Publicly they might pretend a proper and ostentatious horror of corruption. Secretly, however, they quickly dispensed with what were to them idle dronings of political cant. As capitalists they ascribed their success to a rigid application and practicality; and being practical they went about purchasing laws by the most short-cut and economical method. They had the money; the office-holders had the votes and governmental power; consequently the one bought the other. It was a systematic corruption springing entirely from the propertied classes; they demanded it, were responsible for it and kept it up. It worked like an endless chain; the land, charters, franchises and privileges corruptly obtained in one set of years yielded vast wealth, part of which was used in succeeding years in getting more law-created sources of wealth. If professional politicians had long since got into the habit of expecting to be bought, it was because the landholders, traders and bankers had accustomed them to the lucrative business of getting bribes in return for extraordinary laws.
Since the men of wealth, or embryo capitalists who by hook or crook raised the funds to bribe, were themselves ready at all times to buy laws in common councils, legislatures and in Congress, it naturally followed that each of them was fully as eager to participate in the immense profits accruing from charters, franchises or special grants obtained by others of their own class. They never questioned the means by which these laws were put through. They did not care. The mere fact that a franchise was put through by bribery was a trite, immaterial circumstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be expected that he would feel moral objections, even the most attenuated, for the chances were that while he might not have been a party to the corrupt obtaining of this or that particular franchise, yet he was involved in the grants of other special endowments. Moreover, money making was not built on morality; its whole foundation and impetus lay in the extraction of profits. Society, it is true, professed to move on lofty moral planes, but this was a colossal pretension and nothing less.
THE INVERTED NATURE OF SOCIETY.
Society—and this is a truth which held equally strong of succeeding decades—was incongruously inverted. In saying this, the fact should not be ignored that the capitalist, as applied to the man who ran a factory or other enterprise, was an indigenous factor in that period, even although the money or inventions by which he was able to do this, were often obtained by fraud. Every needed qualification must be made for the time and the environment, and there should be neither haste in indiscriminately condemning nor in judging by the standards or maturity of later generations.
Yet, viewing society as a whole and measuring the results by the standards and ideas then prevailing, it was undoubtedly true that those who did the world's real services were the lowly, despoiled and much discriminated-against mass of mankind. Their very poverty was a crime, for after they were plundered and expropriated, either by the ruling classes of their own country or of the United States, the laws regarded them as semi-criminals, or, at best, as excrescences to whom short shrift was to be given. They made the clothes, the shoes, hats, shirts, underwear, tools, and all the other necessities that mankind required; they tilled the ground and produced its food. Curiously enough, those who did these indispensable things were condemned by the encompassing system to live in the poorest and meanest habitations and in the most precarious uncertainty. When sick, disabled or superannuated they were cast aside by the capitalist class as so much discarded material to eke out a prolonged misery of existence, to be thrown in penal institutions or to starve. Substantially everywhere in the United States, vagrancy laws were in force which decreed that an able-bodied man out of work and homeless must be adjudged a vagrant and imprisoned in the workhouse or penetentiary. The very law-making institutions that gave to a privileged few the right to expropriate the property of the many, drastically plunged the many down still further after this process of spoliation, like a man who is waylaid and robbed and then arrested and imprisoned because he has been robbed.
On the other hand, the class which had the money, no matter how that money was gotten, irrespective of how much fraud or sacrifice of life attended its amassing, stood out with a luminous distinctness. It arrogated to itself all that was superior, and it exacted, and was invested with, a lordly deference. It lived in the finest mansions and laved in luxuries. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of importance, it radiated tone, command and prestige.
But, such was the destructive, intestinal character of competitive warfare, that even this class was continually in the throes of convulsive struggles. Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon him. If he were less able, less cunning, or more scrupulous than they, his ruination was certain. It was a system in which all methods were gauged not by the best but by the worst. Thus it was that many capitalists, at heart good men, kindly disposed and innately opposed to duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more successful but thoroughly unprincipled competitors. And, indeed, realizing the impregnating nature of example and environment, one cannot but conclude that the tragedies of the capitalist class represented so many victims of the competitive system, the same as those among the wageworkers, although in a very different way. Yet in this bewildering jumble of fortune-snatching, an extraordinary circumstance failed to impress itself upon the class which took over to itself the claim to superior intelligence and virtue. The workers, for the most part, instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized, rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained.
THE PREVAILING CORRUPTION.
If corruption was flagrant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was triply so in the middle decades. This was the period of all periods when common councils all over the country were being bribed to give franchises for various public utility systems, and legislatures and Congress for charters, land, money, and laws for a great number of railroad and other projects. The numerous specific instances cannot be adverted to here; they will be described more appropriately in subsequent parts of this work. For the present, let this general and sweeping observation suffice.
The important point which here obtrudes itself is that in every case, without an exception, the wealth amassed by fraud was used in turn to put through more frauds, and that the net accumulation of these successive frauds is seen in the great private fortunes of to-day. We have seen how the original Astor fortune was largely derived by the use of both force and fraud among the Indians, and by the exercise of cunning and corruption in the East. John Jacob Astor's immense wealth descends mostly to William B. Astor. In turn, one of the third generation, John Jacob Astor, Jr., representing his father, William B. Astor, uses a portion of this wealth in becoming a large stockholder in the New York Central Railroad, and in corrupting the New York Legislature still further to give enormously valuable grants and special laws with incalculably valuable exemptions to that railroad. John Jacob Astor, Jr., never built a railroad in his life; he knew nothing about railroads; but by virtue of the possession of large surplus wealth, derived mainly from rents, he was enabled to buy enough of the stock to make him rank as a large stockholder. And, then, he with the other stockholders, bribed the Legislature for the passage of more laws which enormously increased the value of their stock.