What distinguishes this age from others, and our own country from others is that here and now wealth is acquired more easily and more rapidly than at other times and places. This being the very obvious fact, it shakes our confidence in the whole fraternity of prophets that they should, one and all, attribute the larger fortunes made here and now to the greater love of money, or its more assiduous pursuit. The rich man is more successful in amassing wealth than the poor man, but he is not more mercenary. Two men try equally hard to get rich; one succeeds, and the other fails; the man who failed is quite likely to be more eager for money than the man who succeeded.
The industrial system never meets the approval of the prophet. An occasional prediction is that the war will destroy our deplorable economic life, in which every man is trying to get as high wages or as large a salary or as ample profits as possible, and will usher in the golden age, in which such base considerations as pecuniary compensation will have a very secondary place in every man’s mind. Before this war came, the most eminent educator in America assured the workingman that he ought to work for the pleasure of it, and not for the contents of his Saturday night envelope. Such admonitions have occurred, in one form or another, in the literature of the sages, for centuries and millenniums. But it was never evolved by a man who was digging postholes, and a noble ambition to mine the very best coal cannot carry a miner far when he is obliged to cut such coal as there is in front of him.
It is barely possible that by devoting some weeks to the task, a man could produce a pair of shoes notably superior to the ordinary run of shoes, and his professional pride as a devout follower of St. Crispin might take keen delight in the work of his hands; in the fact that he had made the very finest pair of shoes in the world. But, after all, he needs food, and possibly he is obliged to pay rent, and he ought to have a wife to make comfortable, and children to send to school in presentable form: so something besides pride in his work is necessary. If he is to be adequately compensated for his labor on that pair of shoes, their price will be such that only the rich—if the rich are to be permitted to survive—can buy them; and if such shoemakers prevail, the greater part of mankind will go barefoot. For does not the prophet who has poured out the phials of his wrath upon an economic system that makes quantity and cheapness, instead of real excellence, its ideals, recognize that the purpose of quantity is to supply the wants of a greater number of human beings, and the purpose of cheapness is to enable human beings to supply more of their needs? For certainly if the shoes which are the very best shoes in the whole world, and whose excellence affords the keenest satisfaction to the soul of the shoemaker, cost $50, then it is quite certain that the customer who carries them home will go without many other things that he ought to have. If the shoes are made by machinery and sold for $3, they may not be quite so beautiful or durable as the artistic product of hand labor, regardless of time, and yet be in the interest of the customer and the community.
After the prophet has got through with his ravings at the present industrial system, the fact will remain that there are a good many millions of us on this earth, and that we have got to earn our livings, and that the agriculture and industries of the Middle Ages would not keep all of us alive. In addition to which, we may also venture to suggest that the people of the Middle Ages were not quite as honest as we are, and were not less particular about getting a financial return for their exertions. The modern industrial system was not created by capital for capitalists; it is the result of the efforts of the community as a whole to supply the needs of all of its members, and to afford employment to all of them. Hunting and fishing are pleasanter than most of the industries, but 100,000,000 of civilized people are living and are equipped with intellectual and moral accessories, where a quarter of a million Indians once roamed. And although they toiled not (systematically), neither did they spin (much), they were not happier or better than we are.
One prophet of more discrimination than most of his clan admits that the industry and thrift which produce capital are valuable qualities morally, but he is still confident that the great wealth of the modern world is thoroughly demoralizing. Whence it appears that the safe course for the world to pursue is to work hard and save carefully and burn up its accumulations every year in order to keep itself poor but pious, like the parents of the subjects of a style of religious biography now quite out of date. Of course this prophet would prefer the wiser course of not earning enough to afford wealth to accumulate. If we would only adopt his system and work for the pleasure of working, and for the satisfaction of producing absolutely perfect products of our own skill, there would be no danger of our sinking our souls into perdition with a load of gold. Noah and his sons appear to have built the Ark by the processes of domestic industry, in distinction from the accursed factory or capitalist system. How their support was provided for during the 120 years has not been recorded, but if one man undertook to build a locomotive, instead of merely making repetitions of a single part, it would be necessary to make arrangement for this. And when we are trying to replace the vessels destroyed by German submarines, it seems necessary to use more rapid methods of construction than sufficed before the Deluge.
Will some prophet please tell us how poor we must be in order to be virtuous and pacific, and how virtuous and pacific the world was before it became prosperous? Were there no wars before the Twentieth Century? The extent of this war is scarcely a result of the world’s opulence, when Sir Edward, now Viscount, Grey, offered to keep England out of it if Germany would limit the war to the Balkans or to Russia. The war has involved most of the world because Germany began it by attacking France and Belgium, and followed that up by attacking Americans on the high seas, where they had as much right to be as at home.
This argument that the war is the result of wealth is immoral, because it makes the guilt of America and England even greater than that of Germany (for they are richer); and because it is the argument of the communist—that theft is not wrong, because it is the inevitable consequence of private property: if no one has any right to anything, then no one will steal anything.
Nothing holds the attention of the prophet better than the idea that the war is the result of commercial competition. This also is an invention of the devil to exculpate Germany. All of us are in business for gain; we are actuated by greed; we are making cotton cloth to cover Africans for the profit that we can get out of it; we ought to think only of clothing the naked, and if we would only give the cotton cloth to the Hottentots without material return, we should have the proud satisfaction of seeing them draped in chintzes, and we should be safe from that wealth which is so certain to make us wicked. On those terms there would be very little competition in supplying the Hottentots, and no danger whatever that any nation would fight us to gain that portion of the export trade.
But the “peaceful penetration” of all other countries by German industry and commerce had been going on for thirty years before the war. England had stamped “Made in Germany” upon the imports from that country under the delusion that people would not buy them if they knew they were not made by domestic industry, but the only result was to advertise German business. Shipping interests at Antwerp, factories in France, hotels in Switzerland, iron works in Italy, commercial establishments in China and South America, the trade and transportation of Turkey, passed into German hands, and no nation offered armed resistance. No less a witness than Prince von Buelow testifies that England could easily have stopped German naval expansion, but did not do so. German commercial expansion did not cause the war, unless Great Britain, the principal sufferer from German business success, attacked Germany in 1914. And this is the German official explanation of the war supplied for domestic consumption. And yet it is repudiated by the highest witness who could be put upon the stand. No less a person than Prince Lichnowsky, who was German Ambassador in London at the outbreak of the war, traces the war to Austrian projects in the Balkans, with the “blank check” of Germany, together with irritation in Russia caused by Germany’s own efforts to establish a dominating influence in Constantinople. This leaves nothing of the story invented for the German people, and propagated by the university professors, that England attacked Germany because the latter was getting its trade away from it. And this falsehood, invented to shield the guilty nation, has a special fascination for the prophets. It looks so much like taking a broad and general and impartial view of the world. Satan is very liberal; it pains him to have guilt attached to any individual. It is more in accord with his philosophic and humane ideas to regard crime as a product of social conditions, and war as the result of trade competition.