The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

To-day the author’s position is similar to that of Helper, who wrote these words, save that it differs in one important particular. Helper, though a Southerner, was not a slave-holder. I am in every sense a member of the class to whom I write. I do not flatter myself that my words will have any more effect among mine own people than Helper’s had among the people of the South, but fortunately my voice is but one of a hundred that are raised to-day to warn the leisure class of the rocks toward which it is drifting.

Hinton Rowan Helper died but a little time ago. Four years after the appearance of his book he saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the end of that war he saw the states of his beloved South bent like reeds in a storm, its armies overthrown, its fields laid waste, its homes destroyed, its cherished institutions gone forever. I wonder, as I write, whether it be possible in this age of civilization and advancement that I, too, am but a voice crying in the wilderness. Will our capitalist class, like the old French monarchy, “learn nothing and forget nothing?”

Many a time, while engaged in the manifold activities of social life, at a dinner or a ball, or amusing myself in the country, this question has come to me. I have wondered whether it is all really as it seems. Here are gay hearts, merry voices, lives all brimming with laughter, young men and maidens all untouched by the sterner things of life, boys with their fortunes to inherit and high positions in life secured, débutantes with every problem solved for them, a formulated education leading to a formulated social routine, stately matrons born to rule their little social world, fine men and women of more ripened years, whose careers have led to what seemed a purposeful goal. It all seems happy and light-hearted, and yet there must be shadows, if these men and women are really men and women, and not mere thoughtless, heartless, brainless creatures. Is it, again, “after us the deluge?”

Again, I remember very well an occasion this past winter, when the same thought came to me. I was dining in one of the city hotels. Music and laughter flooded the place as sunshine floods the fields. Outwardly, the scene had all the appearance of perfect ease and happiness. Looking around, I lighted by chance upon a table where a group of elderly people, all well known to me, were dining. They were people who live well, and who take a large part in the social world as well as in the world of business. I watched them as they talked. I noted an air of gravity, of seriousness, and I wondered what it was all about. A little later, as their table assumed the normal aspect, I went over and exchanged greetings with them. Incidentally, I asked them what had made them so very serious throughout the evening.

One of them, an old friend of mine, told me. They had been discussing a statement that had appeared as a news item during the afternoon. It was part of a speech made in the senate at Washington. It was an attack upon the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It was really a veiled denunciation of the principle upon which Society is founded. These men and women, all part and parcel of the social world, had spent most of their evening discussing that item of news.

A very few years ago such an episode as this would have been dismissed by almost any group of men and women who belonged to Society, with hardly a single thought. Somebody might have introduced the subject; somebody else would have abusively called the senator a demagogue, or an agitator, or a Socialist—and the conversation would have drifted on into the latest sporting news or talk of somebody’s ball a month or so away. But now, the older men and women of Society know better. They have learned, in fact, to distinguish real news from mere sensation. They know a statesman from a demagogue and facts from sensations.

I do not say that it is general, this tendency to take seriously the social, industrial, and economic questions of the day. In my own case, I do know that up to a very few years ago none of these problems bothered me very much. I know that very rarely did I hear the question raised as to the permanence of the conditions under which we lived within our social barriers. Nobody, in my world, considered the problem of industry his own; and every one drifted onward through the years secure in the conviction that in the end everything was going to be all right.

To-day how different it is! To-day we are studying the sources of our wealth, finding out for ourselves the real price paid by humanity to give us the privileges of the social life which we and our fathers have enjoyed. Excited by curiosity, we go down to inspect the mines our fathers left to us. We watch the men at work, mere pitiful animals, risking their lives in terrible endeavour for a meagre wage, that we, the heirs of time and of eternity, may take our leisure in the palaces of wealth. In the mills of Pittsburg we watch the workers in iron and steel, toiling in the white hot blast of the furnaces that we, who never have toiled, may draw our dividends and spend them on the luxuries we love.

All around and about us are millions of active, industrious human beings. How can we, the rich, longer remain idle? Is it possible that the heroism of the wealth-producing, life-preserving population of the world exerts no influence upon those who are not forced by circumstances to work? I know from my own experience that those who are worth while in the social and financial world have not only been influenced by the activity of the world’s workers, but I can positively state that mere pleasure-seeking idlers are disappearing so fast that it is a question of but a few years more before their extinction is complete.

But a very few years ago we would have visited the mines of Scranton or the forges of Pittsburg, and we would have looked upon the workers there with eyes of pity, perhaps, and we might have talked more or less glibly of the hardships of labour. Yet it would not have been our problem. To-day we recognize the relationship between the labour that produces our wealth and the wealth which we enjoy.