Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

“The crowning fact,

The kingliest act

Of Freedom is the Freeman’s vote!”

But though the freeman’s vote is a kingly prerogative, there is no suggestion that he shall use it in initiating or passing upon legislation for the collective good. Rather the plea is for obedience; and the warning is of those violators of the public peace, the labor organizations.

So, too, Mr. Stimson. “The unexpected weakness of democratic government,” he writes, “is its belief that statutes can amend both nature and human nature.” And he rejoices that the judiciary, convinced, no doubt, that neither human nature nor its manifestations can be amended by statutes, have actively intervened by declaring many laws unconstitutional. He finds, moreover, that the general principle which has caused the adverse action of the courts, is that these statutes have been “restrictive of private liberty, of the right of a free citizen to use his own property, and his own personal powers in such a way as he will, if so be that he do not injure others.” A perspicuous and conclusive judgment, no doubt, considering that the very point at issue is the matter of injury to others. He is not satisfied with condemning legislation, moreover, but proceeds further to a gentle remonstrance with the classes of persons who have urged certain regulative laws. Labor leaders, he discovers, distrust experience, and Socialists detest lucidity—a brace of acute judgments in the face of the fact that the thing actually rated highest in trade-union circles is experience, and that whatever the defects of Socialists or of their system may be, the signal contributions of the best Socialist writers to the study of political economy have been lucidity of thought and definiteness of expression.

So, too, Professor Sumner, Professor Walter A. Wyckoff, the entertaining author of “The Workers,” and a host of other instructors of the public, the mere roster of whose names would require several pages of fine print. Of the only two safeguards of the dependent classes against complete exploitation—social legislation and the labor society—our moulders of opinion would seem to have taken the job of demolishing the former, leaving to the magnates themselves the task of attending to the latter.

With many if not most of these publicists the criticism is delivered not only at protective laws, but at the force behind them—democracy. “Every age,” writes Professor Sumner, “is befooled by the notions which are in fashion in it. Our age is befooled by ‘democracy.’ We hear arguments about the industrial organization which are deductions from democratic dogmas, or which appeal to prejudice by using analogies drawn from democracy to affect sentiment about industrial relations.” Many of our moulders of opinion elaborate the argument often made in the writings of our literary magnates, that only men who are themselves possessed of property should have any voice in the disposition of wealth or the regulation of property rights. To justify this view recourse is had to several recently imported dogmas, fashioned by Mr. W. H. Mallock, author of “Aristocracy and Evolution.” All increase of wealth, all advance in knowledge and virtue, contends Mr. Mallock, come from an aristocracy—a word which he defines as meaning the “exceptionally gifted and efficient minority, no matter what the position in which its members may have been born, or what the sphere of social progress in which their efficiency shows itself.” Therefore, since the efficient have produced everything above the maximum which the ignorant and unskilled workman can produce without this higher aid, it follows that the efficient should be left in untroubled possession of their holdings. The large assumption among others in Mr. Mallock’s argument—that those who efficiently sow and those who richly reap are the same persons—need not concern us here. It is sufficient to point out that his argument has been eagerly taken up by a number of our own moulders of opinion, fostered and even developed to further conclusions.

Professor Peck, for instance, rather heroically improving on the spirit, and not infrequently following the text, of Mr. Mallock, puts the matter in this way:—

“Every really great thing that has been accomplished in the history of man has been accomplished by an aristocracy. It may have called itself a sacerdotal aristocracy, or a military aristocracy, or an aristocracy based on birth and blood, yet these distinctions were but superficial; for in reality it always meant one thing alone—the community of interest and effort in those whose intellectual force and innate gift of government enabled them to dominate and control the destinies of States, driving in harness the hewers of wood and drawers of water who constitute the vast majority of the human race, and whose happiness is greater and whose welfare is more thoroughly conserved when governed than when governing.”

The argument that the gifted produce all, and the assumption that the wealthy and the gifted are the same persons lead up to the fervid praise of inequality of condition which in recent years is so often heard. Our literary magnates began the strain, doubtless with the motive of self-justification. Since then it has been taken up by our professional instructors—from what motive is not precisely known—and the result is a mighty chorus of many voices. Says Professor Sumner:—