Or take the work of inventors; they have a man at one of our greatest universities who is a famous inventor, and he makes great scientific discoveries, and then he goes to the big corporations and sells them—what? The right to use his invention and spread it throughout the world for the benefit of mankind? No; he sells them the right to suppress the invention, and deprive mankind of the use of it for a generation or two! You see, a new invention may mean the scrapping of a great deal of existing machinery; if it falls into the hands of some independent concern, it may cost the big monopolists enormous losses. So they pay for the right to suppress it, and a great inventor is turned by the social system into a kind of scientific blackmailer.
Or take the lawyers; surely I do not need to prove to you how the lawyers are betraying mankind. A professor at the University of Chicago told me of attending a class reunion, where a group of high-up corporation lawyers got drunk and began gossiping about the tricks they had played in their profession, and, as the professor said, it made him physically ill. I also have heard these high-up lawyers talking; the late James B. Dill, who was paid a million dollars to organize the Steel Trust, spent many an evening in his home telling me the game as he had seen it, and it began with bribery of judges, juries and legislators, and ended with wire-tapping and burglary. The late Francis Lynde Stetson, one of the highest paid corporation lawyers in New York, went down to Trenton on the train with Judge Dill to beat some railroad rate law, and he opened his suit-case playfully, showing that he had fifty thousand dollars in new bank-notes. “That’s a fine kind of work for a pillar of the church like you,” said Dill, and the other answered, with a grin: “How do I know but that I may have to pay for my lunch?”
Or if you cannot believe Judge Dill, believe Judge Lindsey, who told me about a young man who came to Denver from the Harvard Law School, full of the fine phrases of altruism with which his teachers had filled him, and when he learned what he had to do to practice corporation law in Denver, he broke down in Lindsey’s office, and buried his head in his arms and cried like a baby. Afterwards, so Lindsey writes me, “he capitulated and joined the gang.”
Or maybe it is medicine the young man has studied. He has heard about the nobleness of the healing art, but he has to keep an automobile, and his wife wants to get into society, and competition is keen. There is one way a physician can make a thousand dollars by a few minutes’ work, and any physician who is in touch with the leisure class has women on their knees to him every week, begging him to take their money. Dr. William J. Robinson estimates that there are a million abortions performed in the United States every year, so you see that our medical schools have not steeled all their graduates against this temptation. Now we have another one added—every physician in the United States is made by law a dispenser of joviality, the seneschal of the castle, the keeper of the keys to the wine-cellar!
Or maybe the graduate becomes a newspaper reporter. One of the oldest Wall Street reporters in New York talked to me last spring, telling me a little of the way things are going there. The newspaper reporters also are keepers of the keys of the wine-cellar; they have police passes, and some of them are running a bootlegging industry between New York and Canada! Others have gone into high finance on a large scale—because, of course, a financial reporter comes on information which is worth thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. “Nowadays,” said my friend, “when a Wall Street reporter gets a tip and rushes to the telephone, you don’t hear him call his city editor; you hear him call his broker.” I was told of one newspaper man who had the fortune to be called in when Mr. Charles Sabin of the Guaranty Trust Company gave out some news of the German overtures for peace, and this enterprising young man cleared fifty thousand dollars from the information.
Or perhaps the young man becomes a college professor; if so, he hides his convictions and makes himself a tight little snob and reactionary, to win the favor of the college machine. He hides the truth from his students, or he “shades” it, which is the same thing, and takes his pitiful little bribe in the dignity of a full professorship. He turns out class after class of young men, as ignorant of life and as helpless against temptation as he himself was once. So reaction rules in our country, and men who plead for social justice are slandered and maligned, and turned into criminals in the public eye; all the agencies of law and justice become mobs, and the Ku Klux Klan meets every night in lonely places, and lights its fiery cross and prepares for the wholesale slaughter of the future of mankind.
Just now the rich are having it all their own way; they can do the killing and the bludgeoning and the jailing—and it never occurs to them to think what an example they are setting to the workers, and what it will mean when the tables are turned, and the disinherited of the earth have their way for a while! It ought to be the chief function of educators to point out things like this to the public; but that would be “meddling in politics,” and we have seen that politics in colleges is a privilege reserved to presidents and trustees. There are going to be ferocious attacks made upon this book, and this seems as convenient a place as any in which to explain what they mean. Faculty members will rush forward to defend their institutions; in some cases, no doubt, there will be resolutions of protest, with many signatures. They will have some ammunition; for, of course no one can write a book of this size, full of such masses of facts, and not make a few slips of detail. These will be taken up and magnified into gigantic blunders, and denunciation of them spread broadcast in the capitalist press. When you read these things, bear one circumstance in mind: that any young professor who wants to become a dean in a hurry, who has a vision of himself selected as president in the course of a few years, will know that he can find no more certain way to win favor with his overlords than to find something wrong with this book, and then tell about it gallantly!
CHAPTER LXXVI
PREXY
I promised early in this book to consider how it happens that so many college presidents are men who do not always tell the truth. We have now seen far enough into the inside of colleges to understand the reason. The president of a college or university is the great reconciler of irreconcilabilities; he is the chemist who mixes oil and water, the high priest who makes peace between God and Mammon, the circus-rider who stands on two horses going in opposite directions; and all these things not by choice, but ex-officio and of inescapable necessity. The college president is a man who procures money from the rich, and uses it for the spreading of knowledge; in fulfilling which two functions he places himself, not merely in the line of fire of the warring forces of the class struggle, but between the incompatible elements of human nature itself—between greed and service, between hate and love, between body and spirit.
Consider the rich, how they become so. Either they or their ancestors before them have taken from others, and that which they have taken, the others have lost. The very essence of their richness is that there are many poor. If all were rich, there would be no sense in wealth, no power in it, for there would be none willing to serve. It is plain to anyone who can think that richness means possessing material things, and excluding others from possession thereof. Of such is the kingdom of Mammon.