According to Professor Veblen, honesty is no longer the best policy. What an incredible misreading of the very sign-board of our time! Under the old régime of priest or soldier or prince, honesty was distinctly not the best policy. Strategy, dexterity, chicane, finesse, sophistry, cozening—these were the sure, the only ways to preferment. For, under those régimes preferment meant securing the right to live without work upon the toil of others. And, to confine ourselves to the mercantile classes, was not the successful business man he who got from prince or priest or tyrant the right to rob the people, he who got a monopoly or a license or a concession?
How is it under the new régime, the democratic, the “vulgarizing” régime of the business man? Our chief troubles come from survivals into the present of the tenacious roots of the past’s methods to success, come from the persistence of the idea that by wit and not by wisdom and justice does the truly strong man truly prevail. But slowly—and surely!—the “vulgar” régime is enforcing the laws and sanctions of “vulgar” morality. Even our robber barons demand honesty, strict honesty, among themselves in their conspiracies to monopolize to their own profit the benefits intended for all. When they violate the law of honesty, they do it in secrecy and make haste to deny their crime and to return to their allegiance to the law. Honesty is the very ground upon which a commercial civilization must rest. That our business men are, as a class, and with rare exceptions, honest, keeping their bargains, giving and receiving the value agreed upon, is proved beyond question by the fact that we as a nation prosper, that our abject poverty is almost confined to newly arrived immigrants and to our only recently emancipated negroes.
Where a prince is armed with power arbitrarily to suspend the natural laws governing the intercourse of human beings, lies and dishonesty may, for a time, prosper; but not where the sole basis of intercourse is the voluntary belief of men in each other’s integrity. And more than ninety per cent. of our business is done upon credit! Under the old order, the very laws and customs, the very morality taught by the church, was grounded upon the justice of the unjust distribution of the products of labor; under the new régime, under “business enterprise,” law and custom and religion teach only value for value received.
Professor Veblen does well to criticise the misguided attempts of philanthropy and so-called charity to restore the old relations of superior and inferior. But his criticism that they are insufficient and not in keeping with the “machine civilization’s” merciless demand for economic efficiency does not go far enough. They are also unnecessary, and in large measure productive of greater ills—of pauperism and dependence—than those they seek to mitigate. The ills are not machine-created. They are inherent in the imperfect nature of man. They will tend wholly to disappear only when the machine’s “merciless” demand for efficiency is rigidly enforced. For, what is that “merciless” demand? What does the machine say to man? It says, “Work is not a curse, but a blessing. In a leisure class the only culture is of the germs of profligacy, superciliousness, snobbery and decay. All men must work, and must learn to work well. All men must serve that they may pay for service rendered. And where that order prevails, to the worker will come the full reward for his work. I, the machine, will make your burden into a blessing, your toil into labor, the noble, the dignified, the producer of civilization and self-respect. I will widen your horizon until you see that all men are brothers, brothers in the business of, by business enterprise, increasing and creating wants, and of, by business enterprise, satisfying them. I will give you ideals that are true and just—not loyalty to idle, thieving prince, not slavery to irrational superstition, not bondage to bloody soldier-tyrant, but intelligent loyalty to truth and justice and progress. I will make you master of nature and of yourself, servant of the true religion and the true morality.”
Until now has been reserved the inquiry into how it happens that these critics of industrialism fall into their fatal errors. That inquiry will not long detain us. Professor Veblen naïvely gives himself and his fellow-critics away. He confesses why he hates the régime of the business man, what he means when he calls the machine industry “materialistic, unmoral, undevout.” “Business life,” he says, “does not further the growth of manners and breeding, pride of caste, punctilios of honor or even religious fervor.” And he finds his hope for the future in militarism and imperialism—which he, by the way, unjustly charges to the business men instead of to the politicians pandering to the still lively passions of man’s inheritance from the past when all the world was militaristic and imperialistic. “There can be no serious question,” says he, “but that a consistent return to the ancient virtues of allegiance, piety, servility, graded dignity, class prerogatives, and prescriptive authority would greatly conduce to popular content and to the facile management of affairs.” Nor does he conceal under the ponderous sarcasm lurking in that statement the truth of his own fixed belief in at least a measure of those “ancient virtues.” For his whole book, and the speeches and writings of practically all the critics of industrialism, show that these critics abhor the new virtues as “materialistic.”
The motive in the mind of each critic is a little different from that of his fellow-critics. One wishes college professors and the like to be in control; another is for the supremacy of birth; another for the supremacy of culture, whatever that may mean. Another wants the preacher back at the helm, with mankind an open-mouthed, uncritical congregation. Each wants the particular class or condition to which he himself has the good fortune to belong, to have the chief say in affairs. But all agree in denouncing the business man who is actually in control—and will remain there. They profess to despise money, yet they hate him for his profits. They profess to prefer the intellectual and moral dividends which their own intellectual and moral enterprises declare; yet their dainty fingers twitch for the material dividends which his material enterprises naturally declare. They would deny him the gains which are the only—and, as they loudly profess, the poor enough—rewards for wasting his life upon the gross and sordid things.
The business man—and that means the worker, the “toiler”—is in control, is there to stay, because the human animal is so constituted that its material affairs—proper food, proper clothing, proper shelter—must always be primal. Not of the highest importance, but of the first importance. And if those material matters are well attended to—as they will be when the worker’s instinct pervades the whole race—the spiritual matters, the growth of body and soul, must inevitably prosper. The worker, the worker’s instinct, provides the right soil for a soul to grow in—a real soil, full of the natural and nourishing substances, not a fanciful, unsubstantial soil of false ideals, fraudulent culture and barren fiddle-faddle of closet theorizings.
For proof that the business instinct will provide the right soil we need only point to our own country as it is. In America, the great business nation of the nations, there lives a race of idealists, eighty millions earnest, dominated by the instincts for self-help and helpfulness to others, afire with the passion for improvement, for education, for knowledge of all kinds and from any and all sources.
The world has wandered in the swamps of vain and sentimental imaginings long enough. By all means, let us have it established on the firm ground and in the straight, upward roads of science and business. The sun shines upon those roads by day, the moon and the stars light them by night; the flowers bloom beside them—and within reach of the humblest wayfarer.
This gospel will not be attractive to poseurs and to the lazy and the incompetent. But it is gospel, the gospel of Democracy, America’s gospel. In the cargo of merchandise, Enlightenment and Democracy always travel as stowaway missionaries; when the cargo is landed, they go ashore and begin to preach.