The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

Often, as the years have passed, I have heard older men talk with affection of the “good old days.” I put it down to the failing memory of man, which forgets all that is ugly and repugnant, and remembers best the beautiful. When men in society spoke of the past, they seemed to me to be ignoring the many advantages of the present. As time has fled, however, I come to realize that they spoke truly. They were thinking of this “golden age,” this high mid-day of our industrial history.

They were thinking of the free American, son of the soil, of the factory, as you will, yet free, independent, unafraid. They were thinking of a nation that did not tolerate tyranny, political or industrial, within its borders. They were thinking of that rich America where no man dwelt in poverty. They were thinking of the utter astonishment with which European travellers noted in our cities the absolute lack of beggars, of want, of hunger, and of cold. They were thinking of that happy day, now dead and gone, when evenly and justly the reward of labour fell upon the people, scattered far and wide and sufficiently, like the dew that falls at night upon the fields.

Perhaps you think that Society, as such, cares little about these things. You are eternally wrong. Society is a group of men and women and children. The best of the men and the best of the women think deeply, as the best of men and women think deeply everywhere. Because it is educated, and because it, too, is engaged in an eternal fight for life, Society, perhaps, studies these matters more zealously and more accurately than the rest of the world that makes a nation.

The leaders of the social world in the middle of the last century saw as clearly as any one the tendencies of the time, and recognized as fully as any one the bearing of the conditions of labour and capital upon the purely social problems. They knew that because wealth was evenly distributed as it flowed from the mine, the forest, and the field, Society had nothing to fear. They knew, too, that, when the division of wealth began to be uneven, danger to the social world began. The lesson of the French Revolution was better understood in those days than it is to-day in high Society—because high Society in those days had, at least, read Carlyle or Junius; while to-day it reads little more than the Sunday editions of the newspapers.

Very few, in that time, were the new recruits in the army of Society. The old laws still lived. The ancient families of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia still held sway. The leader of the social world could afford to speak of her father and her grandfather and even, in some cases, of her great-grandfather, without treading on dangerous ground. The subtle barriers of caste, flimsy as they always are in a new country, had yet withstood all the puny assaults to which they had been exposed.

Happy, indeed, was Society; and happy, too, were the people of the country. Yet the poison was even then at work within their veins. Already, here and there, rich men were selling out of industry, taking their mighty profits, and moving away from the industrial cities and towns into the great social and business centres. There is no social index to record the exodus; but one may note, here and there, in government reports of the time, strange facts that to-day are all too clear in their meaning.

In the year 1840, at the beginning of this golden period of national happiness and prosperity, there were in this country 1,240 cotton manufacturing plants, with a combined gross output of $46,000,000 worth of goods. Each plant made $37,000 worth of goods. Twenty years later, the number of plants was 1,091, and the output was $115,000,000.

Our fathers saw these figures; but it is not on record that any man, at that time, saw their true meaning. It was simply, to their minds, the working out of the factory system to its completion. It meant economy. It was part of the same system that had reduced the cost of making a yard of broadcloth from fifty cents in 1823 to fifteen cents in 1840.

They could not, naturally, see in it, as we can, the seeds of a revolution that was to make over again the America of that day, to drag the boasted freedom of America in the mire of poverty, to prostitute our political system, to tear and wreck and sweep away the sacred barriers of Society. It was, in truth, the handwriting on the wall, but America lacked a prophet. If, indeed, there had been such a one, his warning would have been in vain. For evolution is inexorable; and the nation, high and low, rich and poor, poverty and Society—all are but its creatures, brought into life by it, buried at its command.

Let me hurry on to sketch the progress of this wonderful change that was to found in America two great new classes, the Idle Rich and the Slaves of Industry.