The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

The truth is, steam and electricity have made the human race suddenly and acutely self-conscious as a race for the first time in its existence. They have constructed a mighty mirror wherein humanity sees itself, with all its faults and follies, and diseases and deformities. And the sudden, unprecedented spectacle is so startling, is in such abhorrent contrast with poetical pictures of the past, painted in school and popular text-books, that men of defective perspective shrink, and shriek: “Mankind has become monstrous!” But not so. Man, rising, rising, rising through the ages, is not nearer to the dark and bloody and cruel place of his origin than to the promised land toward which his ideals are drawing him. His diseases and deformities are of the past; and virtues that were, up to a few decades ago, almost unattainable ideals, are now so nearly a part of his natural adornment that hope of the nearness of the luminous penumbra of the Golden Age seems not unjustified.

What our grandfathers regarded as the natural and just demands of employer upon employé are now regarded as rigorous and tyrannous exactions of a brute. And in trying still to continue such exactions men slink behind the lawyer-constructed shield of the corporation, that they may be easier in conscience by trying to believe they are not “personally” responsible.

This brings us, naturally, to the charges against business men.

Professor Veblen does not, in so many words, assert that there was a time when business men were in business with other motives—presumably idealistic—more potent than profits. But he forces his readers to infer that this was the case—and that lofty view is always taken by the assailants of our present civilization. That is, man used to be an altruistic animal; Democracy and the machine—for you will find that these assailants are always hitting at Democracy over the shoulders of the machine—have made him a selfish and cruel rascal.

False weights were found in the ruins of the oldest city that has yet been exhumed. And false weights will probably be consumed when the earth drops into the sun and the heavens are rolled together like a scroll. Ancient records and ancient statute books are full of evidence that every new plundering device—from capitalistic and labor monopolies, secret rebates and majority owners swindling minority owners, down to adulterations and crooked scales—was familiar to our ancestors of the plateau of Iran before the migrations. Vice is the old inhabitant; virtue is the newcomer, the immigrant, received with reluctance and compelled to fight for every inch of ground he gains. As for specific testimony as to past ages, we have the testimony of all the old writers that the mercantile classes, the business men, were “without honor,” mean of soul, oppressors of their employés, robbers of their customers. We happen to know, also, that as for the other classes—the proud kings and haughty nobles and the rest—they certainly had a very quaint interpretation of that word “honor” when a murderer, a tyrant, a gambler, a practitioner of every vice that rots its slave and ruins its victims could yet be a “gentleman of unsullied honor.” And we know, finally, that only with the rise of the business men to influence and authority did the standard of honor become what all the world now recognizes as “ideal.” The very Biblical phrases in which honesty is enjoined are altogether commercial, are the language of the business world, of business men.

There are two vital facts about our new industrial civilization which its critics neglect:

First—It has created an unprecedented and infinitely great number of opportunities to dishonesty of the kinds that are, to as yet but slightly enlightened human nature, potently tempting.

Second—It has created new conditions of the moral, as well as of the material, relations of man to the masses of his fellow-men which are as yet imperfectly understood and constitute a debatable ground for even the fairest and rigidest consciences. Men now see that large action of any kind involves large evil as well as large good; and the balance of right and wrong is not easy to adjust, except in the tranquil studies of critics and theorists.

To the first of these two facts may justly be attributed the unquestionably large amount of dishonesty—dishonesty clearly and generally recognized as such. To the second of these two facts is undoubtedly due the most of the wrong-doing by men who in their private relations are above reproach. These statements are not put forward to justify men for yielding to temptation to dishonesty and to justify men in acts, approval of which can be got from conscience by sophistry only, if at all. They are put forward simply to explain why it is that, when there are actually more honesty and conscientiousness, and they of a higher quality, than ever before in human history, there should be a seeming of more dishonesty and consciencelessness. Further in support of the same view, while wrongdoers of the past were hidden or veiled by the imperfect means of publicity, wrongdoers of to-day are at once searched out and pilloried by the press and by public opinion. Up to the middle of the last century men knew little of the large evil done them, and that little imperfectly; now, knowledge of individual acts of uprightness, once scattered everywhere by being immortalized in tradition, rhymed and prose, is lost in the vast revelations of huge and ancient wrongs persisting.

It is no new thing for a man to be admired and envied for wealth and station, regardless of how he got them. But it is a new thing in the world for the public conscience to be so sensitive that a man in possession of wealth or station, got not by outright and open robbery—methods not long ago regarded without grave disapproval—but by means that are questionable and suspicious merely, should be in an apologetic attitude, should feel called upon to defend himself and to give large sums in philanthropy in the effort to justify and to rehabilitate himself. Steam and electricity have given to man a sudden, vast power. It is not strange that he should commit errors and crimes in working out its unfamiliar possibilities. It is not strange that abuses, as old as the selfish struggle for existence, should succeed in adapting themselves to the new conditions, should contrive to persist. But is it not strange that professors of political economy, supposedly familiar with the truth about the past, should be so narrow and twisted in historic and psychological perspective as to misunderstand these simple phenomena? And what must we think of them if, in support of their pessimistic and unwarranted jeremiads, they conjure the fantastic and preposterous and long-exploded myth of humanity’s past Golden Age?