Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

III

Through all the various activities of these classes (except the wastrels and the cotters) our Benevolent Feudalism will carry on the Nation’s work. The full measure of profit is its aim; and having the substance of its desire, it shows a utilitarian scorn of the mummeries and ceremonials by which the overlordship of other days was formally acknowledged. The ancient ceremony of “homage,” the swearing of personal fidelity to the lord, is relaxed into the mere beseeching of the foreman for work. Directness and efficacy characterize its methods. The wage-system, with its mechanical simplicity, continuing in force, there is an absence of the old exactions of special work. A mere altering of the wage-scale appropriates to the noble whatever share of the product he feels he may safely demand for himself. Thus “week-work,” the three or four days’ toil in each week which the villein had to give unrecompensed to the lord, and “boon-work,” the several days of extra toil three or four times a year, will never be revived. Even the company store, the modern form of feudal exaction, will in time be given up, for at best it is but a clumsy and offensive makeshift, and defter and less irritating means are at hand for reaching the same result. There will hardly be a restoration of “relief,” the payment of a year’s dues on inheriting an allotment of land, or of “heriot,” the payment of a valuable gift from the possessions of a deceased relative. Indeed, these tithes may not be worth the bother of collecting; for the villein’s inheritance will probably be but moderate, as befits his state and the place which God and the nobility have ordained for him.

Practically all industry will be regulated in terms of wages, and the entrepreneurs, who will then have become the chief salaried officers of the nobles, will calculate to a hair the needful production for each year. Waste and other losses will thus be reduced to a minimum. A vast scheme of exact systematization will have taken the place of the old competitive chaos, and industry will be carried on as by clock-work. The workshops will be conducted practically as now. Only they will be very much larger, the individual and total output will be greater, the unit cost of production will be lessened. Wages and hours will for a time continue on something like the present level; but, despite the persistence of the unions, no considerable gains in behalf of labor are to be expected, except such as are freely given as acts of baronial grace and benevolence. The owners of all industry worth owning, the barons will laugh at threats of striking and boycotting. No competitor will be permitted to make capital out of the labor disputes of another. There may or may not be competitors. A gigantic merger of all interests, governed by a council of ten, may supplant the individual dukedoms and baronies in the different industries, or these may continue as now, the sovereign units of a federated whole. But in neither case can labor carry its point against them. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction must be guarded against as a possible menace to the régime. Wages and dividends will be nicely balanced with a watchful regard for the fostering of content; workshops and villages of yet more approved models than any of the present will be built, and a thousand Pelzers and Pullmans will arise. Old-age pensions, or at least the promise of them, will be extended to new groups, and by all possible means the lesson that protection and security are due only to faithfulness and obedience will be made plain to the entire villein class.

Gradually a change will take place in the aspirations and conduct of the younger generations. Heretofore there has been at least some degree of freedom of choice in determining one’s occupation, however much that freedom has been curtailed by actual economic conditions. But with the settling of industrial processes comes more and more constraint. The dream of the children of the farms to escape from their drudgery by migrating to the city, and from the stepping-stone of a clerkly place at three dollars a week to rise to affluence, will be given over, and they will follow the footsteps of their fathers. A like fixity of condition will be observed in the cities, and the sons of clerks and of mechanics and of day laborers will tend to accept their environment of birth and training and abide by it. It is a phenomenon observable in all countries where the economic pressure is severe, and it is yet more certain to obtain in feudal America.

IV

The outlines of the present State loom but feebly through the intricate network of the new system. The nobles will have attained to complete power, and the motive and operation of government will have become simply the registering and administering of their collective will. And yet the State will continue very much as now, just as the form and name of the Roman Republic continued under Augustus. The present State machinery is admirably adapted for the subtle and extra-legal exertion of power by an autocracy; and while improvements to that end might unquestionably be made, the barons will hesitate to take action which will needlessly arouse popular suspicions. From petty constable to Supreme Court Justice the officials will understand, or be made to understand, the golden mean of their duties; and except for an occasional rascally Jacobin, whom it may for a time be difficult to suppress, they will be faithful and obey.

The manorial courts, with powers exercised by the local lords, will not, as a rule, be restored. Probably the “court baron,” for determining tenantry and wage-questions, will be revived. It may even come as a natural outgrowth of the present conciliation boards, with a successor of the Committee of Thirty-six of the National Civic Federation as a sort of general court baron for the nation. But the “court leet,” the manorial institution for punishing misdemeanors, wherein the baron holds his powers by special grant from the central authority of the State, we shall never know again. It is far simpler and will be less disturbing to the popular mind to leave in existence the present courts so long as the baron can dictate the general policy of justice.

Armed force will, of course, be employed to overawe the discontented and to quiet unnecessary turbulence. Unlike the armed forces of the old Feudalism, the nominal control will be that of the State; the soldiery will be regular, and not irregular. Not again will the barons risk the general indignation arising from the employment of Pinkertons and other private armies. The worker has unmistakably shown his preference, when he is to be subdued, for the militia and the Federal army. It is not an unreasonable attitude, and it is hardly to be doubted that it will be respected. The militia of our Benevolent Feudalism will be recruited, as now, mostly from the clerkly class; and it will be officered largely by the sons and nephews of the barons. But its actions will be tempered by a saner policy. Governed by those who have most to fear from popular exasperation, it will show a finer restraint.

V

Peace will be the main desideratum, and its cultivation will be the most honored science of the age. A happy blending of generosity and firmness will characterize all dealings with open discontent; but the prevention of discontent will be the prior study, to which the intellect and the energies of the nobles and their legates will be ever bent. To that end the teachings of the schools and colleges, the sermons, the editorials, the stump orations, and even the plays at the theatres will be skilfully moulded; and the questioning heart of the poor, which perpetually seeks some answer to the painful riddle of the earth, will meet with a multitude of mollifying responses. These will be: from the churches, that discontent is the fruit of atheism, and that religion alone is a solace for earthly woe; from the colleges, that discontent is ignorant and irrational, since conditions have certainly bettered in the last one hundred years; from the newspapers, that discontent is anarchy; and from the stump orators that it is unpatriotic, since this nation is the greatest and most glorious that ever the sun shone upon. As of old, these reasons will for the time suffice; and against the possibility of recurrent questionings new apologetics will be skilfully formulated, to be put forth as occasion requires.