Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

The magnates, as has been shown, brook small interference with prevailing customs. Their near dependents, retainers, and “poor relations” think as they think, and feel as they feel; and the great majority of the professional moulders of opinion, drawing their inspiration from above, preach and teach as the magnates would have them. The general social passivity following the pressure of all these influences upon the public mind is as certain and inescapable as a mathematical conclusion.

II

A powerful auxiliary to the preaching of the sanctity of custom is the extolling of individual “success.” At the very time when socio-industrial processes are settling to a fixed routine and socio-industrial forms to a fixed status,—when day by day there is found less room at the top and more room at the bottom,—the chorus of exhortation to the men of the land to bestir themselves reaches its highest pitch. Meddle not with custom and the law, is the injunction; leave those to abler and wiser heads—meaning, of course, the present formulators and manipulators thereof. Meddle not with things as they are, but while your companions sleep, “toil upward in the night,” and carve out a career for yourself among the stars. Put no faith in general social changes, except such as result from the combined effect of each unit concerning himself solely with his own material salvation. There is no social betterment without precedent individual betterment, it is urged. “You cannot make a bad man good by legislation,” is the admonitory adage, and “You cannot make a poor man rich by legislation” is its twin. If certain persons hold to the theory that corrective laws have a definite reaction upon character, and that in every civilization worthy the name there are social institutions, founded in law, which are immeasurably in advance of the general average of sanity, sobriety, and honesty of the citizenship, such persons are but dreamers, and are not to be taken too seriously. So, too, with the dictum regarding the statutory enhancement of riches. There are those who insinuate that it is heard most often from the lips of the industrial magnates, the majority of whom are living examples of the fact that riches may be garnered by means of tariffs and other privilege-giving laws; and from the laissez-faire tariff reformers, whose reiterated argument against protective duties is that they are law-given privileges by which the few gain wealth at the expense of the many. But persons who question this profound adage are unsophisticated. They fail to discriminate properly. The adage is one which, like a simile or metaphor, should not be stretched too far. It has its true and legitimate bearing only when it is applied to the very poor.

Personal endeavor toward the goal of “success” is the urgent exhortation. Scarcely one of the magnates who have recently entered literature, or who, avoiding that province, have on occasion unbosomed themselves to the interviewer, but takes pains to declare how numerous and how mighty are the possibilities in the path of the energetic. All that is needed, according to most of the seigniorial recipes, are brains and health; honesty, it is true, is often included as an ingredient in the compound, but its mention is possibly ironical, and need not concern us. Brains and health are thus the two things needful; and though pursuing Satan may gather in, with his drag-net, a vast army of the hindmost, the fortunate possessors of these two boons will inevitably forge to the front in the headlong race.

It is by no accident that this particular counsel from the magnates is heard now more frequently than any other. It is one that of course has been given in all times; but it has never been given with such frequency and unction as now. Consciously or subconsciously, it is an expression of class feeling—a revelation of the community of interests and purposes of a particular division of our society. In whatever cases its utterance is prompted by a general social motive, that motive is the defence of class control. It is counsel that makes for the acquiescence of the lower orders and the increased security of the upper. “The heaving and straining of the wretches pent up in the hold of the slaver is less,” writes Professor Ross again, “if now and then a few of the most redoubtable are let up on deck. Likewise the admitting of a few brave, talented, or successful commoners into the charmed circle above has a wonderful effect in calming the rage and envy of the exploited, and thereby prolonging the life of the parasitic system.” This counsel of endeavor, promulgated by the few who have striven and “succeeded,” is thus a social sedative of great efficacy.

The professional moulders of opinion take their cue from these exhortations of the magnates, improve, elaborate, and redistribute them. The professors, the editors, and the orators lead, and the hortatory pronouncements of the pulpit follow closely. The Carpenter of Nazareth, it is true, held other views of “success”; but his precepts would seem to have gone out of fashion in the fanes and tabernacles ostensibly devoted to his worship. With all ranks and conditions Success becomes the great god; and as though there were not already priests and votaries enough for his proper worship, a special class of publications has recently arisen, which serve as his vowed and consecrated ministers. These teach to the devout but unsophisticated followers of the great god the particular means best adapted to win his grace; how his frown may be averted; or, if his anger be kindled, by what penances and other rites he is to be propitiated. They chant the praises and recite the life-incidents of those who have been most conspicuously blessed, and to all the rest of mankind they shout, “Follow our counsel, and some day you shall be even like unto these.” It is a glittering lure, and it is eagerly pursued. Sometimes, indeed, not without doubts and misgivings; for a recognition that “all the gates are thronged with suitors,” that “all the markets overflow,” and that the settling and hardening of socio-industrial processes has already begun, becomes more general, and leads many to essay the trial of fortune’s pathway only as a desperate and forlorn adventure. But these are the exceptions; the majority are still to be caught by limed twigs. The gods denied mankind many gifts, and attached hard conditions to most of those which they granted. But for all their withholding of certain gifts and their tainting of others, they sought to compensate by giving an extra allowance of credulity.

III

Not only by the showering of precepts, by the encouragement of individual effort, and by the dangling of more or less illusory prizes before the wistful multitude does the ruling class maintain its hold. It invites, to some extent, a participation in the harvest. The growth of the shareholding class, of which mention has already been made, is by no means wholly fortuitous. New companies of small initial capital, and with somewhat dubious chances in the great struggle, may be glad enough to market their shares wheresoever they can; but something of seigniorial grace and condescension, though not entirely unmixed with calculating foresight, is apparent in the opening of opportunities for small investment in the larger and more stable corporations. Mr. John B. C. Kershaw, in the Fortnightly Review for May, 1900, gives an interesting account of this fostering of share-investment in England. The industrial magnates, he says, saw that the best policy for preventing the growth of a public sentiment favoring the encroachments of labor would be to increase the number of bourgeoisie interested in industrial affairs. Accordingly they encouraged popular share-buying, with the result that “a large and increasing proportion of the general public is now financially involved in all industrial struggles, and our manufacturers feel assured that the danger lest the workers should be backed by a solid and enthusiastic public opinion in their demands for shorter hours or increased pay no longer exists.”

As in England, so also here. The movement toward corporate ownership is probably more pronounced in the United States than in the older country, and it has been equally encouraged from above. Joint-stock concerns increased in England from 9344 in 1885 to 25,267 in 1898. In Massachusetts, the State in which the preparation of statistics most nearly approaches the methods of science, corporations are reported to have increased during the years 1885-95 by more than 77 per cent. As for shareholders, the nine principal manufacturing industries of Massachusetts for the same period show percentages of increase ranging from 13.87 in tapestry to 637.74 in leather, saddles, and harness. The entire country has shown a marked growth in the number of this class, and it would seem that no one is too poor to hold a share in some corporation. Indeed, to read the arguments of the legal retainers of the magnates in the Income Tax case, and in the various trust cases that from time to time arise, one would think that the main body of the shareholders of the nation was composed of workingmen, widows, and orphans. In no time since the prophet Ezekiel’s day have there been uttered words of such tender consideration for the poor and needy, the widow and the orphan, and of such bitter denunciation for their would-be despoilers as were tearfully put forth in opposing the income tax.

A great number of shareholders in a particular company would seem, on first thought, to be something of a nuisance. Unquestionably they would represent a wide range of conflicting views and antagonistic purposes, all bearing upon the one problem of the proper operation of the company’s property; and would thus give salient instances of that unwisdom which is too often found in a multitude of counsellors. At least this is the seigniorial argument against national collectivism—an argument which one might naturally suppose to be quite as applicable to the particular collectivism of the stock company. But it does not so apply; the solid advantages of diffused shareholding in assuring general public sanction to the acts of the magnates outweigh the confusion and danger which are alleged to lie in public ownership.