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Title: Outlook editorials
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Release date: December 31, 2025 [eBook #77590]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Outlook Company, 1909
Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries).
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTLOOK EDITORIALS ***
Outlook Editorials
[Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt
At His Desk in the Outlook Office]
Outlook Editorials
Theodore Roosevelt
[Illustration]
New York
The Outlook Company
1909
Copyright 1909 by
The Outlook Company
New York
All rights reserved
The first eleven editorials of
Theodore Roosevelt, published
in The Outlook from March
sixth to July seventeenth,
nineteen hundred and nine
Contents
PAGE
Why I Believe in the Kind of American
Journalism for Which The Outlook Stands 1
A Judicial Experience 11
A Scientific Expedition 23
Where We Cannot Work With Socialists 29
Where We Can Work With Socialists 51
Quack Cure-Alls for the Body Politic 65
The Japanese Question 71
Tolstoy 81
A Southerner’s View of the South 95
The Thraldom of Names 101
Give Me Neither Poverty Nor Riches 121
_By Way of Welcome_
_From The Outlook of March 6, 1909_
[Illustration]
_It would be a singular affectation to introduce to the readers of
The Outlook its new Associate Editor, Theodore Roosevelt. He is the
most widely known representative of the present world movement towards
industrial democracy. It is needless here to describe that movement,
so fully has it been described by editorials in The Outlook, and by
the public addresses and state papers of the retiring President of the
United States. Unconsciously co-operating, we have pursued a common
end, which in the future we shall pursue in conscious co-operation.
Our object is to bring the industrial institutions of democracy into
harmony with its political and educational institutions. Our resolve
is that the money power in America, as its political and educational
power, shall come from the people, be exercised for the people, and
be controlled by the people. Our motto is, Special privilege for
none, equality of opportunity for all. In the name of the editorial
and publishing departments of The Outlook, I frankly acknowledge our
gratification that Theodore Roosevelt has chosen this journal to be the
medium for his published utterances on social, economic and political
subjects, and in their name I welcome him as an Associate to its
editorial staff._
_LYMAN ABBOTT._
Why I Believe in the Kind of American Journalism for Which
The Outlook Stands
I first came into close contact with The Outlook when Governor of New
York, ten years ago, and I speedily grew to have a peculiar feeling
of respect and regard for Dr. Abbott and his associates. We did not
always agree, and as our convictions were strong our disagreements were
sometimes positive; but experience taught me that, in the first place,
Dr. Abbott and his associates always conscientiously strove to be fair,
and that, in the second place, they not only desired to tell the truth,
but made a serious endeavor to find out the facts. I found, moreover,
that they combined to a peculiar degree a number of qualities, each of
them good, but rarely found in combination.
Every owner, editor, or reporter of a conscientiously and ably
conducted newspaper or periodical is an asset of real value to
the whole community. It would be difficult to overestimate the
amount of good which can be done by the men responsible for such a
publication――responsible for its editorial columns, responsible for
its news columns, responsible for its general policy. We have many
newspapers and periodicals, big and little, of this kind. But we also
have many that are emphatically not of this kind.
During the last few years it has become lamentably evident that certain
daily newspapers, certain periodicals, are owned or controlled by men
of vast wealth who have gained their wealth in evil fashion, who desire
to stifle or twist the honest expression of public opinion, and who
find an instrument fit for their purpose in the guided and purchased
mendacity of those who edit and write for such papers and periodicals.
This style of sordid evil does not even constitute a temptation to The
Outlook; no influence of any kind could make the men who control The
Outlook so much as consider the question of abandonment of duty; and
they hold as their first duty inflexible adherence to the elementary
virtues of entire truth, entire courage, entire honesty.
Moreover, they are as far removed as the poles from the apostles of
that hideous yellow journalism which makes a cult of the mendacious,
the sensational, and the inane, and which, throughout its wide but
vapid field, does as much to vulgarize and degrade the popular taste,
to weaken the popular character, and to dull the edge of the popular
conscience, as any influence under which the country can suffer.
These men sneer at the very idea of paying heed to the dictates of
a sound morality; as one of their number has cynically put it, they
are concerned merely with selling the public whatever the public
will buy――a theory of conduct which would justify the existence of
every keeper of an opium den, of every foul creature who ministers to
the vices of mankind. Here, again, it is perhaps not especially to
the credit of Dr. Abbott and his associates that they have avoided
this pit; fortunately, they are so constituted that it is a simple
impossibility for them to fall into it.
But they do deserve very great credit for avoiding another type of
temptation which has much fascination for men of cultivation and
of refined taste, and which is quite as fatal to their usefulness
as indulgence in yellow journalism. A newspaper or periodical
which avoids vulgar sensationalism, which takes and cultivates an
interest in serious matters, and things literary, artistic, and
scientific――which, in short, appeals to people of taste, intelligence,
and cultivation――may nevertheless do them grave harm, and be within
its own rather narrow limits an element of serious mischief; for it
may habitually and consistently practice a malign and slanderous
untruthfulness which, though more refined than, is at least as
immoral as, the screaming sensationalism of any representative of
the journalism which it affects to despise. A cultivated man of good
intelligence who has acquired the knack of saying bitter things, but
who lacks the robustness which will enable him to feel at ease among
strong men of action, is apt, if his nature has in it anything of
meanness or untruthfulness, to strive for a reputation in what is to
him the easiest way. He can find no work which is easier――and less
worth doing――than to sit in cloistered aloofness from the men who
wage the real and important struggles of life and to endeavor, by an
unceasing output of slander in regard to them, to bolster up his own
uneasy desire to be considered superior to them. Now a paper edited by
men of this stamp does not have much popular influence, and therefore
is less detrimental to the people at large than yellow journalism; but
it may, to the extent of its power, exert a very real influence for
evil, by the way in which it teaches young men of good education, whose
talents should be at their country’s service, that decent and upright
public men are as properly subjects of foul attack as the most debased
corruptionist; that efficiency and wickedness are interchangeable;
and that the correct attitude to adopt, in facing the giant problems
of our great and troubled time, is one of sneering and supercilious
untruthfulness.
Dr. Abbott and his associates have avoided this pitfall also. With
them cultivation and good taste have not implied weakness. Demand for
righteousness in others has not led to abandonment of truth on their
own part.
The Outlook has stood for righteousness, but it has never been
self-righteous. It stands for the things of the spirit, and yet it
remembers the needs of the body. It serves lofty ideals, it believes
in a lofty idealism. But it knows that common sense is essential above
all other qualities to the idealist; for an idealist without common
sense, without the capacity to work in hard, practical fashion for
actual results, is merely a boat that is all sails, and with neither
ballast nor rudder. The Outlook’s belief in gentleness and tenderness,
in the spirit of brotherly love, never blinds it to the necessity
of cultivating those hardy, rugged, and vigorous qualities for the
want of which in the individual as in the Nation, no gentleness,
no cultivation, and, above all, no gift of money-making and no
self-indulgence in the soft ease of living, can in any way atone.
The Outlook has shown a fine scorn of untruth in every form, of
unfairness and injustice to any man or any cause. It is not given to
humanity never to err; but The Outlook makes a resolute effort to
find out what the facts actually are before passing judgment. With it
earnestness and strength of conviction go hand in hand with a sincere
desire to see and to state the other man’s point of view. It believes
that things in this world can be made better, but it does not indorse
quixotic movements which would merely leave things worse. It champions
the rights of the many. It desires in every way to represent, to guide
aright, and to uphold the interests of those whom Abraham Lincoln
called the plain people. It feels a peculiar desire to do all that
can be done for the poor and the oppressed, and to help upward those
struggling to better themselves. But it has no sympathy with moral
weakness or sentimentality. All that it can do it does and will do for
the cause of labor; but it will in no shape or way condone violence or
disorder. It stands for the rights of property, and therefore against
the abuses of property. It believes in a wise individualism, and in
encouragement of individual initiative; and therefore all the more it
believes in using the collective force of the whole people to do what
but for the use of that collective force must be left undone.
I am glad to be associated with Dr. Abbott and the group of men and
women he has gathered around him, because they practice what they
preach; and because they preach the things that are most necessary to
the salvation of this people. It is their earnest belief that every man
must earn enough to support himself and those dependent upon him; but
that when once this has been accomplished, money immediately becomes
secondary to many other things. In this matter The Outlook puts its
principles into practice. It strives in proper ways to make money. If
it did not make money it could not be run at all. But making money is
not the prime reason for its existence. The first question asked when
any matter of policy arises, so far as The Outlook is concerned, is
whether or not a given course is right, and should be followed because
it is in the real and lasting interest of the Nation. If this question
is answered in the affirmative, then The Outlook follows the course
indicated with all the courage, earnestness, and ability that are at
its disposal.
A Judicial Experience
A year after leaving Harvard I ran for the New York Legislature and was
elected. In the Legislature I was soon brought in contact with various
advocates of what is known as labor legislation; and I eyed both them
and their schemes with great distrust. When in Harvard I had studied
what were then considered the orthodox political economists; and after
leaving college the older men whom I met were for the most part lawyers
or business men of wealth who quite sincerely took the ordinary wealthy
business man’s view of labor matters. Moreover, in the Legislature,
most of the men who professed a loud and ardent interest in the welfare
of the laboring man were exceedingly unattractive persons, who, to put
it mildly, did not impress one as being either sincere or honest. Many
of the labor bills which were introduced were foolish, and were urged
in a transparently demagogic spirit, and the labor leaders who came to
Albany to argue for them eyed me with a suspicion which I cordially
reciprocated. Most of them, I am now inclined to think, were by no
means of the best type; and I, in my turn, because of my surroundings
both in the classroom and in the social and business world, was alert
to pick flaws in anything concerning a labor union, and possessed a
self-satisfied narrowness in approaching all labor questions which must
have been highly exasperating to my opponents.
My college training had biased me against all governmental schemes for
the betterment of the social and industrial conditions of laborers,
or for the control of corporations. The education which I afterwards
received in these matters, and which completely changed my views,
was gained partly from books, but more from actual experience in
governmental work, and from a constantly widening and more intimate
knowledge of the real life of different bodies of our people. My
first step in this education began when, after leaving college, I
joined, and endeavored to make myself count in, my local Republican
association――instead of joining some parlor gathering of well-meaning
dilettante reformers.
The labor unions had been demanding legislation to stop the manufacture
of cigars in tenement-houses, and during my second term in Albany the
Assembly appointed a committee to look into the conditions. My belief
is that the committee was appointed with the hope that it would not
recommend any change in the law, and that I was put on because, on
account of my education and social surroundings, it was supposed that
I would naturally take this view; and I certainly expected to take it.
One of my colleagues was a then well-known sporting Tammany politician
who afterwards abandoned politics and became a professional racing
man. There were many points on which our theories of ethics were as
far asunder as the poles; but I soon discovered that there were other
matters, and some of these of fundamental importance, on which we
thought alike, and our association ended in mutual respect and good
will. Soon after the investigation started I told him that I was a good
deal shocked at what I had seen, and was wavering in my preconceived
opinions. He answered by saying that, as far as he personally was
concerned, he was pledged in advance against recommending any change
in the law, but that he had known that I was a free agent and had
all along believed that when I looked into the matter for myself I
would be a very ardent advocate of the change. He was quite right
in his supposition. The investigation convinced me beyond shadow of
doubt that to permit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses,
which necessarily meant their manufacture not only by the men but by
the women and children of the poverty-stricken immigrants who were
engaged in the task, was an evil thing from every standpoint, social,
industrial, and hygienic. I accordingly cordially supported the
bill; which made a large number of my friends regard me as erratic
and dangerous, or else as influenced by demagogic motives. The bill
was badly drawn. No lawyer of any note had been consulted; there was
no one to pay such a lawyer. When it passed both houses, the then
Governor, Grover Cleveland, appointed a day for a hearing, and the
labor unions asked me to appear. Appear we did, several good counsel
being against us, while on our side there were, besides myself, merely
five or six representatives of the cigar-makers’ union, all of them
foreigners――battered-looking men, with whom the battle of life had
evidently gone hard. As this was long before I had established any
real relations with, or had any real understanding of, the unions,
while they felt that I was a crank, influenced by incomprehensible
motives, we worked on entirely independent lines, neither side
feeling altogether comfortable in the relationship. However, the main
argument――and indeed almost the only argument――for the bill was made
by me. I answered various questions which the Governor put to me. He
afterwards called me up and told me that, though he felt very doubtful,
yet that, in view of the state of facts I had set forth, he would sign
the bill.
The employers and tenement-house owners immediately contested the
constitutionality of the act, and after the usual long delays the
highest State court finally pronounced the measure invalid. The
cigar-makers were poor, and the great majority of them were ignorant
foreigners. They had no money and no special influence even in the
world of labor. They could not employ counsel either to draw their
bill well in the first place, or to present their case to the best
advantage when it was before the courts. The great mass of respectable,
well-to-do people were nervously sensitive to attacks on what they
considered the rights of property, and regarded as an infringement on
these rights any effort to correct the abuses of property. The judges,
as was quite natural, shared the feelings of the classes from which
they were drawn, and with which they associated. The decision went
against the dwellers in the tenement-houses. Anything like an effective
reformation of tenement-house conditions was thereby deferred for
fifteen or twenty years, and during that time men, women, and children
were guaranteed their “liberty” to fester in sodden misery.
The judges invoked a technical construction of the Constitution in
order to declare invalid a law deliberately enacted by the legislative
body; a law which I firmly believe it was entirely in the province of
the Legislature to pass. Every consideration of public morals and
public weal demanded that it should be declared valid. At the present
day few courts in any State of the Union would make such a decision
as was then made; yet the judges making it were learned in the law,
and according to their own lights were upright and honorable men.
But they were men without any sympathetic understanding or knowledge
of the needs and conditions of life of the great mass of their
fellow-countrymen. If those judges had understood “how the other half
lived,” if they had possessed a working knowledge of tenement-houses
and factories, of tenement-house dwellers and factory workers, and of
the lives that were lived where the tenement-house and the factory were
one and the same, I am absolutely certain that they would have rendered
no such decision as was rendered. They knew the life of the well-to-do,
both the business life and the home life. They knew nothing of the
lives of those who were not well-to-do. It was this lack of knowledge
and the attendant lack of sympathetic understanding that formed the
real barrier between the judges and a wise judgment.
My reason for relating this anecdote is because from that day to this I
have felt an ever-growing conviction of the need of having on the bench
men who, in addition to being learned in the law and upright, shall
possess a broad understanding of and sympathy with their countrymen
as a whole, so that the questions of humanity and of social justice
shall not be considered by them as wholly inferior to the defense of
vested rights or the upholding of liberty of contract. A hair-splitting
refinement in decisions may result in as much damage to the community
as if the judge were actually corrupt. Freedom of contract should be
permitted only so far as is compatible with the best interests of
the community; and when vested rights become intrenched wrongs, they
should be overturned. I do not for one moment believe that the mass of
our judges are actuated by any but worthy motives. Nevertheless, I do
believe that they often signally fail to protect the laboring man and
the laboring man’s widow and children in their just rights, and that
heartbreaking and pitiful injustice too often results therefrom; and
this primarily because our judges lack either the opportunity or the
power thoroughly to understand the working man’s and working woman’s
position and vital needs.
There are many judges, from the Supreme Court of the Nation down
to the district bench in each State, who do possess this sympathy
and understanding, in addition to uprightness, trained ability,
broad intelligence, and entire fearlessness in the face of wrong,
whether committed by capitalist or by laboring men; such judges are
the best and most useful of all our public servants; public opinion
should uphold them as clearly as it condemns their short-sighted and
narrow-minded brethren.
A Scientific Expedition
I am about to go to Africa as the head of the Smithsonian expedition.
It is a scientific expedition. We shall collect birds and mammals for
the National Museum at Washington, and nothing will be shot unless
for food, or for preservation as a specimen, or unless, of course,
the animal is of a noxious kind. There will be no wanton destruction
whatever.
I very earnestly hope that no representative of any newspaper or
magazine will try to accompany me or to interview me during any portion
of my trip. Until I actually get to the wilderness my trip will be
precisely like any other conventional trip on a steamboat or railway.
It will afford nothing to write about, and will afford no excuse or
warrant for any one sending to any newspaper a line in reference
thereto. After I reach the wilderness of course no one outside of my
own party will be with me, and if any one pretends to be with me or
pretends to write as to what I do, his statements should be accepted
as on their face not merely false but ludicrous. Any statement
purporting to have been made by me, or attributed to me, which may
be sent to newspapers, should be accepted as certainly false and as
calling for no denial from me. So far as possible I shall avoid seeing
my representative of the press, and shall not knowingly have any
conversation on any subject whatever with any representative of the
press beyond exchanging the ordinary civilities or courtesies. I am a
private citizen, and I am entitled to enjoy the privacy that should be
the private citizen’s right. My trip will have no public bearing of
any kind or description. It is undertaken for the National Museum at
Washington, and is simply a collecting trip for the Museum. It will be
extremely distasteful to me and of no possible benefit to any human
being to try to report or exploit the trip, or to send any one with
me, or to have any one try to meet me or see me with a view to such
reporting or exploitation. Let me repeat that while I am on steamer or
railway there will be nothing whatever to report; that when I leave
the railway for the wilderness no persons will have any knowledge which
will enable them to report anything, and that any report is to be
accepted as presumably false.
Where We Cannot Work With Socialists
It is always difficult to discuss a question when it proves impossible
to define the terms in which that question is to be discussed.
Therefore there is not much to be gained by a discussion of Socialism
_versus_ Individualism in the abstract. Neither absolute Individualism
nor absolute Socialism would be compatible with civilization at all;
and among the arguments of the extremists of either side the only
unanswerable ones are those which show the absurdity of the position of
the other. Not so much as the first step towards real civilization can
be taken until there arises some development of the right of private
property; that is, until men pass out of the stage of savage socialism
in which the violent and the thriftless forcibly constitute themselves
co-heirs with the industrious and the intelligent in what the labor
of the latter produces. But it is equally true that every step toward
civilization is marked by a check on individualism. The ages that
have passed have fettered the individualism which found expression in
physical violence, and we are now endeavoring to put shackles on that
kind of individualism which finds expression in craft and greed. There
is growth in all such matters. The individualism of the Tweed Ring type
would have seemed both commonplace and meritorious to the Merovingian
Franks, where it was not entirely beyond their comprehension; and so
in future ages, if the world progresses as we hope and believe it will
progress, the standards of conduct which permit individuals to make
money out of pestilential tenements or by the manipulation of stocks,
or to refuse to share with their employees the dreadful burdens laid
upon the latter by the inevitable physical risks in a given business,
will seem as amazing to our descendants as we now find the standards
of a society which regarded Clovis and his immediate successors as
pre-eminently fit for leadership.
With those self-styled Socialists to whom “Socialism” is merely
a vaguely conceived catchword, and who use it to express their
discontent with existing wrongs and their purpose to correct them,
there is not much need of discussion. So far as they make any proposals
which are not foolish, and which tend towards betterment, we can act
with them. But the real, logical, advanced Socialists, who teach their
faith as both a creed and a party platform, may deceive to their ruin
decent and well-meaning but short-sighted men; and there is need of
plain speaking in order accurately to show the trend of their teaching.
The immorality and absurdity of the doctrines of Socialism as
propounded by these advanced advocates are quite as great as those of
the advocates, if such there be, of an unlimited individualism. As
an academic matter there is more need of refutation of the creed of
absolute Socialism than of the creed of absolute individualism; for it
happens that at the present time a greater number of visionaries, both
sinister and merely dreamy, believe in the former than in the latter.
One difficulty in arguing with professed Socialists of the extreme,
or indeed of the opportunist type, however, is that those of them who
are sincere almost invariably suffer from great looseness of thought;
for if they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at once become
abhorrent in the eyes of any upright and sensible man. The doctrinaire
Socialists, the extremists, the men who represent the doctrine in its
most advanced form, are, and must necessarily be, not only convinced
opponents of private property, but also bitterly hostile to religion
and morality; in short, they must be opposed to all those principles
through which, and through which alone, even an imperfect civilization
can be built up by slow advances through the ages.
Indeed, these thoroughgoing Socialists occupy, in relation to
all morality, and especially to domestic morality, a position so
revolting――and I choose my words carefully――that it is difficult
even to discuss it in a reputable paper. In America the leaders even
of this type have usually been cautious about stating frankly that
they proposed to substitute free love for married and family life
as we have it, although many of them do in a round-about way uphold
this position. In places on the continent of Europe, however, they
are more straightforward, their attitude being that of one of the
extreme French Socialist writers, M. Gabriel Deville, who announces
that the Socialists intend to do away with both prostitution and
marriage, which he regards as equally wicked――his method of doing away
with prostitution being to make unchastity universal. Professor Carl
Pearson, a leading English Socialist, states their position exactly:
“The sex relation of the future will not be regarded as a union for
the birth of children, but as the closest form of friendship between
man and woman. It will be accompanied by no child bearing or rearing,
or by this in a much more limited number than at present. With the sex
relationship, so long as it does not result in children, we hold that
the State in the future will in no wise interfere, but when it does
result in children, then the State will have a right to interfere.”
He then goes on to point out that in order to save the woman from
“economic dependence” upon the father of her children, the children
will be raised at the expense of the State; the usual plan being to
have huge buildings like foundling asylums.
Mr. Pearson is a scientific man who, in his own realm, is as worthy
of serious heed as Mr. Flinders Petrie, whom I mention later, is in
his realm; and the above quotation states in naked form just what
logical scientific Socialism would really come to. Aside from its
thoroughly repulsive quality, it ought not to be necessary to point
out that the condition of affairs aimed at would in actual practice
bring about the destruction of the race within, at most, a couple of
generations; and such destruction is heartily to be desired for any
race of such infamous character as to tolerate such a system. Moreover,
the ultra-Socialists of our own country have shown by their attitude
towards one of their leaders, Mr. Herron, that, so far as law and
public sentiment will permit, they are now ready to try to realize the
ideals set forth by Messrs. Deville and Pearson. As for Mr. Herron, I
commend to those who desire to verify what I have said, the article in
the Boston Congregationalist of June 15, 1901; and to those, by the
way, who have not the time to hunt up all the original authorities,
I would commend a book called “Socialism; the Nation of Fatherless
Children,” a book dedicated to the American Federation of Labor. The
chapters on Free Love, Homeless Children, and Two Socialist Leaders are
especially worth reading by any one who is for the moment confused by
the statements of certain Socialist leaders to the effect that advanced
Socialism does not contemplate an attack upon marriage and the family.
These same Socialist leaders, with a curious effrontery, at times deny
that the exponents of “scientific Socialism” assume a position as
regards industry which in condensed form may be stated as, that each
man is to do what work he can, or, in other words, chooses, and in
return is to take out from the common fund whatever he needs; or, what
amounts to the same thing, that each man shall have equal remuneration
with every other man, no matter what work is done. If they will turn
to a little book recently written in England called “The Case Against
Socialism,” they will find by looking at, say, pages 229 and 300, or
indeed almost at random through the book, quotations from recognized
Socialist leaders taking exactly this position; indeed, it is the
position generally taken――though it is often opposed or qualified,
for Socialist leaders usually think confusedly, and often occupy
inconsistent positions. Mrs. Besant, for instance, putting it pithily,
says that we must come to the “equal remuneration of all workers;” and
one of her colleagues, that “the whole of our creed is that industry
shall be carried on, not for the profit of those engaged in it, whether
masters or men, but for the benefit of the community.... It is not for
the miners, bootmakers, or shop assistants as such that we Socialists
claim the profits of industry, but for the citizen.” In our own
country, in “Socialism Made Plain,” a book officially circulated by the
Milwaukee division of the Socialist party, the statement is explicit:
“Under the labor time-check medium of exchange proposed by Socialists,
any laborer could exchange the wealth he produced in any given number
of hours for the wealth produced by any other laborer in the same
number of hours.” It is unnecessary to point out that the pleasing idea
of these writers could be realized only if the State undertook the duty
of taskmaster, for otherwise it is not conceivable that anybody whose
work would be worth anything would work at all under such conditions.
Under this type of Socialism, therefore, or communism, the government
would have to be the most drastic possible despotism; a despotism so
drastic that its realization would only be an ideal. Of course in
practice such a system could not work at all; and incidentally the mere
attempt to realize it would necessarily be accompanied by a corruption
so gross that the blackest spot of corruption in any existing form of
city government would seem bright by comparison.
In other words, on the social and domestic side doctrinaire Socialism
would replace the family and home life by a glorified State free-lunch
counter and State foundling asylum, deliberately enthroning
self-indulgence as the ideal, with, on its darker side, the absolute
abandonment of all morality as between man and woman; while in place
of what Socialists are pleased to call “wage slavery” there would be
created a system which would necessitate either the prompt dying out
of the community through sheer starvation, or an iron despotism over
all workers, compared to which any slave system of the past would seem
beneficent, because less utterly hopeless.
“Advanced” Socialist leaders are fond of declaiming against patriotism,
of announcing their movement as international, and of claiming to treat
all men alike; but on this point, as on all others, their system would
not stand for one moment the test of actual experiment. If the leaders
of the Socialist party in America should to-day endeavor to force their
followers to admit all negroes and Chinamen to a real equality, their
party would promptly disband, and, rather than submit to such putting
into effect of their avowed purpose, would, as a literal fact, follow
any capitalistic organization as an alternative.
It is not accident that makes thoroughgoing and radical Socialists
adopt the principles of free love as a necessary sequence to insisting
that no man shall have the right to what he earns. When Socialism of
this really advanced and logical type is tried as it was in France in
1792, and again under the Commune in 1871, it is inevitable that the
movement, ushered in with every kind of high-sounding phrase, should
rapidly spread so as to include, not merely the forcible acquisition
of the property of others, but every conceivable form of monetary
corruption, immorality, licentiousness, and murderous violence. In
theory, distinctions can be drawn between this kind of Socialism and
anarchy and nihilism; but in practice, as in 1871, the apostles of
all three act together; and if the doctrines of any of them could
be applied universally, all the troubles of society would indeed
cease, because society itself would cease. The poor and the helpless,
especially women and children, would be the first to die out, and the
few survivors would go back to the condition of skin-clad savages, so
that the whole painful and laborious work of social development would
have to begin over again. Of course, long before such an event really
happened the Socialistic régime would have been overturned, and in
the reaction men would welcome any kind of one-man tyranny that was
compatible with the existence of civilization.
So much for the academic side of unadulterated, or, as its advocates
style it, “advanced scientific” Socialism. Its representatives in
this country who have practically striven to act up to their extreme
doctrines, and have achieved leadership in any one of the branches of
the Socialist party, especially the parlor Socialists and the like,
be they lay or clerical, deserve scant consideration at the hands of
honest and clean-living men and women. What their movement leads to may
be gathered from the fact that in the last Presidential election they
nominated and voted for a man who earns his livelihood as the editor of
a paper which not merely practices every form of malignant and brutal
slander, but condones and encourages every form of brutal wrong-doing,
so long as either the slander or the violence is supposed to be at the
expense of a man who owns something, wholly without regard to whether
that man is himself a scoundrel, or a wise, kind, and helpful member of
the community. As for the so-called Christian Socialists who associate
themselves with this movement, they either are or ought to be aware of
the pornographic literature, the pornographic propaganda, which make up
one side of the movement; a pornographic side which is entirely proper
in a movement that in this country accepts as one of its heads a man
whose domestic immorality has been so open and flagrant as to merit
the epithet of shameless. That criminal nonsense should be listened to
eagerly by some men bowed down by the cruel condition of much of modern
toil is not strange; but that men who pretend to speak with culture of
mind and authority to teach, men who are or have been preachers of the
Gospel or professors in universities, should affiliate themselves with
the preachers of criminal nonsense is a sign of either grave mental or
moral shortcoming.
I wish it to be remembered that I speak from the standpoint of, and
on behalf of, the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil. These are
the two men whose welfare I have ever before me, and for their sakes I
would do anything, except anything that is wrong; and it is because I
believe that teaching them doctrine like that which I have stigmatized
represents the most cruel wrong in the long run, both to wage-worker
and to earth-tiller, that I reprobate and denounce such conduct.
We need have but scant patience with those who assert that modern
conditions are all that they should be, or that they cannot be
improved. The wildest or most vicious of Socialistic writers could
preach no more foolish doctrine than that contained in such ardent
defenses of uncontrolled capitalism and individualism as Mr. Flinders
Petrie’s “Janus,” a book which is absurd, but which, because of this
very fact, is not mischievous, for it can arouse no other emotion than
the very earnest desire that this particular archæological shoemaker
should stick to his early-Egyptian last. There are dreadful woes
in modern life, dreadful suffering among some of those who toil,
brutal wrong-doing among some of those who make colossal fortunes by
exploiting the toilers. It is the duty of every honest and upright man,
of every man who holds within his breast the capacity for righteous
indignation, to recognize these wrongs, and to strive with all his
might to bring about a better condition of things. But he will never
bring about this better condition by misstating facts and advocating
remedies which are not merely false, but fatal.
Take, for instance, the doctrine of the extreme Socialists, that all
wealth is produced by manual workers, that the entire product of
labor should be handed over every day to the laborer, that wealth is
criminal in itself. Of course wealth is no more criminal than labor.
Human society could not exist without both; and if all wealth were
abolished this week, the majority of laborers would starve next week.
As for the statement that all wealth is produced by manual workers,
in order to appreciate its folly it is merely necessary for any man
to look at what is happening right around him, in the next street, or
the next village. Here in the city where The Outlook is edited, on
Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets, is a huge dry goods store.
The business was originally started, and the block of which I am
speaking was built for the purpose, by an able New York merchant. It
prospered. He and those who invested under him made a good deal of
money. Their employees did well. Then he died, and certain other people
took possession of it and tried to run the business. The manual labor
was the same, the good-will was the same, the physical conditions were
the same; but the guiding intelligence at the top had changed. The
business was run at a loss. It would surely have had to shut down, and
all the employees, clerks, laborers, everybody would have been turned
adrift, to infinite suffering, if it had not again changed hands and
another business man of capacity taken charge. The business was the
same as before, the physical conditions were the same, the good-will
the same, the manual labor the same, but the guiding intelligence had
changed, and now everything once more prospered, and prospered as had
never been the case before. With such an instance before our very
eyes, with such proof of what every business proves, namely, the vast
importance of the part played by the guiding intelligence in business,
as in war, in invention, in art, in science, in every imaginable
pursuit, it is really difficult to show patience when asked to discuss
such a proposition as that all wealth is produced solely by the work
of manual workers, and that the entire product should be handed over
to them. Of course, if any such theory were really acted upon, there
would soon be no product to be handed over to the manual laborers,
and they would die of starvation. A great industry could no more be
managed by a mass-meeting of manual laborers than a battle could be won
in such fashion, than a painters’ union could paint a Rembrandt, or a
typographical union write one of Shakespeare’s plays.
The fact is that this kind of Socialism represents an effort to
enthrone privilege in its crudest form. Much of what we are fighting
against in modern civilization is privilege. We fight against privilege
when it takes the form of a franchise to a street railway company to
enjoy the use of the streets of a great city without paying an adequate
return; when it takes the form of a great business combination which
grows rich by rebates which are denied to other shippers; when it takes
the form of a stock-gambling operation which results in the watering of
railway securities so that certain inside men get an enormous profit
out of a swindle on the public. All these represent various forms of
illegal, or, if not illegal, then anti-social privilege. But there can
be no greater abuse, no greater example of corrupt and destructive
privilege, than that advocated by those who say that each man should
put into a common store what he can and take out what he needs. This is
merely another way of saying that the thriftless and the vicious, who
could or would put in but little, should be entitled to take out the
earnings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the industrious. Such
a proposition is morally base. To choose to live by theft or by charity
means in each case degradation, a rapid lowering of self-respect and
self-reliance. The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit upon labor
would sink into insignificance when compared with the hideous wrong
done by those who would degrade labor by sapping the foundations of
self-respect and self-reliance. The Roman mob, living on the bread
given them by the State and clamoring for excitement and amusement to
be purveyed by the State, represent for all time the very nadir to
which a free and self-respecting population of workers can sink if they
grow habitually to rely upon others, and especially upon the State,
either to furnish them charity, or to permit them to plunder, as a
means of livelihood.
In short, it is simply common sense to recognize that there is the
widest inequality of service, and that therefore there must be an
equally wide inequality of reward, if our society is to rest upon
the basis of justice and wisdom. Service is the true test by which a
man’s worth should be judged. We are against privilege in any form:
privilege to the capitalist who exploits the poor man, and privilege
to the shiftless or vicious poor man who would rob his thrifty brother
of what he has earned. Certain exceedingly valuable forms of service
are rendered wholly without capital. On the other hand, there are
exceedingly valuable forms of service which can be rendered only by
means of great accumulations of capital, and not to recognize this
fact would be to deprive our whole people of one of the great agencies
for their betterment. The test of a man’s worth to the community
is the service he renders to it, and we cannot afford to make this
test by material considerations alone. One of the main vices of the
Socialism which was propounded by Proudhon, Lassalle, and Marx, and
which is preached by their disciples and imitators, is that it is
blind to everything except the merely material side of life. It is
not only indifferent, but at bottom hostile, to the intellectual, the
religious, the domestic and moral life; it is a form of communism
with no moral foundation, but essentially based on the immediate
annihilation of personal ownership of capital, and, in the near future,
the annihilation of the family, and ultimately the annihilation of
civilization.
Where We Can Work With Socialists
It is true that the doctrines of communistic Socialism, if consistently
followed, mean the ultimate annihilation of civilization. Yet the
converse is also true. Ruin faces us if we decline steadily to try
to reshape our whole civilization in accordance with the law of
service, and if we permit ourselves to be misled by any empirical or
academic consideration into refusing to exert the common power of the
community where only collective action can do what individualism has
left undone, or can remedy the wrongs done by an unrestricted and
ill-regulated individualism. There is any amount of evil in our social
and industrial conditions of to-day, and unless we recognize this fact
and try resolutely to do what we can to remedy the evil, we run great
risk of seeing men in their misery turn to the false teachers whose
doctrines would indeed lead them to greater misery, but who do at least
recognize the fact that they are now miserable. At the present time
there are scores of laws in the interest of labor――laws putting a stop
to child labor, decreasing the hours of labor where they are excessive,
putting a stop to unsanitary crowding and living, securing employers’
liability, doing away with unhealthy conditions in various trades, and
the like――which should be passed by the National and the various State
Legislatures; and those who wish to do effective work against Socialism
would do well to turn their energies into securing the enactment of
these laws.
Moreover, we should always remember that Socialism is both a wide
and a loose term, and that the self-styled Socialists are of many
and utterly different types. If we should study only the professed
apostles of radical Socialism, of what these men themselves like to
call “scientific Socialism,” or if we should study only what active
leaders of Socialism in this country have usually done, or read only
the papers in which they have usually expressed themselves, we would
gain an utterly wrong impression of very many men who call themselves
Socialists. There are many peculiarly high-minded men and women who
like to speak of themselves as Socialists, whose attitude, conscious or
unconscious, is really merely an indignant recognition of the evil of
present conditions and an ardent wish to remedy it, and whose Socialism
is really only an advanced form of liberalism. Many of these men and
women in actual fact take a large part in the advancement of moral
ideas, and in practice wholly repudiate the purely materialistic, and
therefore sordid, doctrines of those Socialists whose creed really
is in sharp antagonism to every principle of public and domestic
morality, who war on private property with a bitterness but little
greater than that with which they war against the institutions of the
home and the family, and against every form of religion, Catholic
or Protestant. The Socialists of this moral type may in practice
be very good citizens indeed, with whom we can at many points
co-operate. They are often joined temporarily with what are called
the “opportunist Socialists”――those who may advocate an impossible
and highly undesirable Utopia as a matter of abstract faith, but who
in practice try to secure the adoption only of some given principle
which will do away with some phase of existing wrong. With these two
groups of Socialists it is often possible for all far-sighted men to
join heartily in the effort to secure a given reform or do away with a
given abuse. Probably, in practice, wherever and whenever Socialists
of these two types are able to form themselves into a party, they will
disappoint both their own expectations and the fears of others by
acting very much like other parties, like other aggregations of men;
and it will be safe to adopt whatever they advance that is wise, and to
reject whatever they advance that is foolish, just as we have to do as
regards countless other groups who on one issue or set of issues come
together to strive for a change in the political or social conditions
of the world we live in. The important thing is generally the next
step. We ought not to take it unless we are sure that it is advisable;
but we should not hesitate to take it when once we are sure; and we can
safely join with others who also wish to take it, without bothering our
heads overmuch as to any somewhat fantastic theories they may have
concerning, say, the two hundredth step, which is not yet in sight.
There are many schemes proposed which their enemies, and a few of
their friends, are pleased to call Socialistic, or which are indorsed
and favored by men who call themselves Socialists, but which are
entitled each to be considered on its merits with regard only to the
practical advantage which each would confer. Every public man, every
reformer, is bound to refuse to dismiss these schemes with the shallow
statement that they are “Socialistic”; for such an attitude is one of
mere mischievous dogmatism. There are communities in which our system
of State education is still resisted and condemned as Socialism; and
we have seen within the past two years in this country men who were
themselves directors in National banks, which were supervised by the
Government, object to such supervision of railways by the Government on
the ground that it was “Socialistic.” An employers’ liability law is
no more Socialistic than a fire department; the regulation of railway
rates is by no means as Socialistic as the digging and enlarging of
the Erie Canal at the expense of the State. A proper compensation law
would merely distribute over the entire industry the shock of accident
or disease, instead of limiting it to the unfortunate individual on
whom, through no fault of his, it happened to fall. As communities
become more thickly settled and their lives more complex, it grows
ever more and more necessary for some of the work formerly performed
by individuals, each for himself, to be performed by the community
for the community as a whole. Isolated farms need no complicated
system of sewerage; but this does not mean that public control of
sewerage in a great city should be resisted on the ground that it tends
toward Socialism. Let each proposition be treated on its own merits,
soberly and cautiously, but without any of that rigidity of mind which
fears all reform. If, for instance, the question arises as to the
establishment of day nurseries for the children of mothers who work in
factories, the obvious thing to do is to approach it with an open mind,
listen to the arguments for and against, and, if necessary, try the
experiment in actual practice. If it is alleged that small groups of
farmers have prospered by doing much of their work in common, and by a
kind of mutual insurance and supervision, why of course we should look
into the matter with an open mind, and try to find out, not what we
want the facts to be, but what the facts really are.
We cannot afford to subscribe to the doctrine, equally hard and
foolish, that the welfare of the children in the tenement-house
district is no concern of the community as a whole. If the child of
the thronged city cannot live in decent surroundings, have teaching,
have room to play, have good water and clean air, then not only will
he suffer, but in the next generation the whole community will to a
greater or less degree share his suffering.
In striving to better our industrial life we must ever keep in mind
that, while we cannot afford to neglect its material side, we can even
less afford to disregard its moral and intellectual side. Each of us is
bound to remember that he is in very truth his brother’s keeper, and
that his duty is, with judgment and common sense, to try to help the
brother. To the base and greedy attitude of mind which adopts as its
motto, “What is thine is mine,” we oppose the doctrine of service, the
doctrine that insists that each of us, in no hysterical manner, but
with common sense and good judgment, and without neglect of his or her
own interests, shall yet act on the saying, “What is mine I will in
good measure make thine also.”
Socialism strives to remedy what is evil alike in domestic and in
economic life, and its tendency is to insist that the economic remedy
is all-sufficient in every case. We should all join in the effort to
do away with the evil; but we should refuse to have anything to do
with remedies which are either absurd or mischievous, for such, of
course, would merely aggravate the present suffering. The first thing
to recognize is that, while economic reform is often vital, it is never
all-sufficient. The moral reform, the change of character――in which law
can sometimes play a large, but never the largest, part――is the most
necessary of all. In dealing with the marriage relation the Socialist
attitude is one of unmixed evil. Assuredly woman should be guarded
and honored in every way, her rights jealously upheld, and any wrong
done her should be regarded and punished with severe judgment; but
we must keep in mind the obvious fact that equality of consideration
does not mean identity of function. Our effort should be to raise the
level of self-respect, self-control, sense of duty in both sexes, and
not to push both down to an evil equality of moral turpitude by doing
away with the self-restraint and sense of obligation which have been
slowly built up through the ages. We must bring them to a moral level
by raising the lower standard, not by depressing the high. It is idle
to prattle against the “economic dependence” of woman upon man. In the
ideal household――an ideal which I believe, though very far from being
universally realized, is yet now more generally realized than ever
before――there is really complete economic interdependence, as well
as the high spiritual and moral interdependence which is more nearly
attained in happy wedlock, in a permanent partnership of love and duty,
than in any other relation of life which the world has yet seen. Rights
should be forfeited by neither partner; and duties should be shirked
by neither partner. The duty of the woman to be the child-bearer and
home-keeper is just as obvious, simple, and healthy as the duty of the
man to be the breadwinner and, if necessary, the soldier. Whenever
either the man or the woman loses the power or the will to perform
these obvious duties, the loss is irreparable, and whatever may be
the gain in ease, amiable softness, self-indulgent pleasure, or even
artistic and material achievement, the whole civilization is rotten and
must fall.
So with our industrial system. In many respects the wage system can
be bettered; but screaming about “wage slavery” is largely absurd;
at this moment, for instance, I am a “wage slave” of The Outlook.
Under certain conditions and in certain cases the co-operative system
can to a greater or less degree be substituted with advantage for,
or, more often, can be used to supplement, the wage system; but only
on condition of recognizing the widely different needs occasioned
by different conditions, which needs are so diverse that they must
sometimes be met in totally different ways.
We should do everything that can be done, by law or otherwise, to keep
the avenues of occupation, of employment, of work, of interest, so open
that there shall be, so far as it is humanly possible to achieve it,
a measurable equality of opportunity; an equality of opportunity for
each man to show the stuff that is in him. When it comes to reward, let
each man, within the limits set by a sound and far-sighted morality,
get what, by his energy, intelligence, thrift, courage, he is able
to get, with the opportunity open. We must set our faces against
privilege; just as much against the kind of privilege which would let
the shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother has earned as
against the privilege which allows the huge capitalist to take toll to
which he is not entitled. We stand for equality of opportunity, but not
for equality of reward unless there is also equality of service. If the
service is equal, let the reward be equal; but let the reward depend
on the service; and, mankind being composed as it is, there will be
inequality of service for a long time to come, no matter how great the
equality of opportunity may be; and just so long as there is inequality
of service it is eminently desirable that there should be inequality of
reward.
We recognize, and are bound to war against, the evils of to-day.
The remedies are partly economic and partly spiritual, partly to be
obtained by laws, and in greater part to be obtained by individual and
associated effort; for character is the vital matter, and character
cannot be created by law. These remedies include a religious and
moral teaching which shall increase the spirit of human brotherhood;
an educational system which shall train men for every form of useful
service――and which shall train us to prize common sense no less than
morality; such a division of the profits of industry as shall tend to
encourage intelligent and thrifty tool-users to become tool-owners;
and a government so strong, just, wise, and democratic that, neither
lagging too far behind nor pushing heedlessly in advance, it may do its
full share in promoting these ends.
Quack Cure-Alls for the Body Politic
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent
cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man
who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with
the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and
at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism, nor
unrestricted individualism, nor any other ism, will bring about the
millennium. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on
its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system
must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual,
and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn
partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to
develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who
make up the nation. No individual man could be kept healthy by living
in accordance with a plan which took cognizance only of one set of
muscles or set of organs; his health must depend upon his general
bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care which affects hundreds of
different organs according to their hundreds of needs. Society is, of
course, infinitely more complex than the human body. The influences
that tell upon it are countless; they are closely interwoven,
interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others. It is
pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe that some
one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with infinite
difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and haltings,
we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress something
can be done by continually striving to improve the social system, now
here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute effort
for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come to each
individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the attainment
of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must represent the
struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown not merely in
the dealings of each of us within the realm of the State, but even
more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate realm of the
family; for the life of the State rests and must ever rest upon the
life of the family and the neighborhood.
The Japanese Question
There are certain elementary principles all of which should be kept
steadily in view if a nation wishes to act justly both by itself and by
others. It must insist upon what is necessary for its own healthy life,
and this even at the cost of a possible clash; but this insistence on
what is due to itself should always be accompanied by all possible
courtesy to and fair dealing with others.
These are the principles upon which the people of the United States
should act as regards the question of the immigration of the Japanese
into this country. The Japanese are a highly civilized people of
extraordinary military, artistic, and industrial development; they are
proud, warlike, and sensitive. I believe that our people have, what I
personally certainly have, a profound and hearty admiration for them;
an admiration for their great deeds and great qualities, an ungrudging
respect for their national character. But this admiration and respect
is accompanied by the firm conviction that it is not for the advantage
of either people that emigrants from either country should settle in
mass in the other country. The understanding between the two countries
on this point should be on a basis of entire mutuality, and therefore
on a basis which will preserve unimpaired the self-respect of each
country, and permit each to continue to feel friendly good will for
the other. Japan would certainly object to the incoming of masses of
American farmers, laborers, and small traders; indeed, the Japanese
would object to this at least as strongly as the men of the Pacific
Coast and Rocky Mountain States object to the incoming in mass of
Japanese workmen, agricultural laborers, and men engaged in small
trades. The Japanese certainly object to Americans acquiring land in
Japan at least as much as the Americans of the far Western States
object to the Japanese acquiring land on our soil. The Americans who
go to Japan and the Japanese who come to America should be of the same
general class――that is, they should be travelers, students, teachers,
scientific investigators, men engaged in international business, men
sojourning in the land for pleasure or study. As long as the emigration
from each side is limited to classes such as these, there will be no
settlement in mass, and therefore no difficulty. Wherever there is
settlement in mass――that is, wherever there is a large immigration of
urban or agricultural laborers, or of people engaged in small local
business of any kind――there is sure to be friction. It is against
the interests of both nations that such unrestricted immigration or
settlement in mass should be allowed as regards either nation. This
is the cardinal fact in the situation; it should be freely recognized
by both countries, and can be accepted by each not only without the
slightest loss of self-respect, but with the certainty that its
acceptance will tend to preserve mutual respect and friendliness.
But in achieving this policy we should bear steadily in mind that it
is our duty to combine the maximum of efficiency with the minimum
of offensiveness. Only the National Government can carry out such
a policy effectively, and the surest way to do harm is for State,
municipal, or other local governments to pass laws which would be
ineffective to obtain the real object and yet would produce intense
irritation. The best of all possible ways in which to achieve the
object is that which the governments of the two countries have now
by common agreement adopted; for the Japanese Government has on its
own initiative and of its own accord undertaken to prevent the coming
hither in any appreciable numbers of Japanese of the classes to which
I have referred. This agreement during the last year or thereabouts
has worked so well that actually more Japanese have left the country
than have come into it, and there has therefore been a diminution of
their numbers. If this continues, all difficulties will cease without
the need of further action, whether by treaty or by legislation. On the
one hand, it is for the common interest of both countries that Japan
should effectively and rigorously carry out this policy. On the other
hand, it is not only the interest but the duty of America to take no
further action until it can be seen whether this policy is successful;
and this is just as wise, just as incumbent on us, whether we do or
do not believe that it will be successful. The success of the policy
must be gauged by its actual results; that is, by the extent to which
it arrests the immigration of large bodies of Japanese. If the Japanese
Government proves unable to carry its policy through, then undoubtedly
this Government, by treaty or by legislation, must protect itself and
secure the desired result on its own initiative. But in such a case it
would be doubly incumbent upon us to take the action in the way that
would provoke the least possible friction and cause the least possible
hard feeling. Moreover, we should make it evident that the recognition
of the fact that it is to the interest of both races that the masses
of both races should be kept apart is in no way incompatible with the
heartiest feelings of mutual respect and admiration between the two
races.
The fact that all really patriotic and far-sighted Americans insist
that hand in hand with a policy of good will toward foreign nations
should go the policy of the upbuilding of our navy is often interpreted
by well-meaning but short-sighted men as being a threat toward other
nations, or as being provocative of war. Of the two assumptions the
first is utterly unwarranted, and the second is the direct reverse of
the truth. We have the right to say, for instance, what immigrants
shall come to our own shores; but we are powerless to enforce this
right against any nation that chooses to disregard our wishes, unless
we continue to build up and maintain a first-class fighting navy.
The professional peace advocate who wishes us to stop building up
our navy is, in reality, seeking to put us in a position where we
would be absolutely at the mercy of any other nation that happened to
wish to disregard our desires to control the immigration that comes
to our shores, to protect our own interests in the Panama Canal, to
protect our own citizens abroad, or to take any stand whatever either
for our own international honor or in the interest of international
righteousness. Moreover, those well-meaning but fatuous advocates of
peace who would try to prevent the upbuilding of our navy utterly
misread the temper of their countrymen. We Americans are ourselves
both proud and high-spirited, and we are not always by any means
far-sighted. If our honor or our interest were menaced by a foreign
power, this Nation would fight, wholly without regard to whether or not
its navy was efficient. In the event of a crisis arising, the peace
advocates who object to our building up the navy would be absolutely
powerless to prevent this country going to war. All they could do
would be to prevent its being successful in the war. A strong navy is
the surest guaranty of peace that America can have, and the cheapest
insurance against war that Uncle Sam can possibly pay.
Tolstoy
One of the comic features of the political campaign last fall was the
letter which Count Tolstoy wrote on behalf of Mr. Bryan. In this letter
Count Tolstoy advocated the election of Mr. Bryan on the ground that
he was the representative of the party of peace, of anti-militarism.
From the point of view of American politics, the incident possessed
no importance beyond furnishing material for the humorous columns of
the newspapers. But it had a certain real interest as indicating Count
Tolstoy’s worth as a moral guide. He advocated Mr. Bryan on the theory
that Mr. Bryan represented peace and anti-militarism. Now there was
but one point in the platform of either political party in 1908 which
contained any element of menace to the peace of the world. This was the
plank in the Bryanite platform which demanded the immediate exclusion
by law of all Asiatic laborers, and therefore of the Japanese. Coupled
with it was the utterly meaningless plank about the Navy, which was,
however, intended to convey the impression that we ought to have a
navy only for the defense of our coasts――that is, a merely “defensive”
navy, or, in other words, a quite worthless navy. Now I have shown
in a preceding editorial that at this present time there is neither
justification nor excuse for such a law――and this wholly without
regard to what the future may show. The exclusion plank in Mr. Bryan’s
platform represented merely an idle threat, a wanton insult, and it was
coupled with what was intended to be a declaration that the policy of
upbuilding the Navy, which has been so successfully carried on during
the past dozen years, would be abandoned. Any man of common sense,
therefore, ought to perceive the self-evident fact that the only menace
to peace which was contained in any possible action by the American
Republic was that contained in the election of Mr. Bryan and the
attempt to put into effect his platform. That Count Tolstoy did not see
this affords a curious illustration of his complete inability to face
facts; of his readiness to turn aside from the truth in the pursuit
of any phantom, however foolish; and of the utter fatuity of those who
treat him as a philosopher, whose philosophy should be, or could be,
translated into action.
Count Tolstoy is a man of genius, a great novelist. “War and Peace,”
“Anna Karénina,” “The Cossacks,” “Sebastopol,” are great books. As
a novelist he has added materially to the sum of production of his
generation. As a professional philosopher and moralist I doubt if his
influence has really been very extensive among men of action; of course
it has a certain weight among men who live only in the closet, in the
library; and among the high-minded men of this type, who, because of
their sheltered lives, naturally reject what is immoral, and do not
have to deal with what is fantastic, in Tolstoy’s teachings, it is
probable that the really lofty side of these teachings gives them a
certain sense of spiritual exaltation. But I have no question that
whatever little influence Tolstoy has exerted among men of action has
told, on the whole, for evil. I do not think his influence over men
of action has been great, for I think he has swayed or dominated only
the feeble folk and the fantastic folk. No man who possesses both
robust common sense and high ideals, and who strives to apply both
in actual living, is affected by Tolstoy’s teachings, save as he is
affected by the teachings of hundreds of other men in whose writings
there are occasional truths mixed with masses of what is commonplace
or erroneous. Strong men may gain something from Tolstoy’s moral
teachings, but only on condition that they are strong enough and sane
enough to be repelled by those parts of his teachings which are foolish
or immoral. Weak persons are hurt by the teachings. Still, I think that
the mere fact that these weak persons are influenced sufficiently to
be marred means that there was not in them a very great quantity of
potential usefulness to mar. In the United States we suffer from grave
moral dangers; but they are for the most part dangers which Tolstoy
would neither perceive nor know how to combat. Moreover, the real and
dreadful evils which do in fact share in his denunciation of an attack
upon both good and evil are usually not evils which are of much moment
among us. On the other hand, we are not liable to certain kinds of
wickedness which there is real danger of his writings inculcating; for
it is a lamentable fact that, as is so often the case with a certain
type of mystical zealot, there is in him a dark streak which tells
of moral perversion. That side of his teachings which is partially
manifested in the revolting “Kreutzer Sonata” can do exceedingly little
damage in America, for it would appeal only to decadents; exactly as
it could have come only from a man who, however high he may stand in
certain respects, has in him certain dreadful qualities of the moral
pervert.
The usual effect of prolonged and excessive indulgence in Tolstoyism
on American disciples is comic rather than serious. One of these
disciples, for instance, not long ago wrote a book on American
municipal problems, which ascribed our ethical and social shortcomings
in municipal matters in part to the sin of “militarism.” Now the mind
of this particular writer in making such a statement was influenced
not in the least by what had actually occurred or was occurring in
our cities, but by one of Tolstoy’s theories which has no possible
bearing upon American life. Militarism is a real factor for good or for
evil in most European countries. In America it has not the smallest
effect one way or the other; it is a negligible quantity. There are
undoubtedly states of society where militarism is a grave evil, and
there are plenty of circumstances in which the prime duty of man may be
to strive against it. But it is not righteous war, not even war itself,
which is the absolute evil, the evil which is evil always and under
all circumstances. Militarism which takes the form of a police force,
municipal or national, may be the prime factor for upholding peace and
righteousness. Militarism is to be condemned or not purely according
to the conditions. So eating horse meat is in itself a mere matter of
taste; but the early Christian missionaries in Scandinavia found that
serious evil sprang from the custom of eating horse meat in honor of
Odin. It is literally true that our very grave municipal problems in
New York or Chicago have no more to do with militarism than with eating
the meat of horses that have been sacrificed to pagan deities; and
a crusade against one habit, as an element in municipal reform, is
just about as rational as would be a crusade against the other. Oliver
Wendell Holmes said that it had taken a century to remove the lark
from American literature; because the poets insisted upon writing, not
about the birds they saw, but about the birds they had read of in the
writings of other poets. Militarism as an evil in our social life is as
purely a figment of the imagination as the skylark in our literature.
Moreover, the fact that in spite of this total absence of militarism
there is so much that is evil in our life, so much need for reform,
ought to show persons who think that the destruction of militarism
would bring about the millennium how completely they lack the sense of
perspective.
Another disciple used to write poetry in defense of the Mahdi,
apparently under the vague impression that this also was a protest
against militarism and therefore in line with Tolstoy’s teachings――as
very possibly it was. Now, Mahdism was as hideous an exhibition
of bloodthirsty cruelty, governmental tyranny, corruption and
inefficiency, and homicidal religious fanaticism as the world has ever
seen. Its immediate result was to destroy over half the population in
the area where it held sway, and to bring the most dreadful degradation
and suffering to the remainder. It represented in the aggregate more
wickedness, more wrong-doing, more human suffering, than all the
wickedness, wrong-doing, and human suffering in all the Christian
communities put together during the same period. It was characteristic
of the fantastic perversion of morality which naturally results
from the serious acceptance of Tolstoy as a moral teacher that one
manifestation of this acceptance should have been a defense of Mahdism.
Of course when the Anglo-Egyptian army overthrew Mahdism it conferred a
boon upon all mankind, and most of all upon the wretched inhabitants of
the Sudan.
So much for Tolstoyism in America, the only place where I have studied
it in action, and where its effect, although insignificant for good,
has been not much more significant for evil, being absurd rather than
serious. As to the effect in Russia itself, I am not competent to
speak. But the history of the Duma proved in the most emphatic way
that the greatest danger to liberalism in Russia sprang from the fact
that the liberals were saturated with just such folly as that taught
by Tolstoy. The flat contradiction between his theory and practice in
such matters as his preaching concerning the relations of the sexes,
and also concerning private property――for of course it is an unlovely
thing to profit by the private property of one’s wife and children,
while affecting to cast it aside――is explicable only by one of two
very sad hypotheses, neither of which it is necessary here to discuss.
The important point is that his preaching is compounded of some very
beautiful and lofty sentiments, with much that is utterly fantastic,
and with some things that are grossly immoral. The Duma fell far short
of what its friends in other lands hoped for, just because it showed
these very same traits, and because it failed to develop the power for
practical common-sense work. There were plenty of members who could
utter the loftiest moral sentiments, sentiments quite as lofty as those
once uttered by Robespierre; but there was an insufficiency of members
able and willing to go to work in practical fashion, able and willing
to try to make society measurably better by cutting out the abuses that
could be cut out, and by starting things on the right road, instead of
insisting upon doing nothing unless they could immediately introduce
the millennium and reform all the abuses of society out of hand with
a jump. What was needed was a body of men like those who made our
Constitution; men accustomed to work with their fellows, accustomed to
compromise; men who clung to high ideals, but who were imbued with the
philosophy which Abraham Lincoln afterwards so strikingly exemplified,
and were content to take the best possible where the best absolute
could not be secured. This was the spirit of Washington and his
associates in one great crisis of our National life, of Lincoln and his
associates in the other great crisis. It is the only spirit from which
it will ever be possible to secure good results in a free country; and
it is the direct negation of Tolstoyism.
To minimize the chance of anything but willful misunderstanding, let
me repeat that Tolstoy is a great writer, a great novelist; that
the unconscious influence of his novels is probably, on the whole,
good, even disregarding their standing as works of art; that even
as a professional moralist and philosophical adviser of mankind in
religious matters he has some excellent theories and on some points
develops a noble and elevating teaching; but that taken as a whole,
and if generally diffused, his moral and philosophical teachings, so
far as they had any influence at all, would have an influence for bad;
partly because on certain points they teach downright immorality, but
much more because they tend to be both foolish and fantastic, and if
logically applied would mean the extinction of humanity in a generation.
A Southerner’s View of the South
It seems rather queer to go abroad and discover an American author. Two
books have appeared in England during the last year or two, named “The
Scar” and “The Scourge.” They have been a success, not only in England,
but on the Continent; for translations have appeared or are appearing
in German, French, and Russian. Yet they are by an American, Mr.
Warrington Dawson, of South Carolina; and they deal with localities,
questions, and types exclusively and typically American. It is not
very creditable to us that this American, writing with unusual power
of American scenes and problems, should have an exclusively European
audience.
Mr. Dawson’s stories are laid in the country districts and small towns
of Virginia. In each volume a Northerner, in the first a woman, in the
second a man, is thrown into intimate contact with the members of a
proud caste of provincial aristocrats, who have been slowly sinking
under the burden of grinding poverty, whose poverty-stricken lives
are both hardening and narrowing, but in whose strongly individualized
natures there dwell qualities and capacities of the highest kind.
It is in his studies of these native Southern whites――both men and
women, both those who are painfully struggling upwards and those whom
an iron fate is slowly forcing downwards――and in his studies of the
dark-skinned alien race standing so utterly aloof from them and so
intimately connected with them, that Mr. Dawson excels; and it is not
necessary to agree with all his conclusions in order to appreciate
the value of his work. But almost equally good is the study of the
Northerner who dwells South, who has made a real business success,
who is in his own fashion devoted to the interests of the people with
whom he has spent his life, but whom they at bottom never cease to
regard as an interloper; and Mr. Dawson is entirely just in showing how
ungenerous and unwarranted part of this attitude is, and, on the other
hand, the measure of justification which it has in the hard narrowness
that makes the intruder insist on trying to do good to the community
in many ways which represent what is either unnecessary or even
injurious.
I have no intention of writing a criticism of Mr. Dawson’s two books;
but it is worth while calling attention to the fact that this author,
who writes with power and interest of vital home matters, has his
critics and his audience abroad, but has neither critics nor audience
at home. He should have both.
The Thraldom of Names
It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names,
and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the
reverence for or antipathy toward a given name in order to achieve some
alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the history
of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The rule of
a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a
single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an
oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or
any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid
and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the
mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different
words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing
is necessary in order to advance the cause of “liberty,” while the
dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that
the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure “order.”
Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty”
at the one time, and the use of the word “order” at the other, and
ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny,
oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many
individuals, by a State or by a private corporation.
Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt
in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very
class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of
the Second Republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil
tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as
to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a
dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances
in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until
there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny and
all public order have disappeared together. The Second Empire in France
led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how
far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government as
the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it
imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did
not produce another violent reaction, but left the French Republic
standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be
ruled by a king as by a mob.
Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much
people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their
unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at
Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a
century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured,
or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set
of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the
name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the
other was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by
the direction of the Great Monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny
and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as
much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used
another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by
honest men.
We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching
and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the
men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin
gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger
from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore
be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social
problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought
lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved
democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle
course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We
shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar
middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist,
between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong
done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the
apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement
of the Eighth Commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”
First and foremost we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern exposure
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
a terror-struck defense of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
that we should wrest the control of the Government out of the hands of
rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
put the control of the Government into the hands of demagogues and
visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
would make no more difference that one was called individualism, and
the other collectivism, than it made in French history whether tyranny
was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a
Committee of National Safety, or of a King.
The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical,
are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of
the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his own
devices, he will utterly discredit the entire system of government by
individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will,
he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by
the State that any abuses connected with the untrammeled control of
all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We
cannot afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits.
It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual
initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that
we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our
complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the
functions of the State. It has been shown beyond power of refutation
that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction
of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism”
cannot be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see
that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy
buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted
and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may
be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private
monopoly if the State does not interfere at all, as it would be crushed
out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with everything
else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets of the
extreme Socialists.
In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very
reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they
combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing
with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own
which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade
the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential
both to the material and moral progress of the country that these
forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the
genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly
materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as
exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the
refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth.
What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an
English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr.
Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex
American character; it would have been marvelous if a stranger of his
slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to
put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately
after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):
“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left
wholly wanting. Little is done by the State. All is left to the
initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained
partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and
partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the
law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves
under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust
in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It
is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and
successful combinations to override the public interest. All such
corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears
almost a return to savagery. The defenselessness of individual liberty
against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to
oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to
ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be
bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion
should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon
corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious
as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members
in the legislative bodies――pocket Assemblymen, pocket Representatives,
pocket Senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial
progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless
greed on one side, and lawless brutality on the other――the outlook
frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or
embittering these antagonisms――still more, on the fortune of the people
in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get
dollars is the one end of life――it depends whether the future of the
United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster.
It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may
become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will
furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to
recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as
a modern business condition, the curious result will follow that all
power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average
man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the State took
absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big
corporations, each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all
competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as
dependent upon it as if the Government had assumed complete charge of
the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for
the Government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more
unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple
truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness in
the business world are either insincere, or blind to the facts, when
they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and
individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism;
save in a very few able and powerful men, who tend to become dictators
in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American
president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the
State to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable
result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who
is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete
control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which
alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his
fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the
great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much
as it would be crushed out by State control. The very reason why we
object to State ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative
and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the
reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control
in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the Nation as an
antidote to the movement for State Socialism. Those who advocate total
lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business
world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be
the deadening movement towards State Socialism.
There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially
the big corporations, in the industrial world, in the interest of
our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and
therefore it must be administered by executive officers, and not by
lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done, the agitation to increase
out of all measure the share of the Government in this work will
receive an enormous impetus. The movement for Government control of the
great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than
a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty.
On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in
the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small
means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the
peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the
mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge irresponsible
corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of Government
agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the
streets who wishes liberty from police interference.
But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to
learn, and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above.
It is not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the
one end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very
unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as
objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of
the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots;”
and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against
a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what
in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation
enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal
arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same
thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other.
That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same
eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other
to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the
first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his
own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children
and those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom
it is his duty to care, food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an
education, a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements,
and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit
them in their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has
reached this point, which of course will vary greatly under different
conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become
immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically
right, indeed I am tempted to say it is emphatically the first duty of
each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously phrased
it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first duty
to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great deal;
and after the living has been earned, getting dollars should come far
behind many other duties.
Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in
this country where assault is made not upon evil wherever found, but
simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class.
The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is
everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is
quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with
raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an
exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper
whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn,
or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient
manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which
by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred
against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against
every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and
ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or
a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either
profligacy, or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance.
This country cannot afford to let its conscience grow warped and
twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions.
We must draw the line not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We
must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether
he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the
man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done
in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence
among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and
greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.
Give Me Neither Poverty Nor Riches
In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the
smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality
of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know
everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those
who preach and practice a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and
who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the
individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn
from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which
teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches.
Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side
in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted
if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of
great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is
regulated in the interest of the whole community.
The movement which has become so strong during the past few years
to secure on behalf of the Nation both an adequate supervision of
and an effective taxation of vast fortunes, so far as their business
use is concerned, is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen
discontent, restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution,
by an aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our
troubles and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men
wish who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which
would thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching
damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and
forceful men who desire to reform matters, from a legitimate object,
into the channel of bitter and destructive agitation. The reader of
Prince Kropotkin’s Memoirs must be struck by the damage wrought to
Russia by the unwise opponents of all reform, who, by opposing every
sensible movement for betterment, turned the energies of the young men
who under happier conditions would have worked for rational betterment
into the channels of a useless and destructive revolutionary movement.
The multimillionaire is not _per se_ a healthy development in this
country. If his fortune rests on a basis of wrong-doing, he is a far
more dangerous criminal than any of the ordinary types of criminals
can possibly be. If his fortune is the result of great service
rendered, well and good; he deserves respect and reward for such
service――although we must remember to pay our homage to the service
itself, and not to the fortune which is the mere reward of the service;
but when his fortune is passed on to some one else, who has not
rendered the service, then the Nation should impose a heavily graded
progressive inheritance tax, a singularly wise and unobjectionable kind
of tax. It would be a particularly good thing if the tax bore heaviest
on absentees.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
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