As the laughter at iconoclastic business ceased, laughter at philanthropy burst out. The rich rascals, the smug feeders of their own vanity, the coy contributors to the conscience fund, who came in superciliousness and condescension with their pharisaical offerings, were greeted with hoots and jeers. Our young man of many millions, dauntless through all those trying years, had taught the people to look at the true inwardness of things. “Go back to your business,” they would shout at each of these astonished almsgivers. “Go back, and take with you this pittance of your filchings from your workmen and your customers. You are the real object of pity and charity. Look at the tainted sources of your income! Repent, reform, give us our rights, our just dues. Don’t pose as a philanthropist when you are giving away our money—and only a meagre part of the vast sums you have taken from us. Give justice. Generosity will take care of itself!”
And in those days our young iconoclast came into his own, so everybody said. But when his friends, wholly changed in their opinion now, approached him with enthusiastic flattery, he smiled his old peculiar smile. “I came into my own, years ago,” said he. “I came into it on the day I tore down the motto ‘I am a clamorer for dividends’ and set up ‘I am a clamorer for justice’, in its place.” And when he died he did not leave his vast fortune to his children to tempt them to forget his training and example and become soft, idle, foolish and unhappy. He left it to his enterprises, its income to be divided between those who made themselves most valuable and those who, having worked well, had earned the right to a peaceful old age.
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” sang the poet, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’” Not so. It is the vain might-have-been that gives birth to the bright shall-be!
CHAPTER XIV
THE INEVITABLE IDEAL
“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson. And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer—these ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the belief in the loftier basis for the ideal, to-day millions of us see that the laborer is the only good citizen, that his estate is the only estate of dignity. No people ever had such a conception of work as we have to-day. It is an evolution under Democracy. No previous nation could have understood it; our ancestors did not have it, for they were still influenced by caste ideas, hard and nobly though they strove to outgrow them. There are vestiges of the old ideas concerning work remaining. The class that does not work and the class that emulates it and envies it still look down on work, still hug the vulgar, ignorant fancy that work is a curse. But that is not important. Once more let us remind ourselves that caste is made not by him who looks down but by him who looks up. The vital fact is that the laborer is himself aware of his own sovereign dignity. And, excepting a few black sheep, the American flock still bears the ancestral markings; this is a nation of laborers. And the markings of which our ancestors tried hard, but with dubious success, not to be ashamed, have become the markings of honor—not to an occasional Jefferson, but to the overwhelming mass of our eighty millions.
This concept of labor is the first-fruit of Democracy and Enlightenment.
When sons of men of vast wealth go to work, there is much excitement among the idlers, rich and poor. The agitation shows how hard dies the theory that work is wholly a curse and, to a great extent, a degradation; that the only sensible, or noble even, ideal of life is to idle about; that there must be something of the freak in a human being who labors when he might sit at his ease amusing himself by counting the drops of sweat as they roll from the brows of his toiling fellow-men.
This is indeed the old, old theory. It has the sanction of many venerable authorities. But, like almost everything else that has come down to us from the ignorant far past, it will not stand examination.