“Undoubtedly. That is one of its chief drawbacks,” said the banker, with a laugh.
“Well,” I said, with the deference due even to a man who had only a million or two, more or less, “we must allow you to say such things. But if the case is so bad with the business men who have made the great fortunes—the business men who have never had the disadvantage of a university education—I wish you would explain to Mr. Homos why, in every public exigency, we instinctively appeal to the business sense of the community as if it were the fountain of wisdom, probity, and equity. Suppose there were some question of vital interest—I won’t say financial, but political or moral or social—on which it was necessary to rouse public opinion, what would be the first thing to do? To call a meeting over the signatures of the leading business men, because no other names appeal with such force to the public. You might get up a call signed by all the novelists, artists, ministers, lawyers, and doctors in the state, and it would not have a tithe of the effect, with the people at large, that a call signed by a few leading merchants, bank presidents, railroad men, and trust officers would have. What is the reason? It seems strange that I should be asking you to defend yourself against yourself.”
“Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all,” the banker replied, with his caressing bonhomie. “Though I will confess, to begin with, that I do not expect to answer your question to your entire satisfaction. I can only do my best—on the instalment plan.”
He turned to the Altrurian, and then went on: “As I said the other night, this is a business man’s country. We are a purely commercial people; money is absolutely to the fore; and business, which is the means of getting the most money, is the American ideal. If you like, you may call it the American fetish; I don’t mind calling it so myself. The fact that business is our ideal, or our fetish, will account for the popular faith in business men, who form its priesthood, its hierarchy. I don’t know, myself, any other reason for regarding business men as solider than novelists or artists or ministers, not to mention lawyers and doctors. They are supposed to have long heads; but it appears that ninety-five times out of a hundred they haven’t. They are supposed to be very reliable; but it is almost invariably a business man of some sort who gets out to Canada while the state examiner is balancing his books, and it is usually the longest headed business men who get plundered by him. No, it is simply because business is our national ideal that the business man is honored above all other men among us. In the aristocratic countries they forward a public object under the patronage of the nobility and gentry; in a plutocratic country they get the business men to indorse it. I suppose that the average American citizen feels that they wouldn’t indorse a thing unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safe—he is cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks, and business is a game of chance, in a certain degree. Have I made myself intelligible?”
“Entirely so,” said the Altrurian; and he seemed so thoroughly well satisfied that he forbore asking any further question.
No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and resumed at the point where he left off when I ventured to enter upon the defence of his class with him. I must say that he had not convinced me at all. At that moment I would rather have trusted him, in any serious matter of practical concern, than all the novelists I ever heard of. But I thought I would leave the word to him, without further attempt to reinstate him in his self-esteem. In fact, he seemed to be getting along very well without it, or else he was feeling that mysterious control from the Altrurian which I had already suspected him of using. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the banker proceeded with his contribution to the Altrurian’s stock of knowledge concerning our civilization:
“I don’t believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really needed nothing beyond the three R’s, and the working-man needed no R at all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which nobody of our generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a generalization?” the banker asked of me.
“Oh,” I admitted, with a laugh, “it is a good deal like one of my own. I have always been struck with that phase of our civilization.”
“Well, then,” the banker resumed, “take the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R’s, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception and application.”
“Distinctly so,” said the professor. “Now that the text-books are furnished by the state, we have only to go a step further and provide a good, hot lunch for the children every day, as they do in Paris.”