WHERE WAS FRAUD ABSENT?
In Wisconsin the most valuable Government lands, containing rich deposits of lead and other mineral ore, were being boldly appropriated by force and fraud. The House Committee on Public Lands reported on December 18, 1840, that with the connivance of local land agents, these lands, since 1835, had been sold at private sale before they were even subject to public entry.[94] "In consequence of which," the Committee stated, "many tracts of land known to be rich and valuable mineral lands for many years, and known to be such at the time of the entry, have been entered by evil-minded persons, who have falsely made, or procured others to make, the oath required by the land offices. Honest men have been excluded from the purchase of these lands, while the dishonest and unscrupulous have been permitted to enter them by means of false oath and fraud."[95]
These are but the merest glimpses of the widespread frauds in seizing land, whether agricultural, timber or mineral. What of the mercantile importers, the same class that the Government so greatly favored in allowing it long periods in which to pay its customs duties? It was defrauding the Government on the very importations on which it was extended long-time credit for customs payments. The few official reports available clearly indicate this. Great frauds were continuously going on in the importations of lead.[96] Large quantities of sugar were imported in the guise of molasses which, it was discovered, after being boiled a few minutes, would produce an almost equal weight in brown sugar.[97] Doubtless similar frauds were being committed in other lines of importations. Between the methods of these divisions of the capitalist class, and those of Astor, no basic difference can be discerned.
Neither was there any essential difference between Astor's methods and those of the manufacturing capitalists of the North who remorselessly robbed Charles Goodyear of the benefits of his discovery of vulcanized rubber and who drove him, after protracted litigation, into insolvency, and caused him to die loaded down with worries and debts, a broken-down man, at the age of 60.[98] As for that pretentious body of gentry who professed to spread enlightenment and who set themselves high and solemnly on a pinnacle as dispensers of knowledge and molders of public opinion—the book, periodical and newspaper publishers—their methods at bottom were as fraudulent as any that Astor ever used. They mercilessly robbed and knew it, while making the most hypocritical professions of lofty motives. Buried deep in the dusty archives of the United States Senate is a petition whereon appear the signatures of Moore, Carlyle, the two Disraelis, Milman, Hallam, Southey, Thomas Campbell, Sir Charles Lyell, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Rogers, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and other British literary luminaries, great or small. In this petition these authors, some of them representing the highest and finest in literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific thought and expression, implore Congress to afford them protection against the indiscriminate theft of their works by American booksellers. Their works, they set forth, are not only appropriated without their consent but even contrary to their expressed desire. And there is no redress. Their productions are mutilated and altered, yet their names are retained. They instance the pathetic case of Sir Walter Scott. His works have been published and sold from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, yet not a cent has he received. "An equitable remuneration," they set forth, "might have saved his life, and would, at least have relieved his closing years from the burdens of debts and destructive toils."[99]
How fares this petition read in the United States Senate on February 2, 1837? The booksellers, magazine, periodical and newspaper publishers have before succeeded in defeating one copyright bill. They now bestir themselves again; the United States Senate consigns the petition to the archives; and the piracy goes on as industriously as ever.
LEGALIZED PIRACY IN ALL BRANCHES OF TRADE.
What else could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding classes? No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property. But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap. Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial that era was, to what extremes its standards went, and how some of the basest forms of theft were carried on and practically legalized, may be seen by the fate of Peter Cardelli's petition to Congress. Cardelli was a Roman sculptor, residing in the United States for a time. He prays Congress in 1820 to pass an act protecting him from commercial pirates who make casts and copies of his work and who profit at his expense. The Senate Committee on Judiciary, to whom the petition is referred, rejects the plea. On what ground? Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which he can claim the right."[100] Could stupidity go further?
All of the confluent facts of the time show conclusively that every stratum of commercial society was permeated with fraud, and that this fraud was accepted generally as a routine fixture of the business of gathering property or profits. Astor, therefore, was not an isolated phenomenon, but a typically successful representative of his time and of the methods and standards of the trading class of that time.
Whatever in the line of business yielded profits, that act, whether cheating, robbing or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or other. Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he took pleasure in doing them. Perhaps—to extend charitable judgment—he would have preferred to avoid them. But they were all part of the formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the zealous pursuit of wealth.