Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

The Positivists, in their prediction of social changes, give us the phrase, “the moralization of capital,” and some of the more hopeful theologians, not to be outdone, have prophesied “the Christianization of capital.” So far there is not much to be said confirmatory of either expectation. Yet it is not to be denied that the faint stirrings of an ethical sense are observable among the men of millions, and that the principle of the “trusteeship of great wealth” has won a number of adherents. The enormous benefactions for social purposes, the construction of “model workshops” and “model villages,” though in many cases prompted by self-interest and in others by a love of ostentation, are at least sometimes due to a new sense of social responsibility. A duty to society has been apprehended, and these are its first fruits. It is a duty, true enough, which is but dimly seen and imperfectly fulfilled. The greater part of these benefactions, as has already been pointed out, is directed to purposes which have but a slight or indirect bearing upon the relief of social distress, the restraint of injustice, or the mitigation of remediable hardships. The giving is even often economically false, and if carried to an extreme would prove disastrous to the community; for in many cases it is a transmutation of wealth from a status of active capital, wherein it makes possible a greater diffusion of comfort, to a status of comparative sterility. But, though often mistaken as is the conception and futile the fulfilment of this duty, the fact that it is apprehended at all is one of considerable importance, and one that carries the promise of baronial security in the days to come.

II

Bondage to the land was the basis of villeinage in the old régime; bondage to the job will be the basis of villeinage in the new. The new régime, absolving itself from all general responsibility to its workers, extends a measure of protection, solely as an act of grace, only to those who are faithful and obedient; and it holds the entire mass of its employed underlings to the terms of day-by-day service. The growth of industries has overshadowed the importance of agriculture, which is ever being pushed back into the West and into other and remote countries; and the new order finds its larger interests and its greater measure of control in the workshops rather than on the farms. The oil wells, the mines, the grain fields, the forests, and the great thoroughfares of the land are its ultimate sources of revenue; but its strongholds are in the cities. It is in these centres of activity, with their warehouses, where the harvests are hoarded; their workshops, where the metals and woods are fashioned into articles of use; their great distributing houses; their exchanges; their enormously valuable franchises to be had for the asking or the seizing, and their pressure of population, which forces an hourly increase in the exorbitant value of land, that the new Feudalism finds the field best adapted for its main operations.

Bondage to the job will be the basis of the new villeinage. The wage-system will endure, for it is a simpler and more effective means of determining the baron’s volume of profits than were the “boon-works,” the “week-works,” and the corvées of old. But with increasing concentration on the one hand, and the fiercer competition for employment on the other, the secured job will become the laborer’s fortress, which he will hardly dare to evacuate. The hope of bettering his condition by surrendering one place in the expectation of getting another will be qualified by a restraining prudence. He will no longer trust his individual strength, but when he protests against ill conditions, or, in the last resort, strikes, it will be only in company with a formidable host of his fellows. And even the collective assertion of his demands will be restrained more and more as he considers the constantly recurring failures of his efforts. Moreover, concentration gives opportunity for an almost indefinite extension of the black-list: a person of offensive activity may be denied work in every feudal shop and on every feudal farm from one end of the country to the other. He will be a hardy and reckless industrial villein indeed who will dare incur the enmity of the Duke of the Oil Trust when he knows that his actions will be promptly communicated to the banded autocracy of dukes, earls, and marquises of the steel, coal, iron, window glass, lumber, and traffic industries.

There were three under-classes in the old Feudalism,—free tenants, villeins, and cotters. The number of tenants on the farms has approximately doubled in the last twenty years, while in the great cities nearly the whole population are tenants. The cotters, with their little huts and small holdings in isolated places about the margin of cultivation, are also in process of restoration. The villeins are an already existent class, more numerous proportionately than ever before, though the exact status of their villeinage is yet to be fixed. But modern society is characterized by complexities unknown in any of its predecessors, and the specialization of functions requires a greater number of subordinate classes. It is a difficult task properly to differentiate them. They shade off almost imperceptibly into one another; and the dynamic processes of modern industry often hurl, in one mighty convulsion, great bodies of individuals from a higher to a lower class, blurring or obscuring the lines of demarcation. Nevertheless, to take a figure from geology, these convulsions become less and less frequent as the substratum of industrial processes becomes more fixed and regular; the classes become more stable and show more distinct differences, and they will tend, under the new régime, to the formal institution of graded caste. At the bottom are the wastrels, at the top the barons; and the gradation, when the new régime shall have become fully developed, whole and perfect in its parts, will be about as follows:—

I. The barons, graded on the basis of possessions.

II. The court agents and retainers.

III. The workers in pure and applied science, artists and physicians.

IV. The entrepreneurs, the managers of the great industries, transformed into a salaried class.

V. The foremen and superintendents. This class has heretofore been recruited largely from the skilled workers, but with the growth of technical education in schools and colleges, and the development of fixed caste, it is likely to become entirely differentiated.