Some Causes of the Prevailing Discontent

by Charles Dudley Warner

In considering the growth of discontent, and of a natural disregard of duties between employers and employed, it is to be noted that while wages in nearly all trades are high, the service rendered deteriorates, less conscience is put into the work, less care to give a fair day's work for a fair day's wages, and that pride in good work is vanishing. This may be in the nature of retaliation for the indifference to humanity taught by a certain school of political economists, but it is, nevertheless, one of the most alarming features of these times. How to cultivate the sympathy of the employers with the employed as men, and how to interest the employed in their work beyond the mere wages they receive, is the double problem.

As the intention of this paper was not to suggest remedies, but only to review some of the causes of discontent, I will only say, as to this double problem, that I see no remedy so long as the popular notion prevails that the greatest good of life is to make money rapidly, and while it is denied that all men who contribute to prosperity ought to share equitably in it. The employed must recognize the necessity of an accumulated fund of capital, and on the other hand the employer must be as anxious to have about him a contented, prosperous community, as to heap up money beyond any reasonable use for it. The demand seems to be reasonable that the employer in a prosperous year ought to share with the workmen the profits beyond a limit that capital, risk, enterprise, and superior skill can legitimately claim; and that on the other hand the workmen should stand by the employer in hard times.

Discontent, then, arises from absurd notions of equality, from natural conditions of inequality, from false notions of education, and from the very patent fact, in this age, that men have been educated into wants much more rapidly than social conditions have been adjusted, or perhaps ever can be adjusted, to satisfy those wants. Beyond all the actual hardship and suffering, there is an immense mental discontent which has to be reckoned with.

This leads me to what I chiefly wanted to say in this paper, to the cause of discontent which seems to me altogether the most serious, altogether the most difficult to deal with. We may arrive at some conception of it, if we consider what it is that the well-to-do, the prosperous, the rich, the educated and cultivated portions of society, most value just now.

If, to take an illustration which is sufficiently remote to give us the necessary perspective, if the political economists, the manufacturers, the traders and aristocracy of England had had chiefly in mind the development of the laboring people of England into a fine type of men and women, full of health and physical vigor, with minds capable of expansion and enjoyment, the creation of decent, happy, and contented homes, would they have reared the industrial fabric we now see there? If they had not put the accumulation of wealth above the good of individual humanity, would they have turned England into a grimy and smoky workshop, commanding the markets of the world by cheap labor, condemning the mass of the people to unrelieved toil and the most squalid and degraded conditions of life in towns, while the land is more and more set apart for the parks and pleasure grounds of the rich? The policy pursued has made England the richest of countries, a land of the highest refinement and luxury for the upper classes, and of the most misery for the great mass of common people. On this point we have but to read the testimony of English writers themselves. It is not necessary to suppose that the political economists were inhuman. They no doubt believed that if England attained this commanding position, the accumulated wealth would raise all classes into better conditions. Their mistake is that of all peoples who have made money their first object. Looked at merely on the material side, you would think that what a philanthropic statesman would desire, who wished a vigorous, prosperous nation, would be a strong and virile population, thrifty and industrious, and not mere slaves of mines and mills, degenerating in their children, year by year, physically and morally. But apparently they have gone upon the theory that it is money, not man, that makes a state.

In the United States, under totally different conditions, and under an economic theory that, whatever its defects on paper, has nevertheless insisted more upon the worth of the individual man, we have had, all the same, a distinctly material development. When foreign critics have commented upon this, upon our superficiality, our commonplaceness, what they are pleased to call the weary level of our mediocrity, upon the raging unrest and race for fortune, and upon the tremendous pace of American life, we have said that this is incident to a new country and the necessity of controlling physical conditions, and of fitting our heterogeneous population to their environment. It is hardly to be expected, we have said, until, we have the leisure that comes from easy circumstances and accumulated wealth, that we should show the graces of the highest civilization, in intellectual pursuits. Much of this criticism is ignorant, and to say the best of it, ungracious, considering what we have done in the way of substantial appliances for education, in the field of science, in vast charities, and missionary enterprises, and what we have to show in the diffused refinements of life.

We are already wealthy; we have greater resources and higher credit than any other nation; we have more wealth than any save one; we have vast accumulations of fortune, in private hands and in enormous corporations. There exists already, what could not be said to exist a quarter of a century ago, a class who have leisure. Now what is the object in life of this great, growing class that has money and leisure, what does it chiefly care for? In your experience of society, what is it that it pursues and desires? Is it things of the mind or things of the senses? What is it that interests women, men of fortune, club-men, merchants, and professional men whose incomes give them leisure to follow their inclinations, the young men who have inherited money? Is it political duties, the affairs of state, economic problems, some adjustment of our relations that shall lighten and relieve the wrongs and misery everywhere apparent; is the interest in intellectual pursuits and art (except in a dilettante way dictated for a season by fashion) in books, in the wide range of mental pleasures which make men superior to the accidents of fortune? Or is the interest of this class, for the most part, with some noble exceptions, rather in things grossly material, in what is called pleasure? To come to somewhat vulgar details, is not the growing desire for equipages, for epicurean entertainments, for display, either refined or ostentatious, rivalry in profusion and expense, new methods for killing time, for every imaginable luxury, which is enjoyed partly because it pleases the senses, and partly because it satisfies an ignoble craving for class distinction?

I am not referring to these things as a moralist at all, but simply in their relation to popular discontent. The astonishing growth of luxury and the habit of sensual indulgence are seen everywhere in this country, but are most striking in the city of New York, since the fashion and wealth of the whole country meet there for display and indulgence,—New York, which rivals London and outdoes Paris in sumptuousness. There congregate more than elsewhere idlers, men and women of leisure who have nothing to do except to observe or to act in the spectacle of Vanity Fair. Aside from the display of luxury in the shops, in the streets, in private houses, one is impressed by the number of idle young men and women of fashion.

It is impossible that a workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Bacchanalian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of the spectacle. It is the example of what these people care for. With all their wealth and opportunities, it seems to him that these select people have no higher object than the pleasures of the senses, and he is taught daily by reiterated example that this is the end and aim of life. When he sees the value the intelligent and the well-to-do set upon material things, and their small regard for intellectual things and the pleasures of the mind, why should he not most passionately desire those things which his more fortunate neighbors put foremost? It is not the sight of a Peter Cooper and his wealth that discontents him, nor the intellectual pursuits of the scholar who uses the leisure his fortune gives him for the higher pleasures of the mind. But when society daily dins upon his senses the lesson that not manhood and high thinking and a contented spirit are the most desirable things, whether one is rich or poor, is he to be blamed for having a wrong notion of what will or should satisfy him? What the well-to-do, the prosperous, are seen to value most in life will be the things most desired by the less fortunate in accumulation. It is not so much the accumulation of money that is mischievous in this country, for the most stupid can see that fortunes are constantly shifting hands, but it is the use that is made of the leisure and opportunity that money brings.

Another observation, which makes men discontented with very slow accumulation, is that apparently, in the public estimation it does not make much difference whether a man acquires wealth justly or unjustly. If he only secures enough, he is a power, he has social position, he grasps the high honors and places in the state. The fact is that the toleration of men who secure wealth by well known dishonest and sharp practices is a chief cause of the demoralization of the public conscience.