This essentially personal character of wealth must affect the views of those who would attack what are called the inordinate fortunes. I hold no brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In many cases I believe his wealth is as personal, assimilated and legitimate as is the average moderate fortune. In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes, I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which are founded and supported by great wealth. In our time The Rockefeller Institute will have stamped out that slow plague of the south, the hook worm. To the obvious retort that the government ought to do this sort of thing, the reply is equally obvious, that historically governments have not done this sort of thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown the way. Our prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich in particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the socialist indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires a statute of limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more trouble than the possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts, interest, and grudges cannot be indefinitely accumulated and extended. It is the entire disregard of this simple and generally admitted principle that has marred the socialist propaganda from the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred between classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may be clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman [pg 115]see clearly what his actual grievance and expectancy of redress are in his own day and time.
With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very rich will have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire’s evident utility as the milch cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even of the anti-capitalistic stamp, to waver at the point where the cow threatens to dry up from over-milking. If the case, then, for utterly despoiling the harmful rich, is by no means clear, the prospect for the harmless rich may be regarded as fairly favorable. For the moment, caught between the headiness of working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable. But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy, cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be better.
Lecturing at Chautauqua
To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly, I must approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of view. Others, more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the Institution, have written the history of its development from small beginnings to its present impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of Chautauqua was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a surprised and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien thrust suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and, if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some sense of the human significance of this summer seat of earnest recreation may be suggested by a mere record of my individual reactions.
I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer morning, I suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at the Institution. I was a little disconcerted at the moment, because I was enjoying an amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was inclined to shudder at the thought of putting on a collar in July; but, after an hour or two, I managed to imagine that telegram as a Summons from the Great Unknown, and it was in a proper spirit of adventure that I flung together a few books, and climbed into the only available upper berth on a discomfortable train that rushed me westward.
[pg 117]In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out at Westfield, on Lake Erie,—a town that looked like the back-yard of civilization, with weeds growing in it. Thence a trolley car, climbing over heightening hills that became progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the entrance of what the cynical conductor called “The Holy City.” A fence of insurmountable palings stretched away on either hand; and, at the little station, there were turn-stiles, through which pilgrims passed within. Most people pay money to obtain admittance; but I was met by a very affable young man from Dartmouth, whose business it was to welcome invited visitors, and by him I was steered officially through unopposing gates. I liked this young man for his cheerful clothes and smiling countenance; but I was rather appalled by the agglomeration of ram-shackle cottages through which we passed on our way to the hotel.
I say “the hotel,” for the Chautauqua Settlement contains but one such institution. It carries the classic name of Athenæum; but the first view of it occasioned in my sensitive constitution a sinking of the heart. The edifice dates from the early-gingerbread period of architecture. It culminates in a horrifying cupola, and is colored a discountenancing brown. The first glimpse of it reminded me of the poems of A.H. Clough, whose chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough’s life-work was a continual asking of the question, “Life being unbearable, why should I not die?”—while echo, that commonplace and sapient commentator, mildly answered, “Why?”: and this was precisely the impression that I gathered from my initial vista of the Athenæum between trees.