These same manufacturers objected in the most indignant manner, as they similarly do now, to any legislative investigations of their own methods. Eager to have the practices of Vanderbilt and Gould probed into, they were acrimoniously opposed to even criticism of their factory system. For this extreme sensitiveness there was the amplest reason. The cruelties of the factory system transcended belief. In, for instance, the State of Massachusetts, vaunting itself for its progressiveness, enlightenment and culture, the textile factories were a horror beyond description. The Convention of the Boston Eight Hour League, in 1872, did not overstate when it declared of the factory system that "it employs tens of thousands of women and children eleven and twelve hours a day; owns or controls in its own selfish interest the pulpit and the press; prevents the operative classes from making themselves felt in behalf of less hours, through remorseless exercise of the power of discharge; and is rearing a population of children and youth of sickly appearance and scanty or utterly neglected schooling."…
As the factory system was in Massachusetts, so it was elsewhere. Any employee venturing to agitate for better conditions was instantly discharged; spies were at all times busy among the workers; and if a labor union were formed, the factory owners would obtain sneak emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to breed immorality; [Footnote: "Certain to breed immorality." See report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners, forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.
Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled, who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New York a certain ruling social element, the native aristocracy, composed of old families whose wealth, originating in fraud, had become respectable by age, took no pains to conceal their opinion of him as a parvenu, and drew about their sacred persons an amusing circle of exclusiveness into the rare precincts of which he might not enter.
Vanderbilt now proceeded to buy social and religious grace as he had bought laws. The purchase of absolution has ever been a convenient and cheap method of obtaining society's condonation of theft. In medieval centuries it took a religious form; it has become transposed to a social traffic in these superior days. Let a man steal in colossal ways and then surrender a small part of it in charitable, religious and educational donations; he at once ceases being a thief and straightway becomes a noble benefactor. Vanderbilt now shed his life-long irreverence, and gave to Deems, a minister of the Presbyterian Church, as a gift, the Church of the Strangers on Mercer street, and he donated $1,000,000 for the founding of the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tenn. The press, the church and the educational world thereupon upon hailed him as a marvel of saintly charity and liberality.
THE SERMONIZING OF THE "BEST CLASSES."
One section of the social organization declined to accept the views of the class above it. This was the working class. Superimposed upon the working class, draining the life blood of the workers to provide them with wealth, luxuries and power, were those upper strata of society known as the "best classes." These "best classes," with a monstrous presumption, airily proclaimed their superiority and incessantly harped upon the need of elevating and regenerating the masses.
And who, it may be curiously asked, were the classes self destined or self selected to do this regenerating? The commercial and financial element, with its peculiar morals so adjusted to its interests, that it saw nothing wrong in the conditions by which it reaped its wealth —conditions that made slaves of the workers, threw them into degradation and poverty, drove multitudes of girls and women into prostitution, and made the industrial field an immense concourse of tears, agony and carnage. Hanging on to this supreme class of wealth, fawning to it, licking its very feet, were the parasites and advocates of the press, law, politics, the pulpit, and, with a few exceptions, of the professional occupations. These were the instructors who were to teach the working class what morals were; these were the eminences under whose guidance the working class was to be uplifted!
Let us turn from this sickening picture of sordid arrogance and ignorance so historically true of all aristocracies based upon money, from the remotest time to this present day, and contemplate how the organized part of the working class regarded the morals of its "superiors."
While the commercial class, on the one hand, was determined on beating down the working class at every point, it was, on the other, unceasingly warring among itself. In business dealings there was no such recognized thing as friendship. To get the better of the other was held the quintessence of mercantile shrewdness. A flint-hard, brute spirit enveloped all business transactions. The business man who lost his fortune was generally looked upon without emotion or pity, and condemned as an incapable. For self interest, business men began to combine in corporations, but these were based purely upon mercenary aims. Not a microscopic trace was visible of that spirit of fellow kindness, sympathy, collective concern and brotherhood already far developed among the organized part of the working class.
As the supereminent magnate of his day, Vanderbilt was invested with extraordinary publicity; he was extensively interviewed and quoted; his wars upon rival capitalists were matters of engrossing public concern; his slightest illness was breathlessly followed by commercialdom dom and its outcome awaited. Hosts of men, women and children perished every year of disease contracted in factories, mines and slums; but Vanderbilt's least ailment was given a transcending importance, while the scourging sweep of death among the lowly and helpless was utterly ignored.