After short commerce with me fear my frown.’”
But they fear not her frown; and they teach the social precepts of their Master regardless of material consequences. What those consequences are, the average man knows full well. They are ostracism, a reduction, sooner or later, to the poorest livings; a hemming in and constraining to the narrowest fields of effort and influence—in a word, the full sum of the forceful rebuke which it is possible for the magnate class and its retainers, in the present state of society, to deliver. In the more developed state of the future the rebuke will be yet more emphatic; for the influence of the pulpit, whatever it may be in degree, must in kind be confirmatory of the right of the magnate class to rule.
CHAPTER VIII
General Social Changes
The historic props of class rule, according to Professor Edward A. Ross, in his recent volume, “Social Control,” have been force, superstition, fraud, pomp, and prescription. Our present seigniorial class makes use, with fine discrimination as time and occasion require, of each of these means of support, though unquestionably it sets the greatest value upon the last named. Force is employed less openly, less obviously; decreasingly by the direct imposition of the magnates, increasingly through their ingenious manipulation of the powers of the State. The superstition latent in most minds proves now, as ever, a means of ready recourse; but though supernatural sanction to the acts and authority of the magnates is cunningly deduced and volubly preached from a thousand pulpits, the prop fails somewhat as a constant and sure reliance. Even testimony so authoritative as that of President Baer to the effect that the Great First Cause had intrusted to himself and his co-magnates the control of the business interests of the country, has been flouted in a number of places. The notion of supernatural sanctions, as most people know, and as Professor Goldwin Smith has repeatedly taken pains to point out, is losing its hold upon the reason of mankind; and though it still has, and will ever have, a certain potency, its best days are passed.
As for fraud, both of class against class, and individual against individual, attempts to practise it no doubt increase; but the tooth-and-claw struggle of the last generation has developed and sharpened the wits of the combatants, so that it tends to become a less profitable game. He would be a sharper indeed, according to the proverb, who among the Turks of the Negropont, the Jews of Salonika, or the Greeks of Athens could cheat his fellow: each knows by heart all the tricks and devices of which the others are capable. Matters are not yet at such a stage in free America: great frauds, both of the group and of the individual, are still practised. But the almost infinite possibilities of other days have been sadly restricted by the operation of those natural laws which tend to fit beings to their environment. Pomp, too, is less a factor of control than in past times. It has a powerful grip on the imaginations of the poor, as the columns of our “yellow” journals, which devote so large a space to the ceremonies of the great, amply attest; but though it charms the more, it deceives the less. It interests, it delights; but it does not overawe or subdue.
I
It is by prescription—by a constant appeal to the sanctity of custom, a constant preaching of the validity of vested rights, and of the beauty, order, inevitability, and righteousness of things as they are—that the magnate class wins to its support the suffrages of the people. Other influences aid, but this one is dominant. As Professor Ross pertinently writes:—
“Those who have the sunny rooms in the social edifice have ... a powerful ally in the suggestion of Things-as-they-are. With the aid of a little narcotizing teaching and preaching, the denizens of the cellar may be brought to find their lot proper and right, to look upon escape as an outrage upon the rights of other classes, and to spurn with moral indignation the agitator who would stir them to protest. Great is the magic of precedent, and like the rebellious Helots, who cowered at the sight of their masters’ whips, those who are used to dragging the social chariot will meekly open their calloused mouths whenever the bit is offered them.”