It is to a small number of the greatest of these great companies that Congress has given an empire of land in the West—an area double that owned by the lords of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In the railway proprietor of the United States the two great elements of power are united—steam and land. It needs no argument to show that only the nation can control the proprietor of both the land and the railway—the sole means of reaching a market for the products of the land. The appellative—kingship—to the railway proprietor is not a misnomer. He is a real potentate, both by virtue of the multitudes of men over whom he rules autocratically, and of the magnitude of the revenue he wields. Presidents come and go, but he remains. Legislators investigate him and report upon him, but they are met by a flat denial of the authority of either State or nation to interfere with his “vested rights.” He claims the right of himself and associates to control, absolutely, the internal commerce of the country; and this claim involves the pretence that they may confiscate merchandise seeking a market by charging, for carriage, the full value of the thing transported.
The railway and the factory, the two great products of steam, are new factors in the social problem, and to properly control them will require new wisdom; and the new wisdom is not to be drawn from old educational fountains.
State legislation has been as vicious as that of the nation. The people of nearly every State in the Union have been made the victims of great frauds and gross ignorance at the hands of their representatives. In nearly every State syndicates have been formed with the design of securing valuable franchises without consideration; and to effectuate such designs bribery has been freely and successfully resorted to in a vast number of cases. But rarely has the guilty agent of the guilty syndicate, or the perjured, purchased legislator been brought to justice, notwithstanding the fact that exposure has often followed the iniquity.
Evidence of the essentially European character of the American civilization is afforded by the prevalence of speculation.[E30] In Wall Street, New York, on the Board of Trade, Chicago, and on the exchanges of all large cities speculation rages. The real transactions of those business marts are very small, indeed, as compared with the transactions of a speculative character. On the New York Cotton Exchange the speculative trades in “futures” are thirty times more than the cotton sales. On the Chicago Board of Trade the speculative trades in “futures” are fifteen times more than the sales of grain and provisions, and so of the exchanges of all other large cities. To support these speculative operations fresh money is required to be constantly poured into the pool, and it is drawn from every class in the community. Very little of the “fresh money” is ever returned. Most of it remains in the hands of the pool managers, of those whose profession it is to manipulate the markets. Thus the fever of speculation extends from centre to circumference of the country, stimulating bad passions, creating distaste for labor, relieving the countryman of his surplus, and increasing the already overgrown fortune of the city operator. A writer on current topics, discussing this subject, says, “Put your finger on one of our great fortunes, and nine times out of ten you will feel underneath it the cold heart of some one who has mined on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, or packed pork on the Chicago Board of Trade, or built railroads in Wall Street.”[97]
[97] “America does not now suffer from this cause [standing armies], but nowhere in the world have colossal fortunes, rabid speculation, and great monopolies reached so portentous a magnitude, or exerted so pernicious an influence.”—“Bad Times,” p. 80. By Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D. London: Macmillan & Co,. 1885.
A sufficient number of the salient features of American civilization have been brought under review to show that the new continent has not borne new social fruits. Under extremely favorable physical conditions—a country of vast resources, a wide range of climates, and a soil of great fertility—we planted old social forces, and old social evils are in process of rapid development. We are transplanted Europeans, controlled by European mental and moral habitudes. And the virile force, evoked by the splendid physical opportunities of a vast new country, so intensifies the struggle for wealth and power, that European social abuses are not only reproduced, but sometimes exaggerated in this land of boasted equal political rights.
But notwithstanding the fact that social tendencies in America seem to be similar to those of Europe, it is upon America alone that the eyes of mankind rest with an expression of ardent hopefulness. Nor is this hope destitute of a basis of rationality. It is in the United States, for the first time in all the ages, that a good reason can be given for indulging the sentiment of patriotism. Love of country here is a due appreciation of the value of the right of suffrage. The private soldier who goes forth to fight the battles of the United States is a man and citizen, and upon his return from the field he may, with the ballot, devote to the education of his children a share of the estate of the army contractor who amassed a fortune while he defended the country. All the property in the United States, whether honestly or dishonestly acquired, is subject to the order of the ballot of the citizen. It may be taken for war purposes, and it may be taken for educational purposes. In the universality of the right of suffrage lies the power of correcting all social evils. It is through the right of suffrage that the wrongs inflicted upon a too patient people by corrupt and ignorant legislation may be ultimately righted. By the suffrages of the people the tax bill is voted; and it is through the tax bill that the vast estates of corporations and individuals, whether obtained by dishonest practices or not, may be made to contribute to the thorough education of all the children of the country. And it is through the sentiment of patriotism thus inspired that the right of universal suffrage in the United States is destined to preservation forever.
The late proposition to limit suffrage in the city of New York is explainable only on the theory put forth in this chapter, that our civilization is the product of European ideas—that we are Europeans in disguise. On any other hypothesis it would be amazing. It is even now sufficiently startling that the proposition to restrict suffrage should precede the proposition to make education universal by making it compulsory, and to purge it of its glaring defects. Every attempt to restrict the right of suffrage in the United States will, however, fail. The right of self-government can be taken from the American people only by force. The American citizen will not vote away his right to vote, as the careless Greek sold his freedom, and as the Chinaman sells his life.
That American social abuses do not spring from free suffrage is evident, because similar abuses exist in countries where the masses have little or no share in the government. Social evils are the product of defective education. So long as European educational methods prevail in this country, so long European social abuses will characterize our civilization. Our education is scant in quantity and poor in quality; hence the standard of the suffrage is lowered by the presence of ignorance and depravity. But when the suffrage shall be better informed, it will be more honest; and when it shall have become more honest and more intelligent, it will have gained the power to grapple with social abuses.
Such examination of history as we have been able to make fails to disclose any radical change in educational methods for three thousand years. The charge of Mr. Herbert Spencer against the schools of England, to wit, “That which our school courses leave almost entirely out we thus find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life”—this charge applies with almost as much force to the schools of the United States as to the Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric and logic. Bacon’s aphorism—“Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things”—is two hundred and fifty years old, but it has as yet exerted scarcely an appreciable influence upon the methods of our public schools. We still reverse the natural order of investigation proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, thus lumbering the mind of the student with trash which must be removed as a preliminary to the first step in the real work of education. We still impart a knowledge of words instead of a knowledge of things; we still ignore art, notwithstanding the fact that it is through art alone that education touches human life. We still inculcate contempt of labor, and teach the student how to “make his way in the world” by his wits, rather than by giving an equivalent for what he shall receive; and, worst of all, we continue, through subjective processes of thought, to charge the mind with selfishness, the essence of depravity.