Our social system has the elements of decay already as conspicuous as in the tuberculous patient. Invention increases the power of wealth instead of increasing the resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses machinery and diminishes the relative value of the man by making him a machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from the independent shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his neighbors, to the mere tenth of a shoemaker who if dislodged from the factory is helpless. The independence of the hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing. Population is gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. At this moment a strike of 150,000 is threatened. But it is not merely the laboring classes, for all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive let loose and flying wildly over the railroad. If there were no other formidable danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself a fatality. When a thousand millions enter the field they enter as master, in the Standard Oil fashion. They can buy out or crush out, as they may choose, every competitor in the field they may seize. There is not a single form of industry which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is established, demand what prices they please for that which they alone can supply. Can we imagine the conventional brother Jonathan held down by the throat with iron grip, and his pockets open to the holder, or will he rebel before the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how well it is fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire country. Ten years more will introduce the struggle. The struggle must come, for plutocracy is advancing to universal absorption, and labor is becoming defiant, and well it may, for the COMMONWEALTH represents not money but man, and when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the nation’s wealth, assumes the practical government, the commonwealth with a firm hand will thrust it aside; but will it be a peaceful change, will the conquerors yield to the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its sleeping victims while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy, or anything going on but the natural legitimate and healthful development of trade; and the medical corporations called colleges in seizing a stern monopoly of the healing art, assure us that it is only for the benefit and protection of the dear people who have not sense enough to distinguish between a successful and an unsuccessful doctor, and have so unpardonable a partiality for those who cure them cheaply without college permission. There is nothing too small for monopoly to grasp, not even the cheap dispensing of established remedies from the druggist’s counter.
It is a just and patriotic sentiment which looks with apprehension upon the great and irresponsible power developed by extreme wealth, which lifts the wealthy far above society, enabling them to indulge in profligate luxury, and to squander in a single evening’s pleasure (or display without pleasure) an amount that would make life prosperous to a hundred suffering families, or on a single piece of architectural splendor, enough to complete the education of the entire youth of a city—wealth enabling them to rival the despots of Europe in social ostentation, while almost within hearing of their revelry, ten or twenty thousand are suffering from want of employment, want of health, want of education, want of industrial skill, which society did not give them, suffering the slow death that comes through debility, emaciation, and disease, from toil and poverty, the sufferer being sometimes a woman in whom all the virtues have blossomed only to perish in the chilling atmosphere of poverty.[16] This may be utterly senseless talk to those in whom the sentiment of brotherhood is dead, but it expresses sentiments to which millions respond, and it is refreshing to see that these statements, which at last have found free expression through The Arena, are also beginning to find a home in the minds of public leaders, whose voices will compel attention. I allude to the philanthropic expressions of the Emperor of Germany, and to the language of Mr. Gladstone, who shows that the necessity of philanthropic action on the part of the wealthy is increased by their changed attitude, as they are becoming more isolated from the people, and no longer take that friendly personal interest in their tenants and employes of every grade, which was formerly common. In this country, social ostentation is a great power to increase this separation of ranks, and the book of Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” ought to be studied by every wealthy citizen as well as by reformers. Herbert Spencer, in a recent thoughtful essay, refers to this increasing interest in social welfare thus: “He is struck, too, by the contrast between the small space which popular welfare then occupied in the public attention, and the large space it now occupies, with the result that outside and inside Parliament, plans to benefit the millions form the leading topics, and every one having means is expected to join in some philanthropic effort.” This is because the millions demand it, and they who, like the writer, have for half a century been interested in behalf of the millions, may now be listened to.
The enormous wealth developed in our republic, in which a single city holds a thousand millionaires, controls the press, controls legislation, and teaches the ambitious to sell themselves to the wealthy who are the controlling power. Under such influences arises that moral insensibility which, in New York, could squander twenty millions on one building, while half the children were out of school, and a large portion of the insane were left wallowing in indecent filth, worse than that of a hog pen, as shown in the Albany Law Journal.
In presenting these views, I am not assailing millionaires as men more objectionable or censurable than any other class. It is not true that the mere ability to gain wealth implies moral inferiority, for it implies many substantial and honorable qualities. Reverse the social ranks, give the wealth to the poor, and our condition would not be improved, perhaps it would be much worse. The fault lies in our social system of struggle and rivalry, and while that system generates, as it always has, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, we must combat these two evils, and to control them is the purpose of this essay. Whether a better social system is possible that would PREVENT them, is not now under consideration, but surely there must be a system which will make unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty impossible, for such conditions are incompatible with a permanent, peaceful, and prosperous republic. As well might we expect a successful voyage from a ship with four-fifths of its cargo on the upper deck, as from a republic top heavy with millionaire capital. Can we believe that republics are forbidden by the laws of progress and evolution; that they must, as Macaulay maintained, come to a fatal crisis? I trust not. But does not our social system, inherited from barbarism, built up on the hot ashes left where the fires of war have desolated, necessarily develop that inequality which has swept the great empires of antiquity to their doom. When all the wealth of the nation has fallen into the possession of two per cent. of the population, the period of danger has arrived. Five per cent. of our population had, in 1880, absorbed four fifths of the national wealth, and at present, according to the careful statistics of Mr. Shearman, less than two per cent. hold seven tenths of our wealth, and are rapidly advancing to nine tenths, their progress being assisted by the indirect taxation which places the burden of government on the shoulders of poverty. Popular ignorance of public affairs has tolerated this, and has tolerated a financial system far worse, which has given capital all possible advantage of labor. We are drifting in the rapids; how far off is our Niagara? But labor is roused, and a change in our system of taxation is imminent.
Unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty are the necessary results of the warlike stage of progress, which develops the conquerors and the conquered in the great battle of life. Unnumbered centuries of tribal and international war have developed to high perfection the wolfish and tigerish instincts of humanity. What is called peace is a state of financial war. Beneath the smooth skin of the civilized man, we find the wolf in undiminished vigor. The triumphant wolf rides in his chariot; the conquered wolf sleeps in the open air along the alleys, wharves, and streets; but what cares the wolf triumphant for that? for the 30,000 homeless in London? The policeman’s club, or the bayonet, is the only thing that keeps down riot and arson, and the uncertainty of the result is all that hinders the French, German, and Russian wolves from turning a continent into a pandemonium. Is Europe truly a civilized country? Not if tried by an ethical standard. Von Moltke, the great man of Germany, who has so recently passed away, considered war a permanent institution.
In this wolfish stage of human development, altruism is almost unknown, except as an eccentricity. It is safe to say, as a general rule to which there are not many exceptions, that no man is fit to be entrusted with any more than he needs for his own comfortable existence. Every dollar beyond that sum is wasted in his hands. He has not the faintest conception that he is a trustee of all such wealth, responsible to heaven for its use. As he cannot consume it, he can but squander it to gratify his vanity, and lift himself to a position from which he can, or thinks he can, look down upon his fellows. The leading idea of the average citizen is to construct a palace that will cost ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as much as the residence that would be amply sufficient and pleasant.[17] His talent for the destruction of wealth grows by indulgence, and thus the millions that the financial conquerors have won from the conquered are thrown into the blazing flame of ostentation, and might as well be thrown into a literal conflagration. Such is the humanity with which we have to deal at present. Wealth, no matter who holds it, does not restrain the destruction of the resources of the commonwealth, but the growl of the suffering millions may, and may lead to a recognition of the grand truth that everything beyond the demands of human comfort is a sacred trust for humanity, and with the millions thus aroused, I believe it may be possible to introduce laws which will gradually change the entire condition of society, and leave in this broad land neither an American prince nor an American beggar—a change which will be a greater forward movement than that of 1776.
The leading purpose of such legislation will be the controlling of that lawless selfishness, which wantonly destroys all in which the community is interested; which on the prairies exterminates the buffalo, in the mountains and forests destroys the timber, bringing on as a consequence the drouth, floods, and desolate barrenness, under which a large part of the old world is suffering; which would exterminate the seals if government did not interfere, and would infect every city with pestilential odors of offensive manufactories; which would destroy the people’s national money for the benefit of private bankers, and pervert all the powers of government for the benefit of monopoly and organized speculation.
May we not look to that struggle for justice which to-day assumes the forms of Nationalism, Farmers’ Alliance, People’s Party, Knights of Labor, and Land Nationalization, to accomplish this purpose and emancipate the present from the barbarian ideas of the past?
(To be concluded in July Arena.)
