“If we could get rid of some of our notions about liberty and equality, and could lay aside this eighteenth-century philosophy, according to which human society is to be brought into a state of blessedness, we might get some insight into the might of the societal organization: what it does for us and what it makes us do.... If we are willing to be taught by the facts, then the phenomena of the concentration of wealth which we see about us will convince us that they are just what the situation calls for. They ought to be because they are, and because nothing else would serve the interests of society.... I often see statements published in which the objectors lay stress upon the great inequalities of fortune, and having set forth the contrast between rich and poor, they rest their case. What law of nature, religion, ethics, or the State is violated by inequalities of fortune? The inequalities prove nothing.”
Professor John B. Clark, of Columbia University, also sees in vast inequalities of fortune the basis of a happy state. Aristotle taught differently, it is true. “In human societies,” he wrote, “extremes of wealth and poverty are the main sources of evil. The one brings arrogance and a lack of capacity to obey; the other brings slavishness and a lack of capacity to command. Where a population is divided into the two classes of very rich and very poor, there can be no real state; for there can be no real friendship between the classes, and friendship is the essential principle of all association.” But Professor Clark, touched by prophetic fire, pictures a new society in which inequality is the great blessing. “The world of the near future,” he writes in his recent article on “The Society of the Future,” “will not be one with inequalities levelled out of it; and to any persons to whom inequality of possessions seems inherently evil, this world will not be satisfactory. It will present a condition of vast and ever growing inequality. With a democracy that depends on a likeness of material possessions it will have nothing in common. The rich will continually grow richer, and the multi-millionnaires will approach the billion-dollar standard.... If an earthly Eden is to come through competition, it will come not in spite of, but by means of, an enormous increase of inequality of outward possessions.”
We must hear from Professor Peck again—and for the last time. “When men by temper and training,” he writes in his recent paper on “The Social Advantages of the Concentration of Wealth,” “come to possess the ability to do large things in this direct and simple way [i.e., the characteristic way, of the magnates], they have an immense advantage over those who can work only in committees, or boards, or companies, and they will inevitably dominate them and use them quite at will.... This [concentration] means, in the first place and as a first result, the aggrandizement of individuals; but in the end it means the wide diffusion of a golden stream through every artery and vein of our national and individual life. America has already been enormously enriched; yet the actualities of the present are nothing when compared with the potentialities of the future. Timid minds which are appalled rather than inspired by the vastness and magnificence of the whole thing shrink back and croak out puling prophecies of evil. They cannot rise to the greatness of it all because they lack the dauntless courage of the typical American, who, in Kipling’s vivid phrase, can always—
“‘Turn a keen, untroubled face
Home to the instant need of things.’”
III
So much for a consensus of some of our notable instructors of the public on things political and social. That these opinions produce a powerful influence on the mass, no one will deny. The wide respect in which our teachers—particularly our commissioned teachers—are held; the general recognition of their learning, their profundity, their unquestioned liberty to speak what they will, their insulated freedom from the influences arising out of seigniorial endowments, compel a popular deference to their judgments. It is, therefore, with pained surprise that an American reads an uncharitable comment on their ability and learning. Such a comment is that which appeared last February in the conservative and ably edited Paris Temps. “It is true,” writes its editor, “that American universities pay great attention to social and political sciences. It is no less true that they have at their disposal considerable financial resources for the publication of reviews. But the question is to know what the reviews and teachings are worth.... I believe myself sufficiently conversant with the matter. By professional duty I read, not everything which is printed on the other side of the Atlantic concerning these subjects, but a notable part of the work which is considered the most weighty. With a few honorable exceptions—honorable, but rare—I must venture to say that these publications are, for the most part, without originality and without any real value.
“I imagine American professors will be the first to feel surprise at the great honor [the establishment of a French school in America] which it is proposed to do them. They have a very keen feeling of what they owe to European culture. They keep in close touch with all that is published in their respective specialties in France, Germany, England, and Italy. They profit by such publications, of which their own are sometimes—let us say things as they are—only adaptations or reflections. Many of them have had their intellectual training in old Europe, and had, at their start, no other ambition than to model themselves on their masters and repeat them. The development of social and political studies is immense—on the surface—in the United States. In depth it is not quite the same.”
The Temps, it may be remarked, is not, on the one hand, radical, nor on the other, anti-democratic or anti-American; and so the reasons for its illiberal and discourteous judgment must be left undiscerned. Its startling declaration, that the sociological pronouncements of our distinguished teachers “are, for the most part, without originality and without any real value,” rises to the dignity of a national affront, and rightly calls for emphatic action from our strenuous State Department.