Vanishing Landmarks: The Trend Toward Bolshevism

by Leslie M. Shaw

In this connection let me warn you not to expect any considerable portion of the necessary work to be done by the very rich. They have so long believed, and their experience has justified the conviction that money will buy anything, that many of them seem to think their wealth will enable them to buy liberty of a mob. A mob is always venal but it can never be bribed by what it has the power to take. Did the wealthy of France escape? They were the first to die. Have the rich of Russia been spared? They have been the first to suffer. Possibly the rich may be able to buy their choice of being mutilated before or after death. The history of all revolutions of the kind that seems impending justifies the prediction that the more money a man has the greater certainty of his torture and ultimate death. Quite recently a very rich man was asked to contribute to a campaign of education against bolshevism. He wrote a patronizing letter acknowledging the importance of the work, but expressed the opinion that it should be financed, not by the rich, but by men worth thirty or forty thousand dollars. “Accursed be the gold that gilds the narrow forehead of the fool.”

LEGISLATION OFFERS NO REMEDY

It is recorded that the children of Israel once upon a time got into serious difficulty through worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain getting the Moral Law. If American civilization is idolatrous—and it seems not to be free from that sin—the object of its worship is statute law, to the neglect of underlying principles which make most laws unnecessary. In the last ten years over sixty-five thousand statutes have been enacted by Congress and the state legislatures and approved by executives. Meanwhile the evil we are now considering, in common with most others recognized a decade ago, has in the main increased. Neither the laws of nature, nor the laws of economics, nor the laws of society, can be reversed by statute. We have proceeded upon the theory that a republic can accomplish anything by popular edict, but the tides come in whether prohibited by sovereign king or by sovereign people.

A DIAGNOSIS

Before a disease can be treated with any hope of success, its cause, no less than its manifestations, must be studied. American industries and internal improvements were begun with American labor. I can remember when girls in northern New England spent their winters in the factories at Lowell and Manchester and returned to teach school during the summer. When our industries outgrew the supply of American labor, agents were sent abroad and immigrants were brought over under contract. When Congress forbade the admission of contract labor, and wages still advanced, the world heard of it and a polyglot mass of all kindreds and tribes and complexions came flocking to our shores, because, as we have seen elsewhere in this volume, labor was better rewarded here than elsewhere, and relatively better rewarded than capital. Naturally, American-bred boys and girls did not fancy working side by side with foreigners who did not speak the English language, who had not imbibed American ideas and were strangers to American standards of living. So they ceased to accept work, and commenced looking for situations.

I visited a mill in Passaic, New Jersey, where the rules were posted in five languages, and a teacher in one of the schools told me there were nineteen languages spoken in her room. In thousands of establishments, laborers, many of whose names are unpronounceable, are known by numbers. Think of an American citizen, outside of a penitentiary, being identified and known by number. Will any wage satisfy that man? What wage or salary will you accept and be known to your boss only by number, and stand in line and accept a pay envelope at the end of the week as “437”? An increased wage may temporarily satisfy the intellect of a man thus environed but it will not satisfy his heart hunger.

There are only two demands that a laborer knows how to make: He can ask shorter hours, and he can demand more wages, but neither will satisfy, for neither is the thing he needs. Would you like to know what it is for which the very soul of every man—laborer no less than capitalist—cries and without which he will not be appeased? You do not need to be told. You have only to hark back to the days of your youth. You have only to study mental philosophy, using your own inner consciousness as a text book, and you will find the answer. What the American laborer demands, what the American citizen, regardless of his surroundings, needs, is recognition. He wants a voice. His very being demands some measure of responsibility. He needs to feel that in some way he has contributed to results and that someone besides himself knows it. God save America from a generation in whom these divinely implanted aspirations have been stifled.

Being unable to formulate these longings, the laborer limits his demands to the two things which the walking delegate tells him are the only things necessary—shorter hours and more pay. When he gets them the real need of his being remains untouched and he repeats his demand. When his employer seeks to do something for him, instead of doing something together with him, he resents both his charity and his sympathy, and spurns his advice.

Men who are required to deal with men ought to give primary study to human nature, and omit the study of angelic nature until they join the angels. Suppose we continue this analysis of human nature for therein we may find the seed of truth that shall, if nurtured, fructify in blessing to us all.

A few years ago the Chamber of Commerce of one of our very large cities gave a Lincoln Day Banquet at which the speaker of the House of Representatives of Congress was the guest of honor. Among other wise philosophies that fell from his lips was this: “I do not know your personal genesis but I will guess that less than fifty years ago nine out of ten of the intelligent, virile leaders of production, who own and represent capital, as well as the high officials of your state, and of the nation, who sit at this table, were bright-faced schoolboys in the common schools, ‘building castles in Spain.’ If this Chamber shall repeat this banquet a half century hence, you can find your successors in the public schools of today ‘building castles in Spain.’” The thought I gather is not the trite expression that “The youth of today is the adult of tomorrow,” nor that the public school is the nursery of greatness. The thought I get is that he who is destined to achieve prominence in any walk of life is the youth who “builds castles in Spain,” who imagines, who hopes, and who goes out to fight for the fulfillment of his dreams.