He is a king in precisely the same way, and to precisely the same purpose, as Louis the Great was king. You know how Richelieu served the nobility of France—if they would not obey they simply lost their heads. If you have read Miss Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,” or Henry D. Lloyd’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” you know how Mr. Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he tricked them and crushed them; how sometimes, it is said, he blew up their refineries with dynamite, or burned them with fire. You know how Louis said he was the State; and you heard the president of one of the coal companies, who is doing business in flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare that God in His Infinite Wisdom had entrusted to him the property interests of the country. It is not necessary to pursue this analogy; if you do not see that in the due and inevitable course of evolution, our industrial organism has attained the monarchical stage, it is simply because you do not wish to see it, and no amount of exposition will avail. I have only to add, as before, that the purpose of this process was to evolve an organism which should be capable of maintaining itself against all enemies, without and within. The task of King Louis was the aggrandisement of France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the keeping up of Standard Oil stock. Incidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a race-heritage and a civilisation; incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller furnishes the world with oil. Also—what is true in one case is true in the other—the Standard Oil Company is a marvellous piece of work. It has men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and all fitting perfectly and running like a clock. It has labourers to till the soil, lobbyists and salesmen to fight, factories to make all its necessaries, and railroads to handle them; and, rising tier upon tier, it has a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to the president. It has likewise the whole outfit of ideas necessary to its operation; it is complete and perfect and sublime—it is like a mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who have constructed it are proud of it, and feel that there is nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going?
It is of course clear that the next step, according to my parallel, would be into an Industrial Republic. The reader differs from most Americans whom I meet if this idea is not startling to him. Let us go forward slowly.
In Mr. John Bach McMaster’s “History of the People of the United States,” is a narrative of the terrible yellow-fever epidemic which occurred in Philadelphia in the year 1793, causing the death of over four thousand people in four months. In those days men had strange ideas as to the causes of yellow fever; they believed, in this case, that it “had come from a pile of stinking hides that had been on one of the wharves.” The historian goes on to describe the strange expedients they adopted to get rid of it. “People were bidden to keep out of the sun, and not to get tired. The doctors had little faith in bonfires as purifiers of the air, but much in the burning of gunpowder. Every one then who could buy or borrow a gun, loaded and fired it from morning till night. Then one remedy after another would be suggested, and people would cover themselves with it—nitre, tobacco, and garlic, mud-baths, camphor, and thieves’ vinegar. The last could only be procured by going to the shop. The purchaser going to get it was careful to have a piece of tarred rope wet with camphor at his nose, and in his pocket his handkerchief soaked with the last preventive he had heard of. He shunned the footpaths, fled down the nearest alley at sight of a carriage, and would go six blocks to avoid passing a house where a dead body had been taken out a week before. He would not enter a shop where another man stood at the counter; he would rush in, throw down the money, and rush home—soak everything in this prepared vinegar, and live on a prescribed diet, water-gruel, oatmeal, tea, barley-water, or a vile concoction called apple-tea. If his head pained him or his tongue felt rough, he would immediately wash out his mouth with warm water and honey and vinegar——” etc., etc. At the time when I read all this, it made a peculiar impression upon me, because the newspapers happened just then to be full of the discovery of the true cause of yellow fever. And so all the time that I was reading about the man with the tarred rope in his hands and a sponge wet with camphor at his nose, I had this thought in my mind: And while he was waiting outside of the shop, a mosquito flew up, all unheeded, and bit him. And so he died!
It seemed to me a peculiarly neat illustration of the precise difference between knowledge and ignorance. It led me to reflect how very eager men ought to be to possess the former; and I put the anecdote away in my mind, thinking, “I shall use it some day when I want—all of a sudden—to scare someone out of a prejudice!”
For just imagine, if you can, that mosquitoes, instead of being a pest about which every man was glad to believe evil, had been the basis of some important industry, or otherwise the source of incalculable advantage to the dominant classes of the community; that universities were endowed, and newspapers owned, and churches and hospitals supported, out of the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! Are you sure that in that case the discovery of the physicians in Havana would have been hailed as a triumph of Science? Or do you not think that there might have been a strong opposition to the fantastic speculation, and that the men who had published it might have been denounced as enemies of society, and turned out of office for their incendiary teachings? That other physicians of high standing might have been found to ridicule the idea? That newspapers might have refused to print arguments in favour of it—that, in short, the mosquito monopoly might have succeeded in conjuring up before the imaginations of the multitude so horrible an image of this doctrine and its consequences, that they would have looked upon anyone who advocated it as in some way morally deformed? Assuming that this could have been done, there are only two things to be added. The first is that all the while the mosquitoes would have gone right on causing the yellow fever; and the second is that the people would have found it out in the end—that all that the makers of public opinion would have done, would be to put just so many millions of dollars into the pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a cost of just so much misery to the human race.
At the outset of this argument, I very much wish that you, the reader, would commune with yourself prayerfully, as to whether or not it might not possibly be that the ideas you have in your head concerning an “Industrial Republic” are really not ideas of your own at all, but prejudices which other people have put there for purposes known to them.
Let me repeat the definition which I gave at the outset of this argument: I mean by an Industrial Republic, an organisation for the production of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who share equally in all its advantages.
A century or two ago our ancestors were governed, “by grace of God,” by an unamiable old gentleman over in England, who controlled their destinies, and sent his representatives over here to tax and oppress them; and they impiously rose up and adopted a declaration to the effect that all men were born free and equal; and they seized the property and revenues of their king, and thereafter managed the country for their own benefit solely. “No taxation without representation,” had been their doctrine beforehand. And you, who are an American, and celebrate the Fourth of July, and teach your children to admire the men who threw the tea into Boston Harbour—do you think that you could give me any reason why a man has a right to be represented where he pays his taxes, and no right to be represented where he gets his daily bread? Do you not perceive that a man who can say to me, “Do thus, or you and your children can have nothing to eat,” is just as much my lord and master as the man who can say to me, “Do thus, or be put into jail?”
You stop and think. “The case is not quite the same,” you say. “One is not represented, to be sure; but certainly every man has a right to get his daily bread as he pleases.”
Indeed, I answer. Suppose, for instance, that his occupation happens to be that of a steel-worker; has he any way of getting his daily bread, except upon certain precise terms which a certain group of men offer him?