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Title: Drift and mastery
an attempt to diagnose the current unrest
Author: Walter Lippmann
Release date: September 11, 2026 [eBook #79553]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79553
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRIFT AND MASTERY ***
DRIFT AND MASTERY
AN ATTEMPT
TO DIAGNOSE THE CURRENT UNREST
BY
WALTER LIPPMANN
_“Men find themselves working and thinking
and feeling in relation to an environment, which
... is without precedent in the history of the
world.”_
--_Graham Wallas, “The Great Society.”_
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1914
_Copyright 1914 by
Mitchell Kennerley_
CONTENTS
Introduction
_Page xv_
Democracy is a way of life, not simply a revolt against tyrants--Rock
of Ages blasted for us--Rebel program is stated--Chaos of a new
freedom--Need for a vision of what is to come out of unrest--but not an
inclusive utopia--on being practical--Aim of the book.
PART I
Chapter I
THE THEMES OF MUCKRAKING
_Page 1_
American prejudice to-day in favor of accusation--Myths of
muckraking--why did people believe?--Honeymoon period over--Acts
called corrupt--German pedant required to classify them--but picture
would be false--New necessities and new expectations--Themes of
muckraking--why were politicians attacked?--Graft defined--Conservative
or corrupt--Rising price of corruption--Public standards applied
to business--the Persimmon family--developing criticism of private
business.
Chapter II
NEW INCENTIVES
_Page 27_
Profiteering and the professions--Falling prestige of the Economic
Man--Fencing off profit--Are new motives appearing?--General
change of social scale--The Great Industry requires unheard of
equipment--Brandeis against big business--How big?--Science of
administration--Federal business--Little monarchs--Salaried
men--The revolution in business incentives--Professional business
men--Civilizing the Economic Man.
Chapter III
THE MAGIC OF PROPERTY
_Page 50_
An empty shrine--The feebleness of shareholding--Absentee and
transient--Investing a profession--The “money power”--The
rugged virtues of private property--Qualifications for
shareholding--Impotence--Divorce from management--Private property
in trusts an uncertain form of money lending--Public ownership not a
question of private property--but of administration--The fight for the
control of industry.
Chapter IV
CAVEAT EMPTOR
_Page 66_
Consumer ignorant and helpless--Advertising--Buying an intricate
task--Competition makes it no easier--Government aid--“All
the people”--Votes for women--Consumers’ controls--Business
anarchy--Focussing attention--Revolutionary standards.
Chapter V
A KEY TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
_Page 77_
Employers not worried about labor’s freedom--Richesse oblige--Organized
obstruction--Unions and a servile class--Encroachment of democracy upon
business--Pioneering--The scab--Preliminaries of civilization--When
harmony can begin--Power vs. insurrection--I. W. W.--Revolt rather
than solidarity--“Conscious minority”--Power and peace--The
unorganizable--Being interested in efficiency--Having an interest--A
struggle for power--Share of control--Others who must share--Unions as
experiments in government--The politics of industry--Present realities.
Chapter VI
THE FUNDS OF PROGRESS
_Page 101_
How to finance the costs of progress--What is unearned income?--Latent
panic--The unproductive--Inefficient--Antiquated--Landlords--
Capitalists--No blanket case--The criterion is use--Destroying
incentive--Misapplied incentives to-day--Pressure to improve business--
Commercial adventurers--Necessity and invention--Opportunity of
professional business man--Industrial waste--Wealth exists to pay for
democracy.
Chapter VII
“A NATION OF VILLAGERS”
--_Bernard Shaw._
_Page 121_
Hieroglyphics and the Sherman Act--Systematic enforcement, not
desultory pecking--Anti-trust agitation to preserve commercialism--High
value of lawbreaking--Whipping the trusts--Revolution in American
village life--Bryan as conservative--Wilson--Conflict of head
and heart--His new formula--His old ideal--“The man on the
make”--A halo for small business--What isn’t mentioned in the New
Freedom--Amending the New Freedom--A task for Solomon--The appearance
of magic--Democratic Party and village culture--Accepting the new scale
of endeavor--The untried--Need for a collective mind--Really a deus ex
machina--A problem for human beings alone.
PART II
Chapter VIII
A BIG WORLD AND LITTLE MEN
_Page 149_
The uprooted person--Hunting up the peasants--Slang--Fashions--Real
novelty--Unsettled relations--Precedent made for a different
environment--Out-of-kilter--Breakdown of loyalties--Organized
gossip--Institutions made inconsistent--Schools must educate
for novelty--Churches expected to produce interpretations of
novelty--Courts expected to deal with social change--Political
structure not fitted to modern functions--Decline of geographical
influences--Embryonic governments--International affairs
elude democracy--Can there be a “solution” of the industrial
question?--No better order by decree--Complexity of democratic
undertaking--Disruption in the soul of man.
Chapter IX
DRIFT
_Page 172_
Evil as a lapse from grace--“Oblivescence of the disagreeable”--A
Golden Age--The created past--Thought unnecessary and happiness
inevitable--The salt of the earth--Paradise ahead--Wild dreams and
unimportant deeds--Darlings of evolution--Progressivism by the
calendar--Fatalism in the socialist movement--Panaceas--So much good in
everything--The aliases of drift--Chronic rebellion--Cutting off from
central authority--Protestantism, Romanticism, Democracy--The modern
artist--Loss of certainty--The classicist dream--A diagnosis--Liberty
the beginning of real tasks.
Chapter X
THE ROCK OF AGES
_Page 198_
Opposite conclusions from the same principle--Absolutism as a practical
force--Efficiency of mystics--The search for assurance--Constructive
psychology of the Catholic Church--Spiritual exercises that create
dependence--Decay of authority--We have more responsibility than
capacity--Authority cannot survive--Small comfort in liberalism--The
immigrant as type of the modern man--Our inner chaos.
PART III
Chapter XI
A NOTE ON THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
_Page 213_
Liberty not an unmixed blessing--Rights--Women as routineers--Inventing
a new life--Academic dispute about inferiority--Women fight more than
tradition--They fight their own bewilderment--“Single standard” with
two meanings--The amateur male--Economic independence--Upper class
women--The expanding home--Specializing--Earning money--Marrying
to function--Women as enemies of co-operation--Influence of
parents--Aggravating the property instinct--Sense of public
property--About separating parent and child--The superstitious
nursery--Monogamy and the sexual anarchists--The family and the
spread of intelligence--Promiscuity--The “lunatic fringe”--Sexual
sincerity--The promise of women’s awakening.
Chapter XII
BOGEYS
_Page 240_
Waiting for the heavens to fall--Laying a ghost--Where phantoms
live--Terror calls for authority--The regiment of bogeys--Sense
of sin--Purity--Class feeling--Unconventionality--Losing one’s
job--Death--Reputation--Exorcising bogeys and disciplining love of
reality.
Chapter XIII
POVERTY, CHASTITY, OBEDIENCE
_Page 251_
Not the ideals of self government--The democratic substitutes--Surplus
of Wealth--A social minimum--Chastity and lust of the spirit--Realism
about sex--Modern intellect pragmatic--Difficulty of judging by
results--The necessary effort.
Chapter XIV
MASTERY
_Page 264_
Reverence for tradition and social cohesion--Conflicting
traditions--Loyalty to “children’s land”--Common purpose instead of
common tradition--The dreaming quality of life--Reflection--Conscious
living--The return to the unconscious--Intention--Clumsy
meddling--Criticizing the scientific mind--Inner sanctuary of human
power--Emotion of futurity--Science the discipline of democracy.
Chapter XV
MODERN COMMUNION
_Page 277_
What binds together the modern effort?--Need of communion--Focussing
interest--Example of the scientific world--Beginnings of common
method--Spiritual values--Santayana quoted--Discipline and
coöperation--Morality--“State-making” dream--Signs.
Chapter XVI
FACT AND FANCY
_Page 289_
A chilly existence--Hard-headed people may be fantastic--Trying
to generalize--William James’s rule--Science as enemy of life’s
variety--Science and religious dogma--Science in the Catholic
Church--Blindness of young science--New value of tradition--Fear of the
past--The past as emancipator--History as cure for barren hopes--Vision
has an instrument--Science not a passionless pursuit--The rôle of
fantasy--In political economy: Adam Smith, Marx; in leaders: Wilson,
Haywood--The source of ideas--Criticism of desire--The utopias--Dream
of the actual--Visionary and philistine--Creative imagination--Its
severity--Mastery a new turn in human culture--Reaction into fantasy or
routine--The end of rebellion--Our vision far from adequate.
INTRODUCTION
In the early months of 1914 widespread unemployment gave the anarchists
in New York City an unusual opportunity for agitation. The newspapers
and the police became hysterical, men were clubbed and arrested on
the slightest provocation, meetings were dispersed. The issue was
shifted, of course, from unemployment to the elementary rights of free
speech and assemblage. Then suddenly, the city administration, acting
through a new police commissioner, took the matter in hand, suppressed
official lawlessness, and guaranteed the men who were conducting the
agitation their full rights. This had a most disconcerting effect on
the anarchists. They were suddenly stripped of all the dramatic effect
that belongs to a clash with the police. They had to go back to the
real issue of unemployment, and give some message to the men who had
been following them. But they had no message to give: they knew what
they were against but not what they were for, and their intellectual
situation was as uncomfortable as one of those bad dreams in which you
find yourself half-clothed in a public place.
Without a tyrant to attack an immature democracy is always somewhat
bewildered. Yet we have to face the fact in America that what
thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious
contrivance of the plutocracy, but the faltering method, the distracted
soul, and the murky vision of what we call grandiloquently the will of
the people. If we flounder, it is not because the old order is strong,
but because the new one is weak. Democracy is more than the absence of
czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of
life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do
not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is
not followed by a coöperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman
is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a
master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal
device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only
the form of tyranny, for like Christian’s sword, democracy is a weapon
in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it;
in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.
The issues that we face are very different from those of the last
century and a half. The difference, I think, might be summed up
roughly this way: those who went before inherited a conservatism and
overthrew it; we inherit freedom, and have to use it. The sanctity of
property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste, the dogma of sin,
obedience to authority,--the rock of ages, in brief, has been blasted
for us. Those who are young to-day are born into a world in which the
foundations of the older order survive only as habits or by default.
So Americans can carry through their purposes when they have them. If
the standpatter is still powerful amongst us it is because we have not
learned to use our power, and direct it to fruitful ends. The American
conservative, it seems to me, fills the vacuum where democratic purpose
should be.
So far as we are concerned, then, the case is made out against
absolutism, commercial oligarchy, and unquestioned creeds. _The rebel
program is stated._ Scientific invention and blind social currents
have made the old authority impossible in fact, the artillery fire
of the iconoclasts has shattered its prestige. We inherit a rebel
tradition. The dominant forces in our world are not the sacredness
of property, nor the intellectual leadership of the priest; they are
not the divinity of the constitution, the glory of industrial push,
Victorian sentiment, New England respectability, the Republican Party,
or John D. Rockefeller. Our time, of course, believes in change. The
adjective “progressive” is what we like, and the word “new,” be it the
New Nationalism of Roosevelt, the New Freedom of Wilson, or the New
Socialism of the syndicalists. The conservatives are more lonely than
the pioneers, for almost any prophet to-day can have disciples. The
leading thought of our world has ceased to regard commercialism either
as permanent or desirable, and the only real question among intelligent
people is how business methods are to be altered, not whether they
are to be altered. For no one, unafflicted with invincible ignorance,
desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form.
The business man has stepped down from his shrine; he is no longer an
oracle whose opinion on religion, science, and education is listened to
dumbly as the valuable byproduct of a paying business. We have scotched
the romance of success. In the emerging morality the husband is not
regarded as the proprietor of his wife, nor the parents as autocrats
over the children. We are met by women who are “emancipated”; for what
we hardly know. We are not stifled by a classical tradition in art: in
fact artists to-day are somewhat stunned by the rarefied atmosphere of
their freedom. There is a wide agreement among thinking people that the
body is not a filthy thing, and that to implant in a child the sense of
sin is a poor preparation for a temperate life.
The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice,
but against the chaos of a new freedom.
This chaos is our real problem. So if the younger critics are to meet
the issues of their generation they must give their attention, not so
much to the evils of authority, as to the weaknesses of democracy. But
how is a man to go about doing such a task? He faces an enormously
complicated world, full of stirring and confusion and ferment. He hears
of movements and agitations, criticisms and reforms, knows people who
are devoted to “causes,” feels angry or hopeful at different times,
goes to meetings, reads radical books, and accumulates a sense of
uneasiness and pending change.
He can’t, however, live with any meaning unless he formulates for
himself a vision of what is to come out of the unrest. I have tried in
this book to sketch such a vision for myself. At first thought it must
seem an absurdly presumptuous task. But it is a task that everyone has
to attempt if he is to take part in the work of his time. For in so far
as we can direct the future at all, we shall do it by laying what we
see against what other people see.
This doesn’t mean the constructing of utopias. The kind of vision
which will be fruitful to democratic life is one that is made out of
latent promise in the actual world. There is a future contained in the
trust and the union, the new status of women, and the moral texture of
democracy. It is a future that can in a measure be foreseen and bent
somewhat nearer to our hopes. A knowledge of it gives a sanction to
our efforts, a part in a larger career, and an invaluable sense of
our direction. We make our vision, and hold it ready for any amendment
that experience suggests. It is not a fixed picture, a row of shiny
ideals which we can exhibit to mankind, and say: Achieve these or be
damned. All we can do is to search the world as we find it, extricate
the forces that seem to move it, and surround them with criticism
and suggestion. Such a vision will inevitably reveal the bias of its
author; that is to say it will be a human hypothesis, not an oracular
revelation. But if the hypothesis is honest and alive it should cast a
little light upon our chaos. It should help us to cease revolving in
the mere routine of the present or floating in a private utopia. For a
vision of latent hope would be woven of vigorous strands; it would be
concentrated on the crucial points of contemporary life, on that living
zone where the present is passing into the future. It is the region
where thought and action count. Too far ahead there is nothing but
your dream; just behind, there is nothing but your memory. But in the
unfolding present, man can be creative if his vision is gathered from
the promise of actual things.
The day is past, I believe, when anybody can pretend to have laid down
an inclusive or a final analysis of the democratic problem. Everyone
is compelled to omit infinitely more than he can deal with; everyone
is compelled to meet the fact that a democratic vision must be made by
the progressive collaboration of many people. Thus I have touched upon
the industrial problem at certain points that seem to me of outstanding
importance, but there are vast sections and phases of industrial
enterprise that pass unnoticed. The points I have raised are big in the
world I happen to live in, but obviously they are not the whole world.
It is necessary, also, to inquire how “practical” you can be in a
book of generalizations. That amounts to asking how detailed you can
be. Well, it is impossible when you mention a minimum wage law, for
example, to append a draft of the bill and a concrete set of rules for
its administration. In human problems especially there is a vagueness
which no one can escape entirely. Even the most voluminous study in
three volumes of some legal question does not meet at every point the
actual difficulties of the lawyer in a particular case. Generalization
is always rough, and never entirely accurate. But it can be useful if
it is made with a sense of responsibility to action. I have tried,
therefore, to avoid gratuitously fine sentiments; I have tried to
suggest nothing that with the information at my command doesn’t seem at
least probable.
This book, then, is an attempt to diagnose the current unrest and to
arrive at some sense of what democracy implies. It begins with the
obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery.
I have tried in the essays that follow to enter the American problem
at a few significant points in order to trace a little of the
immense suggestion that radiates from them. I hope the book will
leave the reader, as it does me, with a sense of the varied talents
and opportunities, powers and organizations that may contribute to a
conscious revolution. I have not been able to convince myself that one
policy, one party, one class, or one set of tactics, is as fertile as
human need.
It would be very easy if such a belief were possible. It would save
time and energy and no end of grubbing: just to keep on repeating what
you’ve learnt, eloquent, supremely confident, with the issues clean, a
good fight and an inevitable triumph: Marx, or Lincoln, or Jefferson
with you always as guide, counsellor and friend. All the thinking done
by troubled dead men for the cocksure living; no class to consider but
your own; no work that counts but yours; every party but your party
composed of fools and rascals; only a formula to accept and a specific
fight to win,--it would be easy. It might work on the moon.
W. L.
July 17, 1914.
46 East 80th Street,
New York City.
DRIFT AND MASTERY
PART I
CHAPTER I
The Themes of Muckraking
There is in America to-day a distinct prejudice in favor of those who
make the accusations. Thus if you announced that John D. Rockefeller
was going to vote the Republican ticket it would be regarded at once
as a triumph for the Democrats. Something has happened to our notions
of success: no political party these days enjoys publishing the names
of its campaign contributors, if those names belong to the pillars
of society. The mere statement that George W. Perkins is an active
Progressive has put the whole party somewhat on the defensive. And
there is more than sarcasm in the statement of the New York Times
Annalist that:
“If it be true that the less bankers have to do with a scheme of
banking and currency reform the more acceptable it will be to the
people, it follows that the Administration’s Currency Bill ... must
command popular admiration.”
You have only to write an article about some piece of corruption in
order to find yourself the target of innumerable correspondents,
urging you to publish their wrongs. The sense of conspiracy and secret
scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. “Big Business,” and its
ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy
of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain
of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where
the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an
alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew--all
the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil
intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes
of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a
barbarous myth. I know a socialist who seriously believes that the
study of eugenics is a Wall Street scheme for sterilizing working-class
leaders. And the cartoons which pictured Morgan sitting arrogantly
in a chariot drawn by the American people in a harness of ticker
tape,--these are not so much caricatures as pictures of what no end
of fairly sane people believe. Not once but twenty times have I been
told confidentially of a nation-wide scheme by financiers to suppress
every radical and progressive periodical. But even though the most
intelligent muckrakers have always insisted that the picture was
absurd, it remains to this day a very widespread belief. I remember how
often Lincoln Steffens used to deplore the frightened literalness with
which some of his articles were taken. One day in the country he and
I were walking the railroad track. The ties, of course, are not well
spaced for an ordinary stride, and I complained about it. “You see,”
said Mr. Steffens with mock obviousness, “Morgan controls the New Haven
and he prefers to make the people ride.”
Now it is not very illuminating to say that this smear of suspicion
has been worked up by the muckrakers. If business and politics really
served American need, you could never induce people to believe so many
accusations against them. It is said, also, that the muckrakers played
for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact
that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most
important revelation of the whole campaign.
There is no other way of explaining the quick approval which the
muckrakers won. They weren’t voices crying in a wilderness, or lonely
prophets who were stoned. They demanded a hearing; it was granted.
They asked for belief; they were believed. They cried that something
should be done and there was every appearance of action. There must
have been real causes for dissatisfaction, or the land notorious for
its worship of success would not have turned so savagely upon those
who had achieved it. A happy husband will endure almost anything, but
an unhappy one is capable of flying into a rage if his carpet-slippers
are not in the right place. For America, the willingness to believe
the worst was a strange development in the face of its traditional
optimism, a sign perhaps that the honeymoon was over. For muckraking
flared up at about the time when land was no longer freely available
and large scale industry had begun to throw vast questions across the
horizon. It came when success had ceased to be easily possible for
everyone.
The muckrakers spoke to a public willing to recognize as corrupt an
incredibly varied assortment of conventional acts. That is why there
is nothing mysterious or romantic about the business of exposure,--no
putting on of false hair, breaking into letter-files at midnight,
hypnotizing financiers, or listening at keyholes. The stories of graft,
written and unwritten, are literally innumerable. Often muckraking
consists merely in dressing up a public document with rhetoric and
pictures, translating a court record into journalese, or writing the
complaints of a minority stockholder, a dislodged politician, or a boss
gone “soft.” No journalist need suffer from a want of material.
Now in writing this chapter I started out to visualize this material
in systematic and scholarly fashion by making a list of the graft
revelations in the last ten years. I wished for some quantitative sense
of the number and kinds of act that are called corrupt. But I found
myself trying to classify the industrial, financial, political, foreign
and social relations of the United States, with hundreds of sub-heads,
and a thousand gradations of credibility and exaggeration. It was an
impossible task. The popular press of America is enormous, and for
years it has been filled with “probes” and “amazing revelations.” And
how is a person to classify, say, the impeachment of a Tammany governor
by a Tammany legislature? A mere list of investigations would fill this
book, and I abandoned the attempt with the mental reservation that if
anyone really desired that kind of proof, a few German scholars, young
and in perfect health, should be imported to furnish it.
They could draw up a picture to stagger even a jaded American. Suppose
they began their encyclopedia with the adulteration of foods. There
would follow a neat little volume on the aliases of coffee. The story
of meat would help the vegetarians till the volume on canned foods
appeared. Milk would curdle the blood, bread and butter would raise a
scandal, candy,--the volume would have to be suppressed. If photographs
could convey odors the study of restaurants might be done without
words. The account of patent medicines, quack doctors, beauty parlors,
mining schemes, loan sharks, shyster lawyers, all this riff-raff and
fraud in the cesspool of commercialism would make unendurable reading.
You would rush to the window, cursing the German pedants, grateful for
a breath of that air which filters through in spite of the unenforced
smoke ordinance of your city.
But the story would proceed. Think of your state of mind after you had
read all about the methods of drummers, advertising agents, lobbyists,
publicity men, after you knew adulteration of every description, and
had learned the actual motives and history of political conferences,
of caucuses, and consultations with the boss; suppose you understood
the underground history of legislatures, the miscarriages of justice,
the relations of the police to vice and crime, of newspapers to
advertisers and wealthy citizens, of trade union leaders to their
unions, the whole fetid story of the war between manufacturers and
labor organizations. A study of the public domain in America would
employ a staff of investigators. What railroads have done to the
public, to their employees, what directors do to the stockholders and
the property, the quantitative record of broken trust, the relation of
bankers to the prosperity of business enterprise, of stock gamblers
to capitalization,--taking merely all that is known and could be
illustrated, summed up and seen at once, what a picture it would make.
And yet such a picture would be false and inept. For certainly there
must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground
beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These
charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered
radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we
condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional
acts of twenty years ago, it’s because we have developed new
necessities and new expectations.
They are the clue to the clouds of accusation which hang over American
life. You cannot go very far by reiterating that public officials are
corrupt, that business men break the law. The unbribed official and the
law-abiding business man are not ideals that will hold the imagination
very long. And that is why the earlier kind of muckraking exhausted
itself. There came a time when the search for not-dishonest men ceased
to be interesting. We all know now what tepid failures were those
first opponents of corruption, the men whose only claim to distinction
was that they had done no legal wrong. For without a vivid sense of
what politics and business might be, you cannot wage a very fruitful
campaign.
Now if you study the chief themes of muckraking I think it is possible
to see the outlines of what America has come to expect.
The first wave of exposure insisted upon the dishonesty of politicians.
Close upon it came widespread attack upon big business men, who were
charged with bribing officials and ruining their competitors. Soon
another theme appeared: big business men were accused of grafting
upon the big corporations which they controlled. We are entering upon
another period now: not alone big business, but all business and
farming too, are being criticized for inefficiency, for poor product,
and for exploitation of employees.
This classification is, of course, a very rough one. It would be easy
enough to dispute it, for the details are endlessly complicated and
the exceptions may appear very large to some people. But I think,
nevertheless, that this classification does no essential violence to
the facts. It doesn’t matter for my purposes that some communities
are still in what I call the first period, while others are in the
third. For a nation like ours doesn’t advance at the same rate
everywhere. All I mean to suggest is that popular muckraking in the
last decade has shifted its interest in something like this order:
First, to the corruption of aldermen and mayors and public servants
by the boss acting for a commercial interest, and to the business
methods of those who built up the trusts. Then, muckraking turned,
and began to talk about the milking of railroads by banks, and of
one corporation by another. This period laid great emphasis on the
“interlocking directorate.” Now, muckraking is fastening upon the
waste in management, upon working conditions as in the Steel Mills or
at Lawrence, or upon the quality of service rendered by the larger
corporations. These have been the big themes.
Why should they have been? Why, to begin with, should politicians
have been attacked so fiercely? Some people would say flatly:
because politicians were dishonest. Yet that is an utterly unfounded
generalization. The morals of politicians cannot by any stretch of the
imagination be described as exceptionally bad. Politicians were on the
make. To be sure. But who in this sunny land isn’t? They gave their
relatives and friends pleasant positions. What father doesn’t do that
for his son if he can, and with every feeling of righteousness? They
helped their friends, they were loyal to those who had helped them:
who will say that in private life these are not admirable virtues?
And what were the typical grafts in politics--the grafts for which we
tried to send politicians to jail? The city contracts for work, and the
public official is in league with the contractor; but railroads also
contract for work, and corporation officials are at least as frequently
as politicians, financially interested in the wrong side of the deal.
The city buys real estate, and the city official manages to buy it from
himself or his friends. But railroad directors have been known to sell
their property to the road they govern.
We can see, I think, what people meant by the word graft. They did
not mean robbery. It is rather confused rhetoric to call a grafter a
thief. His crime is not that he filches money from the safe but that
he betrays a trust. The grafter is a man whose loyalty is divided and
whose motives are mixed. A lawyer who takes a fee from both sides in
some case; a public official who serves a private interest; a railroad
director who is also a director in the supply company; a policeman
in league with outlawed vice: those are the relationships which the
American people denounce as “corrupt.” The attempt to serve at the same
time two antagonistic interests is what constitutes “corruption.”
The crime is serious in proportion to the degree of loyalty that
we expect. A President of the United States who showed himself too
friendly to some private interest would be denounced, though he may
not have made one cent out of the friendship. But where we have not
yet come to expect much loyalty we do very little muckraking. So if
you inquired into the ethics of the buyer in almost any manufacturing
house, you would find him doing things daily that would land the
purchasing agent of a city in jail. Who regards it as especially
corrupt if the selling firm “treats” the buyer, gives him or her a
“present,” perhaps a commission, or at least a “good time”? American
life is saturated with the very relationship which in politics we call
corrupt. The demand for a rake-off penetrates to the kitchen where a
sophisticated cook expects a commission from the butcher, and tampers
with the meat if it is refused; you can find it in the garage where
the chauffeur has an understanding about the purchase of supplies; it
extends to the golf caddie who regards a “lost” ball as his property
and proceeds to sell it to the next man for half the original cost,--it
extends to the man who buys that ball; and it ramifies into the
professions when doctors receive commissions from specialists for
sending patients to them; it saturates the work-a-day world with tips
and fees and “putting you on to a good thing” and “letting you in on
the ground floor.” But in the politician it is mercilessly condemned.
That is because we expect more of the politician. We say in effect that
no public servant must allow himself to follow the economic habits of
his countrymen. The corrupt politician is he who brings into public
service the traditions of a private career. Perhaps that is a cynical
reflection. I do not know how to alter it. When I hear politicians talk
“reform,” I know they are advocating something which most drummers on
the road would regard as the scruples of a prig, and I know that when
business men in a smoking-room are frank, they are taking for granted
acts which in a politician we should call criminal.
For the average American will condemn in an alderman what in his
partner he would consider reason for opening a bottle of champagne. In
literal truth the politician is attacked for displaying the morality
of his constituents. You might if you didn’t understand the current
revolution, consider that hypocrisy. It isn’t: it is one of the hopeful
signs of the age. For it means that unconsciously men regard some of
the interests of life as too important for the intrusion of commercial
ethics.
Run a government to-day, with the same motives and vision that you run
a dry goods store, and watch for the activity of the muckrakers. Pursue
in the post office the methods which made you a founder of colleges,
you will be grateful for a kind word from Mr. Lorimer. Poor as they
are, the standards of public life are so much more social than those
of business that financiers who enter politics regard themselves as
philanthropists. The amount of work and worry without reward is almost
beyond the comprehension of the man whose every act is measured in
profit and loss. The money to be accumulated in politics even by the
cynically corrupt is so small by comparison that able men on the make
go into politics only when their motives are mixed with ambition, a
touch of idealism, vanity, or an imaginative notion of success.
But the fact that a public official took no bribe soon ceased to
shield him from popular attack. Between the honest adherent of machine
politics and the corruptionist himself the muckrakers made no sharp
distinction. And that was because they had in a vague way come to
expect positive action from men in office. They looked for better
school systems, or health campaigns, or a conservation policy, that
is for fairly concrete social measures, and officials who weren’t for
them were lumped together and denounced. The official might have read
too much Adam Smith, or been too much of a lawyer, or taken orders from
the boss, or a bribe from a lobbyist--the rough result was the same: he
wasn’t for what public opinion had come to expect, and the muckrakers
laid their traps for him.
I suppose that from the beginning of the republic people had always
expected their officials to work at a level less self-seeking than
that of ordinary life. So that corruption in politics could never be
carried on with an entirely good conscience. But at the opening of this
century, democratic people had begun to see much greater possibilities
in the government than ever before. They looked to it as a protector
from economic tyranny and as the dispenser of the prime institutions of
democratic life.
But when they went to the government, what they found was a petty and
partisan, slavish and blind, clumsy and rusty instrument for their
expectations. That added to the violence of their attacks. When they
had no vision of what a democratic state might do, it didn’t make
so very much difference if officials took a rake-off. The cost of
corruption was only a little money, and perhaps the official’s immortal
soul. But when men’s vision of government enlarged, then the cost of
corruption and inefficiency rose: for they meant a blighting of the
whole possibility of the state. There has always been corruption in
American politics, but it didn’t worry people very much, so long as the
sphere of government was narrowly limited. Corruption became a real
problem when reform through state action began to take hold of men’s
thought.
As muckraking developed, it began to apply the standards of public
life to certain parts of the business world. Naturally the so-called
public service corporation was the first to feel the pressure. There is
obviously a great difference in outlook between the Vanderbilt policy
of “the public be damned” and the McAdoo policy of “the public be
pleased.” The old sense of private property is very much modified: few
railroad men to-day would deny that they are conducting a quasi-public
enterprise, and that something more is demanded of them than private
exploitation. Thus President Mellen of the New Haven railroad could
not have been handled more roughly by the people of New England if
they had elected him to office. And his successor, President Howard
Elliott, finds it necessary to remind the people that “the railroad
is a public servant in fact as well as in name and that the service
which it renders depends largely upon the treatment which it receives
from its master.” Mr. Elliott’s grandfather would, I think, have said
that his descendant lacked a sense of private property. That is
true: Mr. Elliott’s remark is a recognition that the cultural basis
of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind
in recognizing the change. So if the stockholders think they are the
ultimate owners of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally
mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people have no such notion. And
the men who are connected with these essential properties cannot escape
the fact that they are expected to act increasingly as public officials.
That expectation has filtered into the larger industrial corporations.
I have here, for example, a statement by Roger Babson, a recognized
financial expert:
“Suppose the mayor of a town should appoint his brother police
commissioner; his daughter’s husband, fire commissioner; his uncle,
superintendent of the water works; and put his son in charge of the
street cleaning department. How long would it be before the good
citizens would hold an indignation meeting? It would not be long.
No city in America would stand that kind of graft. Yet pick up the
letterhead of a private corporation and what are you likely to find? It
usually reads something like this: Quincy Persimmon, president; Quincy
Persimmon, Jr., vice-president; Persimmon Quincy, treasurer; Howard
Lemon, secretary. The presence of Howard Lemon in this select family
circle is somewhat puzzling until one learns that Prunella Quincy
Persimmon is the wife of Howard Lemon. Then all is clear. To be sure,
the general manager of the concern, who is the man to see on any matter
of special importance, is a man named Hobbs or Smith or Hogan, but
it soon appears that the salary of the general manager is just about
what it costs young Lemon to run his motor for one year.... Has there
ever been an American mayor who dared to run his city as this private
corporation is run? In their leisure moments the Persimmons, Quincys
and the Lemons are constantly advising their fellow citizens of the
danger of permitting an American city to advance one step toward the
sort of municipal work which is done by a great many foreign cities
with success. The reason against this is given as the graft in public
life.”[1]
Now when the Persimmons are muckraked, what puzzles them beyond words
is that anyone should presume to meddle with _their_ business. What
they will learn is that it is no longer altogether _their_ business.
The law may not have realized this, but the fact is being accomplished,
and it’s a fact grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men who are
at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about
their “responsibilities,” their “stewardship.” It is the swan-song of
the old commercial profiteering and a dim recognition that the motives
in business are undergoing a revolution.
But muckraking has grown in scope, which is another way of saying that
it has come to expect still more. We hear now about the inefficiency
of business. Men like Brandeis, Redfield, Taylor have taken the lead
in this criticism. Try if you can to imagine a merchant in the ’70’s
subject to criticism on a national scale because he didn’t know how
to run his business. He would have sputtered and exploded at the
impudence of such a suggestion. As a matter of fact some remnants of
that age have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of Mr. Brandeis.
But in the main the younger business men have been willing to listen.
They do not think it a preposterous notion when the Secretary of
Commerce suggests that if they are to conduct business they must do
it efficiently. Then too, the farmers are being criticized. They are
no longer deluged with adulation: they are being told quite frankly
that they have a very great deal to learn from the government and
the universities. And now there is a tremendous agitation about the
quality of the goods and the conditions of labor under which they are
produced.
Why all this has happened: why there are new standards for business
men, why the nature of property is altered, why the workers and the
purchasers are making new demands,--all this muckraking never made
very clear. It was itself considerably more of an effect than a
sign of leadership. It expressed a change, and consequently it is
impossible to say that muckraking was either progressive or reactionary
in its tendency. The attack upon business men was listened to by
their defeated competitors as well as by those who looked forward
to some better order of industrial life. Muckraking is full of the
voices of the beaten, of the bewildered, and then again it is shot
through with some fine anticipation. It has pointed to a revolution in
business motives; it has hinted at the emerging power of labor and the
consumer--we can take those suggestions, perhaps, and by analyzing
them, and following them through, gather for ourselves some sense of
what moves beneath the troubled surface of events.
CHAPTER II
New Incentives
We say in conversation: “Oh, no, he’s not a business man,--he has a
profession.” That sounds like an invidious distinction, and no doubt
there is a good deal of caste and snobbery in the sentiment. But
that isn’t all there is. We imagine that men enter the professions
by undergoing a special discipline to develop a personal talent.
So their lives seem more interesting, and their incentives more
genuine. The business man may feel that the scientist content with a
modest salary is an improvident ass. But he also feels some sense of
inferiority in the scientist’s presence. For at the bottom there is a
difference of quality in their lives,--in the scientist’s a dignity
which the scramble for profit can never assume. The professions may
be shot through with rigidity, intrigue, and hypocrisy: they have,
nevertheless, a community of interest, a sense of craftsmanship, and
a more permanent place in the larger reaches of the imagination. It
is a very pervasive and subtle difference, but sensitive business men
are aware of it. They are not entirely proud of their profit-motive:
bankers cover it with a sense of importance, others mitigate it
with charity and public work, a few dream of railroad empires and
wildernesses tamed, and some reveal their sense of unworthiness by
shouting with extra emphasis that they are not in business for their
health.
It is a sharp commentary on the psychological insight of the orthodox
economist who maintains that the only dependable motive is profit.
Most people repeat that--parrot-fashion, but in the rub they don’t
act upon it. When we began to hear recently that radium might subdue
cancer, there was a fairly unanimous demand that the small supply
available should be taken over by the government and removed from
the sphere of private exploitation. The fact is that men don’t trust
the profiteer in a crisis, or wherever the interest at stake is of
essential importance. So the public regards a professor on the make as
a charlatan, a doctor on the make as a quack, a woman on the make as
an adventuress, a politician on the make as a grafter, a writer on the
make as a hack, a preacher on the make as a hypocrite. For in science,
art, politics, religion, the home, love, education,--the pure economic
motive, profiteering, the incentive of business enterprise is treated
as a public peril. Wherever civilization is seen to be in question, the
Economic Man of commercial theorists is in disrepute.
I am not speaking in chorus with those sentimentalists who regard
industry as sordid. They merely inherit an ancient and parasitic
contempt for labor. I do not say for one instant that money is the root
of evil, that rich men are less honest than poor, or any equivalent
nonsense. I am simply trying to point out that there is in every-day
life a widespread rebellion against the profit motive. That rebellion
is not an attack on the creation of wealth. It is, on the contrary, a
discovery that private commercialism is an antiquated, feeble, mean,
and unimaginative way of dealing with the possibilities of modern
industry.
The change is, I believe, working itself out under our very eyes.
Each day brings innumerable plans for removing activities from the
sphere of profit. Endowment, subsidy, state aid, endless varieties
of consumers’ and producers’ coöperatives; public enterprise--they
have been devised to save the theater, to save science and invention,
education and journalism, the market basket and public utilities from
the life-sapping direction of the commercialist. What is the meaning
of these protean efforts to supersede the profiteer if not that his
motive produces results hostile to use, and that he is a usurper where
the craftsman, the inventor and the industrial statesman should govern?
There is no sudden substitution of sacrifice for selfishness. These
experiments are being tried because commercialism failed to serve
civilization: the coöperator intrenched behind his wiser organization
would smile if you regarded him as a patient lamb on the altar of
altruism. He knows that the old economists were bad psychologists and
superficial observers when they described man as a slot machine set in
motion by inserting a coin.
It is often asserted that modern industry could never have been created
had it not been given over to untrammeled exploitation by commercial
adventurers. That may be true. There is no great point in discussing
the question as to what might have happened if something else had
happened in the past. Modern industry was created by the profiteer,
and here it is, the great fact in our lives, blackening our cities,
fed with the lives of children, a tyrant over men and women, turning
out enormous stocks of produce, good, bad, and horrible. We need waste
no time arguing whether any other motive could have done the work.
What we are finding is that however effective profit may have been for
inaugurating modern industry, it is failing as a method of realizing
its promise. That is why men turned to coöperatives and labor unions;
that is why the state is interfering more and more. These blundering
efforts are the assertion of all the men and all those elements of
their natures which commercialism has thwarted. No amount of argument
can wipe out the fact that the profit-system has never commanded the
whole-hearted assent of the people who lived under it. There has been
a continuous effort to overthrow it. From Robert Owen to John Stuart
Mill, from Ruskin through Morris to the varied radicalism of our day,
from the millionaire with his peace palaces to Henry Ford with his
generous profit-sharing, through the consumer organizing a coöperative
market, to the workingmen defying their masters and the economists by
pooling their labor, you find a deep stream of uneasiness, of human
restlessness against those impositions which are supposed to rest on
the eternal principles of man’s being.
There is scarcely any need to press the point, for no one questions
the statement that endowment, coöperation, or public enterprise are
attempts to employ motives different from those of the profiteer. The
only dispute is whether these new motives can be extended and made
effective. It is, I think, a crucial question. It lies at the root of
most theoretical objection to socialism in the famous “human nature”
argument. Far from being a trivial question, as socialist debaters
like to pretend,--it is the hardest nut they have to crack. They are
proposing a reconstruction of human society, and in all honesty, they
cannot dodge the question as to whether man as we know him is capable
of what they ask. Persian, Mexican, Turkish and Chinese experience with
constitutional democracies ought to show how easy it is, as Macaulay
said, for a tailor to measure the clothes of all his customers by
the Apollo Belvedere. In a matter like this there is little to choose
between the socialist who is sure his plan will work and the “anti”
who is sure it will not. The profit-motive is attacked, that is
certain; that more or less successful attempts are made to supplant
it, is obvious, but how far we can go, that remains an open question.
We cannot answer it by analogy: it does not follow from the success
of a coöperative grocery that the Steel Trust can be governed on the
same plan. If our expectations are to have any solidity we must find
evidence for them in those great private industries which seem to be
completely in the hands of profit. That is where the issues join. The
theater has always been a stamping ground for “queer” people; scholars
are notoriously incompetent in “business”; scientific research pays so
well, is so undeniably valuable, that few dare grudge it a subsidy;
public utilities, like the highways, are by tradition not business
propositions; and coöperatives have had a stormy history. There are,
of course, the army and navy, which no man wishes to see organized by
private individuals on the make. The most conservative have doubted
recently whether armaments should be manufactured for profit. Yet
such analogies, impressive as they are, offer nothing conclusive. But
if we find that in the staple industries like steel and oil a silent
revolution is in progress, then we have a basis for action. If there
the profit-motive is decadent and new incentives ready, then perhaps
what look like irresponsible outcries and wanton agitation will assume
the dignity of a new morality.
* * * * *
In the last thirty years or so American business has been passing
through a reorganization so radical that we are just beginning to
grasp its meaning. At any rate for those of us who are young to-day
the business world of our grandfathers is a piece of history that we
can reconstruct only with the greatest difficulty. We know that the
huge corporation, the integrated industry, production for a world
market, the network of combinations, pools and agreements have played
havoc with the older political economy. The scope of human endeavor
is enormously larger, and with it has come, as Graham Wallas says, a
general change of social scale.[2] Human thought has had to enlarge
its scale in order to meet the situation. That is why it is not very
illuminating to say, for example, that the principles of righteousness
are eternal and that the solution of every problem is in the Golden
Rule. The Golden Rule in a village, and the Golden Rule for a nation
of a hundred million people are two very different things. I might
possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world
the greatest problem that confronts me is to find my neighbor and
treat him at all. The size and intricacy which we have to deal with
have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple
generalizations of our ancestors. After all, they were not prophets,
and the conservative to-day makes an inhuman demand when he expects
them to have laid out a business policy for a world they never even
imagined. If anyone thinks that the Fathers might have done this let
him sit down and write a political economy for the year 1950.
“Since the Sherman Act was passed (1890),” says President Van Hise
of Wisconsin University, “a child born has attained its majority.”
Indeed he has, much to the surprise of the unwilling parents. Now a new
business world has produced a new kind of business man. For it requires
a different order of ability to conduct the Steel Trust, than it did to
manage a primitive blast-furnace by means of a partnership. The giant
corporation calls for an equipment unlike any that business has ever
known: the minds of the managers are occupied with problems beyond
the circle of ideas that interested the old-fashioned chop-whiskered
merchants. They have to preserve intimate contact with physicists and
chemists, there is probably a research laboratory attached to the
plant. They have to deal with huge masses of workingmen becoming every
day more articulate. They have to think about the kind of training
our public schools give. They have to consider very concretely the
psychology of races, they come into contact with the structure of
credit, and a money squeeze due to the Balkan war makes a difference
in their rate of output. They have to keep thousands of ignorant
stockholders somewhere in the back of their mind, people who don’t know
the difference between puddling and pudding. They may find themselves
an issue in a political campaign, and if they are to be successful they
must estimate correctly the social temper of the community. Diplomacy
is closely related to the selling department, and perhaps at times they
may have to dabble in Latin-American revolutions.
Mr. Louis D. Brandeis commented on this change of scale in his
testimony before the Committee on Interstate Commerce.[3]
“Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that success
or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man.... Now while
organization has made it possible for the individual man to accomplish
infinitely more than he could before, aided as he is by new methods of
communication, by the stenographer, the telephone, and system, still
there is a limit for what one man can do well ... When, therefore, you
increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of
problems increases with its growth, you will find, in the first place,
that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts, and,
in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising careful
judgment upon them.”
In this statement, you will find, I believe, one of the essential
reasons why a man of Mr. Brandeis’s imaginative power has turned
against the modern trust. He does not believe that men can deal
efficiently with the scale upon which the modern business world is
organized. He has said quite frankly, that economic size is in itself
a danger to democracy. This means, I take it, that American voters are
not intelligent enough or powerful enough to dominate great industrial
organizations. So Mr. Brandeis, in company with many important thinkers
the world over, has turned de-centralizer. The experience of history
justifies his position in many respects: there is no doubt that an
organization like the Holy Roman Empire was too large for the political
capacity of human beings. It is probably true that the Morgan empire
had become unwieldy. It may be that the Steel Trust is too large for
efficiency. The splendid civilizations of the past have appeared in
small cities. To-day if you go about the world you find that the
small countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, are the ones that have
come nearest to a high level of social prosperity. I once heard George
Russell (Æ), the Irish poet and reformer, say that an ideal state would
be about the size of County Cork.
Yet it is not very helpful to insist that size is a danger, unless you
can specify what size.
The senators asked Mr. Brandeis that question. They pressed him to
state approximately what percentage of an industry he considered an
effective unit. He hesitated between ten per cent. and forty per cent.,
and could not commit himself. Obviously,--for how could Mr. Brandeis be
expected to know? Adam Smith thought the corporations of his day doomed
to failure on the very same grounds that Mr. Brandeis urges against
the modern corporation. Now the million dollar organization is not too
large for efficiency and the billion dollar one may be. The ideal unit
may fall somewhere between? Where? That is a problem which experiments
alone can decide, experiments conducted by experts in the new science
of administration.
The development of that science is the only answer to the point Mr.
Brandeis raises. Remarkable results have already been produced. Every
one of us, for example, must wonder at times how the President of the
United States ever does all the things the papers say he does. When,
for example, does the man sleep? And is he omniscient? The fact is that
administration is becoming an applied science, capable of devising
executive methods for dealing with tremendous units. No doubt the
President with his increasing responsibilities is an overworked man. No
doubt there are trusts badly administered. No doubt there are inflated
monopolies created for purely financial reasons. But just what the
limits of administrative science are, a legislature is no more capable
of determining than was Mr. Brandeis. Only experience, only trial and
ingenuity, can demonstrate, and in a research so young and so swift in
its progress, any effort to assign by law an arbitrary limit is surely
the most obvious meddling. Say to-day that one unit of business is
impossible, to-morrow you may be confronted with an undreamt success.
Here if anywhere is a place where negative prophecy is futile. It
is well to remember the classic case of that great scientist Simon
Newcomb, who said that man would never fly. Two years before that
statement was made, the Wright brothers had made secret flights.
It may well be that the best unit is smaller than some of the modern
trusts. It does not follow that we must break up industry into units of
administration whose ideal efficiency is spent in competing with one
another. I can understand, for example, the desire of many people to
see Europe composed of a larger number of small nations. But I take it
that everyone wishes these small nations to coöperate in the creation
of a common European civilization. So it is with business. The unit of
administration may be whatever efficiency demands. It may be that the
steel industry would gain if it were conducted by forty corporations.
But at the same time there are advantages in common action which
we cannot afford to abandon. Technical improvement must be for the
whole industry, the labor market must be organized and made stable,
output must be adjusted to a common plan. The appearance of federal
organization seems to suggest a possible compromise in which the
administrative need for decentralization is combined with the social
demand for a unified industrial policy.
No one, surely, proposes to revive the little business monarch who
brooded watchfully over every operation in factory and office,
called his workingmen by their pet names, and was impelled at almost
every turn by Adam Smith’s “natural propensity to truck and barter.”
For just as in political government “the President” does a hundred
things every day he may never even hear of, just as the English
Crown acts constantly through some unknown civil servant at $1,500
a year,--so in big business,--the real government is passing into a
hierarchy of managers and deputies, who, by what would look like a
miracle to Adam Smith, are able to coöperate pretty well toward a
common end. They are doing that, remember, in the first generation of
administrative science. They come to it unprepared, from a nation that
is suspicious and grudging. They have no tradition to work with, the
old commercial morality of the exploiter and profiteer still surrounds
these new rulers of industry. Perhaps they are unaware that they are
revolutionizing the discipline, the incentives, and the vision of the
business world. They do brutal and stupid things, and their essential
work is obscured. But they are conducting business on a scale without
precedent in history.
The real news about business, it seems to me, is that it is being
administered by men who are not profiteers. The managers are on
salary, divorced from ownership and from bargaining. They represent
the revolution in business incentives at its very heart. For they
conduct gigantic enterprises and they stand outside the higgling of the
market, outside the shrewdness and strategy of competition. The motive
of profit is not their personal motive. That is an astounding change.
The administration of the great industries is passing into the hands of
men who cannot halt before each transaction and ask themselves: what
is my duty as the Economic Man looking for immediate gain? They have
to live on their salaries, and hope for promotion, but their day’s
work is not measured in profit. There are thousands of these men, each
with responsibilities vaster than the patriarchs of industry they
have supplanted. It is for the commercial theorists to prove that the
“ability” is inferior, and talent less available.
It is no accident that the universities have begun to create graduate
schools of business-administration. Fifty years ago industry was an
adventure or perhaps a family tradition. But to-day it is becoming a
profession with university standing equal to that of law, medicine,
or engineering. The universities are supplying a demand. It is big
business, I believe, which has created that demand. For it is no longer
possible to deal with the present scale of industry if your only
equipment is what men used to call “experience,” that is, a haphazard
absorption of knowledge through the pores. Just as it is no longer
possible to become a physician by living with doctors, just as law
cannot be grasped by starting as a clerk in some attorney’s office, so
business requires a greater preparation than a man can get by being a
bright, observant, studious, ambitious office boy, who saves his money
and is good to his mother.
What it will mean to have business administered by men with a
professional training is a rather difficult speculation. That it
is a very far-reaching psychological change, I have no doubt. The
professions bring with them a fellowship in interest, a standard of
ethics, an esprit de corps, and a decided discipline. They break up
that sense of sullen privacy which made the old-fashioned business man
so impervious to new facts and so shockingly ignorant of the larger
demands of civilized life. I know that the professions develop their
pedantry, but who was ever more finicky, more rigid in his thinking
than the self-satisfied merchant? It would be idle to suppose that
we are going suddenly to develop a nation of reasonable men. But at
least we are going to have an increasing number of “practical” men who
have come in contact with the scientific method. That is an enormous
gain over the older manufacturers and merchants. They were shrewd,
hard-working, no doubt, but they were fundamentally uneducated. They
had no discipline for making wisdom out of their experience. They had
almost no imaginative training to soften their primitive ambitions. But
doctors and engineers and professional men, generally, have something
more than a desire to accumulate and outshine their neighbors. They
have found an interest in the actual work they are doing. The work
itself is in a measure its own reward. The instincts of workmanship, of
control over brute things, the desire for order, the satisfaction of
services rendered and uses created, the civilizing passions are given a
chance to temper the primal desire to have and to hold and to conquer.
CHAPTER III
The Magic of Property
The ordinary editorial writer is a strong believer in what he calls the
sanctity of private property. But as far as highly organized business
is concerned he is a pilgrim to an empty shrine. The trust movement is
doing what no conspirator or revolutionist could ever do: it is sucking
the life out of private property. For the purposes of modern industry
the traditional notions have become meaningless: the name continues,
but the fact is disappearing. You cannot conduct the great industries
and preserve intact the principles of private property. And so the
trusts are organizing private property out of existence, are altering
its nature so radically that very little remains but the title and the
ancient theory.
When a man buys stock in some large corporation he becomes in theory
one of its owners. He is supposed to be exercising his instinct of
private property. But how in fact does he exercise that instinct which
we are told is the only real force in civilization? He may never see
_his_ property. He may not know where his property is situated. He is
not consulted as to its management. He would be utterly incapable of
advice if he were consulted. Contact with _his_ property is limited
to reading in the newspapers what it is worth each day, and hoping
that dividends will be paid. The processes which make him rich in
the morning and poor in the evening, increase his income or decrease
it,--are inscrutable mysteries. Compare him with the farmer who owns
his land, the homesteader or the prospector, compare him with anyone
who has a real sense of possession, and you will find, I think,
that the modern shareholder is a very feeble representative of the
institution of private property.
No one has ever had a more abstract relation to the thing he owned.
The absentee landlord is one of the sinister figures of history. But
the modern shareholder is not only an absentee, he is a transient too.
The week ending January 10, 1914, was generally regarded as a dull one
in Wall Street.[4] Yet on the New York Stock Exchange alone the total
sales amounted to 1,777,038 shares. About 340,000 shares of private
property in Reading changed hands.
With a few thousand dollars I can be an owner in Massachusetts
textile mills on Monday, in Union Pacific on Tuesday. I can flit like
a butterfly from industry to industry. I don’t even have to use my
judgment as to where I shall alight. All I have to do is to choose
some well-known stock broker and put myself into his hands. And when I
read in books on political economy that any profit I make is a reward
for my foresight, my courage in the face of risk, I laugh. I know that
I can’t have any foresight. I don’t understand the inner workings
of the business world. I’m not allowed to know. That is reserved for
specialists like stock brokers and private bankers. In the modern world
investing has become a highly skilled profession, altogether beyond the
capacities of the ordinary shareholder. The great mass of people who
have saved a little money can no more deal with their property on their
own initiative than they can deal with disease or war on their own
initiative. They have to act through representatives. Just as they need
physicians and organized armies, so they have to have stock brokers,
financial experts, public service commissions and the rest.
There has been in recent years a great outcry against the concentrated
control of credit. It was found that the decision as to how money
should be invested had passed away from the people who owned the money.
The enormous power of Morgan consisted in his ability to direct the
flow of capital. He was the head of a vast system which had taken out
of the hands of investors the task of deciding how their money was to
be used. It was no doubt a colossal autocracy. There has been a great
effort to break it up, to decentralize the power that concentrated
about Morgan. But no one proposes to put back into the hands of the
investor the decision as to the financing of industry. The investors
are a scattered mob incapable of such decisions. The question of where
money is to be applied is a matter for experts to answer. And so reform
of the credit system does not consist in abolishing the financial
expert. It consists in making him a public servant. The Wilson Currency
Bill seems to be an effort to make banking responsive to business needs
all over the country. It gives business men a larger control over
financial experts. How that control is to be extended to the citizens
at large is one of the subtlest problems of democracy. I do not venture
here to answer it. I wish rather to keep more closely to the fact
that whatever system is devised, it will have to recognize that the
investor no longer can decide in modern industry, that “foresight” has
become an organized, technical profession, and is ceasing to be one of
the duties of private property.
Not long ago the Interstate Commerce Commission gave a very neat
recognition to this change. It issued a report on the bankruptcy of
the Frisco railway which contained a condemnation of certain private
bankers for offering bonds to the investing public when the bankers
should have known that the road was insolvent. The Commission was
saying that the investor couldn’t know, that he was in the hands of
experts, and that the experts have a trust to perform. You couldn’t
very well go to greater lengths in announcing the impotence of private
property. For where in the name of sanity have all the courage,
foresight, initiative gone to, what has happened to all the rugged
virtues that are supposed to be inherent in the magic of property?
They have gone a-glimmering with the revolutionary change that the
great industry has produced. Those personal virtues belong to an
earlier age when men really had some personal contact with their
property. But to-day the central condition of business is that capital
shall be impersonal, “liquid,” “mobile.” The modern shareholder as a
person is of no account whatever. It mattered very much what kind of
people the old landlords were. But it matters not at all what kind of
person the shareholder is. He may be ignorant or wise, he may be a
child in arms or a greybeard in his dotage, he may live in Iceland or
Patagonia: he has no genuine rôle in the conduct of industry. He cannot
fulfil any responsibility to the property he owns. That is why it is
so futile to attack clergymen and reformers who happen to own stock in
some ruthless factory. They have no real power to alter the situation.
You often hear it said that the stockholders must be made to realize
their duties. Not long ago, for example, when the wretched working
conditions of the Steel Mills were exposed, a very well-meaning
minority stockholder did protest and cause a slight flurry in the
newspapers. But the notion that the 200,000 owners of the Steel Trust
can ever be aroused to energetic, public-spirited control of “their”
property--that is as fantastic as anything that ever issued from the
brain of a lazy moralist. Scattered all over the globe, changing from
day to day, the shareholders are the most incompetent constituency
conceivable. Think how difficult it is to make the voters in one town
exhibit any capacity for their task. Well, the voters in the government
of the Steel Trust do not meet each other every day, do not read the
same newspapers: the suffrage qualifications for the Steel Trust have
nothing to do with age, sex, nationality, residence, literacy; the
one qualification is the possession of some money and the desire for
more. Shareholders are a heterogeneous collection with a single motive,
and from that material some people pretend to expect a high sense of
social responsibility.
I do not mean to imply, of course, that because a man owns stock he
is necessarily ignorant or tyrannical. He may be as benevolent as you
please. But the fact that he owns stock will not enable him to practice
his benevolence. He will have to find other ways of expressing it. For
shareholding in the modern world is not adapted to the exercise of any
civilizing passion. It is too abstract, too scattered, too fluctuating.
All this is a natural result of the large-scale corporation. In the
partnership and firm, owners and managers are in general the same
people, but the corporation has separated ownership from management.
Ownership has been opened to a far larger number of people than it ever
was before, and it means less than it used to. Each stockholder owns
a smaller share in a far greater whole. The trusts have concentrated
control and management, but ownership they have diffused and diluted
till it means very little more than a claim to residual profits, after
expenses are paid, after the bondholders are satisfied, and perhaps,
after the insiders have decided which way they wish the stock market to
fluctuate.
Let no stockholder come to the radical, then, and charge him with
attacking the sanctity of private property. The evolution of business
is doing that at a rate and with a dispatch which will make future
historians gasp. If the reformers should, for example, arrive at the
point of deciding to abolish private property in railroads, they would
discover that most of the rights of property had already disappeared.
Management has long ago passed out of the hands of the stockholders;
the right to fix rates has been absorbed by the state; the right to
fix wages is conditioned by very powerful unions. They would find
stockholding in the last stages of decay, where not even the dividends
were certain. And one of the most difficult problems reformers may have
to face will be the eagerness of railroad owners to give up the few
vestiges of private property which are left to them, if they can secure
instead government bonds. They may feel far happier as creditors of the
United States than as representatives of the institution of private
property.
Government ownership will probably be a very good bargain for railroad
stockholders. To-day they are a little less than creditors; they loan
their money, and they are not sure of a return. Government ownership
may make them real creditors--that is the highest hope which remains
from the shattered glamour that came from the magic of property.
What has happened to the railroads is merely a demonstration of what
is likely to happen to the other great industries--steel, oil, lumber,
coal and all the others which are adapted to large scale production.
Private property will melt away; its functions will be taken over
by the salaried men who direct them, by government commissions, by
developing labor unions. The stockholders deprived of their property
rights are being transformed into money-lenders.
It is evident that the question of nationalizing industries is not a
choice between the maintenance of private property and its abolition.
In amateur socialist discussions this is always made the issue whenever
someone proposes to substitute public operation for private. It betrays
an unreal sense of the problem. There is no very essential difference
between holding the securities of the Steel Trust and those of the U.
S. Government. The government bonds are, if anything, a more certain
investment. But there is some difference between public and private
enterprise: what is it?
Opponents of collectivism argue that government work is inefficient.
They seem to imply that the alleged superiority of private management
is due to the institution of private property. That, it seems to me,
is a striking example of what logicians call false cause. If the Steel
Trust is efficient, it is not due to the existence of its 200,000
stockholders. It is due to the fact that the management is autocratic,
that administrators are highly paid, and given power adequate to their
responsibility. When governments are willing to pursue that course,
they can be just as efficient as private management. The construction
of the Panama Canal is a classic example of what government can do if
it is ready to centralize power and let it work without democratic
interruption.
The real problem of collectivism is the difficulty of combining popular
control with administrative power. Private property is no part of the
issue. For any industry which was ready for collectivism would have
abolished private property before the question arose. What would remain
for discussion would be the conflict between democracy and centralized
authority. That is the line upon which the problems of collectivism
will be fought out--how much power shall be given to the employees,
how much to the ultimate consumer, how much to sectional interests,
how much to national ones. Anyone who has watched the disillusionment
of labor with the earlier socialism and has understood the meaning of
the syndicalist trend will know how radically the real difficulties of
public enterprise differ from those presented in theoretical debates.
I do not wish at this point to draw any conclusion as to the solution
of the trust problem. I am trying to sketch very roughly the main
elements in the actual situation. The incentive of the men who conduct
modern industry was the first point of interest. It is obvious that
the trusts have created a demand for a new type of business man--for
a man whose motives resemble those of the applied scientist and whose
responsibility is that of a public servant. Nothing would be easier
than to shout for joy, and say that everything is about to be fine: the
business men are undergoing a change of heart. That is just what an
endless number of American reformers are shouting, and their prophet is
Gerald Stanley Lee. The notion seems to be that workers, politicians,
consumers and the rest are to have no real part in the glorious
revolution which is to be consummated for their benefit. It is not hard
to understand the habit of mind which leads men to these conclusions.
The modern world is brain-splitting in its complexity, and if you
succeed in disentangling from it some hopeful trend there is nothing
more restful than to call it the solution of the problem. Those who
have seen the change in business motives have, I believe, good ground
for rejoicing, but they might in decency refrain from erecting upon it
a mystic and rhetorical commercialism.
For the same reason, it is well not to take too literally the
revolution in private property. This revolution has not happened to all
property. It is most advanced in the railroads and what we call public
service corporations. It is imminent in the big staple industries which
are adapted to large scale production. But there remains a vast amount
of genuine private property in agricultural land, in competitive
business.
In the great industries themselves, however, it is important to notice
that with the diminishing importance of ownership, the control has
passed for the time being into the hands of investment experts, the
banking interests. That control is challenged now, not by the decadent
stockholders, but by those most interested in the methods of industry:
the consumer, the worker, and the citizen at large.
CHAPTER IV
Caveat Emptor
I am sure that few consumers feel any of that sense of power which
economists say is theirs. No doubt when Mr. Morgan was buying antiques
there came to him a real sense that he commanded the market. But the
ordinary man with a small income to spend is much more like a person
who becomes attached to an energetic bulldog, and leaves the spectators
wondering which is the mover and which the moved. He is the theoretical
master of that dog....
The consumer is sometimes represented as the person whose desires
govern industry. Actually, he is an ignorant person who buys in the
dark. He takes what he can get at the price he can afford. He is told
what he wants, and then he wants it. He rides in a packed subway
because he has to, and he buys a certain kind of soap because it has
been thrust upon his soul. Where there is a monopoly the consumer
is, of course, helpless, and where there is competition he is almost
entirely at the mercy of advertising.
Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge
of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply
a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In
the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle
and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it
wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered
child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world
market of to-day. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of
calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization.
Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of
consumption is uncultivated. By advertising I don’t mean descriptive
catalogues which enable the buyer to select. I mean the deceptive
clamor that disfigures the scenery, covers fences, plasters the city,
and blinks and winks at you through the night. When you contemplate the
eastern sky ablaze with chewing gum, the northern with tooth-brushes
and underwear, the western with whiskey, and the southern with
petticoats, the whole heavens brilliant with monstrously flirtatious
women, when you glance at magazines in which a rivulet of text trickles
through meadows of automobiles, baking powders, corsets and kodaks,
you begin to accumulate a sense of the disastrous incompetence of the
ultimate consumer.
For the scale on which the world is organized to-day discrimination has
become impossible for the ordinary purchaser. He hasn’t time to candle
every egg he buys, test the milk, inquire into the origins of the meat,
analyze the canned food, distinguish the shoddy, find out whether
the newspapers are lying, avoid meretricious plays, and choose only
railroads equipped with safety devices. These things have to be done
for him by experts backed with authority to enforce their decisions. In
our intricate civilization the purchaser can’t pit himself against the
producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair
one. By the time goods are ready for the ultimate consumer they have
travelled hundreds of miles, passed through any number of wholesalers,
jobbers, middlemen and what not. The simple act of buying has become
a vast, impersonal thing which the ordinary man is quite incapable
of performing without all sorts of organized aid. There are silly
anarchists who talk as if such organization were a loss of freedom.
They seem to imagine that they can “stand alone,” and judge each thing
for themselves. They might try it. They would find that the purchase of
eggs was such a stupendous task that no time would be left over for the
purchase of beer or the pursuit of those higher freedoms for which they
are fighting.
The old commercial theorists had some inkling of these difficulties.
They knew that the consumer could not possibly make each purchase a
deliberate and intelligent act. So they said that if only business
men were left to compete they would stumble over each other to supply
the consumer with the most satisfactory goods. It is hardly necessary
to point out how complete has been the collapse of that romantic
theory. There are a hundred ways of competing, to produce the highest
quality at the lowest cost proved to be the most troublesome and
least rewarding form of competition. To cheapen the quality, subtract
value that does not appear on the surface, lower the standards of
workmanship, to adulterate, in short, was a more “natural” method of
competition than the noble Platonic method which economists talked
about. And then came price agreements, the elimination of “cut-throat”
competition, and the consumer began to realize that he couldn’t trust
to the naïve notions of the nineteenth century.
He turned to the government for aid, and out of that has grown a fresh
sense of the uses of politics. The old commercialists saw in government
little more than the police power; the modern syndicalists refuse to
believe that the state can be anything but an agent of tyranny. But
the facts belie both notions. Politics is becoming the chief method by
which the consumer enforces his interests upon the industrial system.
Many radical socialists pretend to regard the consumer’s interest as
a rather mythical one. “All the people” sounds so sentimental, so far
removed from the clash of actual events. But we are finding, I think,
that the real power emerging to-day in democratic politics is just the
mass of people who are crying out against the “high cost of living.”
That is a consumer’s cry. Far from being an impotent one, it is, I
believe, destined to be stronger than the interests either of labor
or of capital. With the consumer awake, neither the worker nor the
employer can use politics for his special interest. The public, which
is more numerous than either side, is coming to be the determining
force in government.
Votes for women will increase the power of the consumer enormously.
The mass of women do not look at the world as workers; in America, at
least their prime interest is as consumers. It is they who go to market
and do the shopping; it is they who have to make the family budget go
around; it is they who feel shabbiness and fraud and high prices most
directly. They have more time for politics than men, and it is no idle
speculation to say that their influence will make the consumer the real
master of the political situation.
It is through government that people are seeking to impose upon
business a maximum of quality and a minimum of cost. Price fixing is
already in operation for public utilities; there is every reason to
believe that it will be extended to the great industries. The amount of
inspecting of products which is already being done it is impossible to
record. I don’t say that it is effective or satisfactory, but it is a
force to be reckoned with and it is sure to grow. We hear a great deal
about the class-consciousness of labor; my own observation is that in
America to-day consumers’-consciousness is growing very much faster.
What forms it will assume with time is not easy to predict. The great
extension of collectivism which is at hand will be carried through
and dominated by the “public.” The workers will have very little to
say about it, as workers. The public is capable of oppression, I have
no doubt, and when I say that consumers are going to dominate the
government I do not state the fact with unmixed joy. There will be a
tyranny of the majority for which minorities will have to prepare. But
good or bad, collectivism or “state socialism” is perhaps the chief
instrument of the awakened consumer.
One of the heritages from competitive business was almost complete
disorganization in selling of wares. Six grocers in three blocks,
dingy little butcher-shops, little retail businesses with the family
living in the back room, the odor of cooking to greet you as you enter
the door, fly-specks on the goods--walk through any city and marvel
at the anarchy of retail business. Well, the large department store,
organized markets, the chain of stores, the mail order business, are
changing the situation radically for the purchaser.
They are focussing his attention: he could not focus on a congery of
little shops. But where there is centralization, he has something of
which to take hold. The solidarity of the consumer is made possible,
just as large scale production is making possible a much greater
solidarity for labor. But it is doubtful whether the public will be
satisfied to stand outside these large retail organizations, and try to
regulate them through government inspectors. The example of the English
Coöperative Societies is very attractive. They represent a power for
the consumer, and in the face of the high cost of living, the consumer
is looking for power.
Business, then, must look forward to increasing control in the
interests of those who buy. Processes will be inspected, and regulated
by law, some industries will be operated directly by the government,
and producers in general may face coöperative organizations grown
powerful enough perhaps to command the market. Those seem to be
the general methods by which the consumer is trying to redeem his
helplessness in the complexity of the newly organized industrial world.
It is interesting to notice the revolutionary standards which are being
generated by this young social power. Take the matter of prices. That,
after all, is the first item that interests the purchaser. Quality is
a subtler notion. But in the matter of prices, there is coming into
existence an idea that profits can be “unreasonable.” It is an idea
that runs counter to the whole fabric of the old commercialism, where
the only recognized motive was profit and the only ideal all that the
traffic would bear. To talk about “reasonable returns” is to begin
an attack on industrialism which will lead far beyond the present
imaginations of the people who talk about it. The whole question of
unearned wealth is opened up, for “unreasonable” profit can mean only
unearned profit. Just where those words lead nobody seems to know.
But there is a groping behind them which points without question to a
radical attack on large incomes. The consumer talks about “reasonable
return” because he feels that any profit which keeps prices high must
be unreasonable. That may seem a curious logic, but it’s the kind of
logic which half-conscious democracies use.
CHAPTER V
A Key to the Labor Movement
When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some
of them are really worried over the hostility of most unions to
exceptional rewards for exceptional workers. But in the main that isn’t
what worries them. They are worried about their own freedom, not the
freedom of wage-earners. They dislike the union because it challenges
their supremacy. And they fight unions as monarchs fight constitutions,
as aristocracies fight the vote. When an employer tells about his own
virtues, he dilates upon his kindness, his fairness, and all the good
things he has done for his men. That is just what benevolent autocrats
do: they try to justify their autocracy by their benevolence. Indeed,
the highest vision of those who oppose unions is that the employer
will develop the virtues of a good aristocrat.
But, of course, wage-earners are not dealing with men inspired by a
sense of _noblesse_ or _richesse oblige_. Henry Ford is a sensational
rarity among employers. No doubt there are some others, not so
conspicuous. Now, if workers faced only men with such an outlook, I
don’t think their problem would be solved, but it would take on a very
different complexion. This is, however, an academic question, for the
great mass of employers show no desire to make big concessions.
Employers are organized for obstruction. There is, for example,
the National Association of Manufacturers, embracing four thousand
individual employers, who represent a capital of about ten billion
dollars. Their constructive program consists of such attractive
items as “unalterable antagonism to the closed shop,” opposition to
eight-hours’ bills, and with mild emphasis hostility “to any and
all anti-injunction bills of whatever kind.” American civilization
is also assisted by the National Council for Industrial Defense, an
unincorporated body which employs a lobbyist at the rate of a thousand
dollars a month. According to the proud words of its late President,
this Council “in the number of members, in the capital which they
control, and in the social, industrial and political influence which
they exert ... is by far the largest and most powerful league of
conservative and public-spirited citizens ever formed in any country of
the world.”[5]
There are also a number of national associations in various trades
endeavoring to prevent wage-earners from submerging their individuality
in unions. They have been known to refuse advertising to papers which
were friendly to organized labor--on the highest grounds, of course,
such high grounds being a refusal “to pander to the unthrifty class.”
They have been known to use the black-list, though of course they do
not approve of it. They have been known to place spies in labor unions
to protect workers against themselves. They have been known to use what
revolutionists call the “provocateur”: in Cleveland during the garment
strike there was a glib, plausible person who talked dynamite in an
effort to discredit the union. There have been some actual “planting”
of dynamite as at Lawrence, a little beating up as at Calumet,
kidnapping, private armies, gatling guns and armored trains as at West
Virginia and Colorado.
It is well known, of course, that newspapers make every effort to
enable workingmen to reach public opinion, and make their appeal not to
force but to the national conscience. All civil rights are carefully
guarded for workers as in Paterson, Lawrence, and the southern lumber
camps. Employers are precise in their desire to secure judges who have
no bias whatever. And the voters are an active, intelligent body of
imaginative democrats fighting at every step to see that justice is
done.
The fact is that nothing is so stubbornly resisted as the attempt
to organize labor into effective unions. Yet it is labor organized
that alone can stand between America and the creation of a permanent,
servile class. Unless labor is powerful enough to be respected, it
is doomed to a degrading servitude. Without unions no such power is
possible. Without unions industrial democracy is unthinkable. Without
democracy in industry, that is where it counts most, there is no such
thing as democracy in America. For only through the union can the
wage-earner participate in the control of industry, and only through
the union can he obtain the discipline needed for self-government.
Those who fight unions may think they are fighting its obvious errors,
but what they are really against is just this encroachment of democracy
upon business.
Now men don’t agitate for democracy because it is a fine theory. They
come to desire it because they have to, because absolutism does not
work out any longer to civilized ends. Employers are not wise enough to
govern their men with unlimited power, and not generous enough to be
trusted with autocracy. That is the plain fact of the situation: the
essential reason why private industry has got to prepare itself for
democratic control.
I don’t pretend for one moment that labor unions are far-seeing,
intelligent, or wise in their tactics. I have never seen a political
democracy that aroused uncritical enthusiasm. It seems to me simply
that the effort to build up unions is as much the work of pioneers, as
the extension of civilization into the wilderness. The unions are the
first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic
life. They may not succeed, but if they don’t their failure will be a
tragedy for civilization, a loss of coöperative effort, a baulking of
energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
The unions are struggling where life is nakedly brutal, where the
dealings of men have not been raised even to the level of discussion
which we find in politics. There is almost as little civil procedure
in industry as there is in Mexico, or as there was on the American
frontier. To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and
act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot,
a victim of your class tradition. The virtues of labor to-day are
frontier virtues, its struggles are for rights and privileges that the
rest of us inherited from our unrefined ancestors.
Men are fighting for the beginnings of industrial self-government. If
the world were wise that fight would be made easier for them. But it
is not wise. Few of us care for ten minutes in a month about these
beginnings or what they promise. And so the burden falls entirely
upon the workers who are directly concerned. They have got to win
civilization, they have got to take up the task of fastening a
worker’s control upon business.
No wonder they despise the scab. He is justly despised. Far from being
the independent, liberty-loving soul he is sometimes painted, the scab
is a traitor to the economic foundations of democracy. He makes the
basic associations of men difficult. He is an indigestible lump in the
common life, and it is he who generates nine-tenths of the violence
in labor disputes. Democracies of workingmen have to fight him out of
sheer self-protection, as a nation has to fight a mutiny, as doctors
have to fight a quack. The clubbing of scabs is not a pretty thing; the
importation of scabs is an uglier one. It is perhaps true that there
is, as ex-President Eliot said, no such thing as peaceful picketing.
There is no such thing as a peaceful coast defense or a gentlemanly
border patrol. The picket-line is to these little economic democracies
the guardian of their integrity, their chief protection from foreign
invasion.
Without some security no internal growth is possible. As long as the
unions have to fight for mere existence, their immense constructive
possibilities will be obscured in the desperation of the struggle.
The strikebreaker, then, is not only a peril to the union, he is a
peril to the larger interests of the nation. He keeps workingmen from
their natural organization, deprives them of the strength that union
brings, and thwarts all attempts to train men for industrial democracy.
Instead of discipline and preparation for the task of the future,
instead of deep-grounded experience in coöperative effort, we shall
get, if strike-breakers and blind legislators and brutal policemen and
prejudiced judges and visionless employers prevail, despair and hate
and servile rebellions.
There are certain preliminaries of civilization which the great mass of
workingmen have not yet won. They have not yet won a living wage, they
have not yet won anything like security of employment, they have not
yet won respect from the government, they have not yet won the right
to be consulted as to the conditions under which they work. Until they
do, it is idle to talk about industrial peace, and folly to look for
“reasonable” adjustments of difficulties. Reason begins when men have
enough power to command respect; a coöperative solution of industrial
problems is possible only when all the partners to the coöperation
must listen to each other. Until labor is powerful enough to compel
that, it cannot trust to the benevolence of its masters,--it has to
be suspicious, it has to cling to the few weapons left it, for labor
is right in supposing that no national conscience and no employers’
conscience yet exhibited are adequate.
There are certain occupations where workingmen have won these
preliminaries of civilized life. The most notable example is in
railroading, where the Brotherhoods have become a real part of the
industrial structure. They are so powerful that they can’t be left out.
More than that, they are so powerful that they don’t have to flirt
with insurrection. It is the weak unions, the unorganized and shifting
workers, who talk sabotage and flare up into a hundred little popgun
rebellions. Guerilla warfare is the only tactic open to weakness. But
where unions can meet the employers on a real equality, as railroad
workers can, there you will find very little insurrectionary talk.
You will meet in these powerful unions what radical labor leaders call
conservatism. That is a very interesting accusation. The railroad men
have won wages and respect far beyond anything that the I. W. W. can
hope for. They have power which makes the I. W. W. look insignificant.
If the I. W. W. could win for the unskilled anything like the position
and responsibility that railroad men enjoy, it would have achieved
something that might well be called a social revolution. The fact is
that the railroad men are “conservatives” in the labor world, just as
the Swiss are conservatives among the nations. They have won the very
things the lack of which makes rebellion necessary. For if men are
ground down in poverty, if the rights of assemblage and free speech
are denied them, if their protests are ineffective and despised, then
rebellion is the only possible way out. But when there is something
like a democracy where wrong is not a matter of life and death, but
of better and worse, then the preliminaries of civilization have been
achieved, and more deliberate tactics become possible.
The I. W. W., the anarchists and the syndicalists know this. That is
why the reformer is an object of special hatred amongst them. They
say, quite rightly, that reform undermines the revolutionary spirit,
and substitutes for flaming impatience and heroic moods, concrete
adjustments and grudging change. They say that only passionate revolt
can redeem society from stagnant mediocrity. They prefer the atmosphere
of temporary rebellion to the somewhat slow-footed and generally
uninspired method of a clumsy democracy. Thus the I. W. W. makes no
real effort to build up permanent unions. That is to say, it does
not look with favor upon the cohesive power of funds and fraternal
benefits. I have heard Haywood say that when a union had something
to lose, the spontaneity of rebellion was gone. He hopes to unite
wage-earners by militant feeling, rather than to knit them together by
common discipline and common interests. The I. W. W. prefers revolt to
solidarity--of course, it imagines that it can have workers united and
militant too. But in practice it is quite ready to destroy union for
the sake of militancy.
Syndicalists and anarchists half recognize the fact that only a small
minority of the workers can be aroused to bitter revolt. So they have
begun to sing the praises of a “conscious minority.” In other words
they have abandoned the path of democracy, because it is incompatible
with the temper they most admire. Workers who were really effectively
organized would produce great changes in our social structure, but
they would have to act with a deliberation that no temperamental
anarchist can stomach. This is the paradox of the labor movement, that
those who can’t overthrow society dream of doing it, while those who
could, don’t want to. If there is one occupation where syndicalist
tactics might work, it would be on the railroads. A small minority
could paralyze the country and precipitate a General Strike. But
American railroad men are not likely to do this because they don’t
need to. They have a stake in the country, a genuine representation in
public opinion, and they can at all times secure a respectful hearing.
If that were taken away from them, if their unions were disintegrated,
they too might take to conspiracy.
It is a commonplace of radicalism that power makes for peace. It is
deeply true of the labor movement that the alternatives before it are
powerful peace and weak insurrection. Thus if the I. W. W. should
succeed in organizing the unskilled on any extensive scale, the I. W.
W., as we know it, would have abolished itself. For the unions which
were created would inevitably seek a different type of leader: men of
administrative capacity who can wield power without exhausting it.
The extreme weakness of the unskilled workers has made them listen so
eagerly to the large hopes of men like Haywood, Ettor and Giovannitti.
Wherever democracy is feeble vague insurrection is its dream. And so
the civilized hope for labor is conditioned upon its conquest of power
in the life of the nation. This alone will make peaceful adjustments
possible, not the moral guardianship of the employers, not the charity
of the community. It is the rich who don’t need ready cash, it is the
strong who don’t have to fight.
I know how offensive all this will be to refined and sensitive
people. Those who believe in disarmament have come to think that the
possession of power is a temptation to use it. Perhaps that is true.
But wage-earners have no choice in the matter. If they abandon power,
employers will not abandon theirs. To preach mere peace, then, is to
preach a docile exploitation. Perhaps when society has learned to
respect labor, then society and labor will disarm. But that day is not
our day. It is not pleasant, but it’s true: if labor turns the other
cheek, that cheek will be smitten without much compunction. For the
Golden Rule works best among equals.
So the real peril to the nation from the side of labor is the existence
of great masses of unorganized, and perhaps unorganizable, workers.
From them will come most of the street-fights, the beatings and the
sabotage. They have no share in the country, they have “nothing to lose
but their chains.” But with the tactics open to them they haven’t “a
world to win.” They can parade and shout, call the police “cossacks,”
and talk revolution. But they have to put up with the pettiest gains.
To the weakness of all labor is to be ascribed its lack of interest
in the efficiency of industry. An employer will tell you in one breath
that he will stand no interference with “his” business, and in the next
that his employees take no interest in that business. Of course they
don’t. They haven’t any _interest_. They are unconsulted outsiders.
You might as well expect an Indian peasant to be interested in the
administrative efficiency of the British government. What possibility
is there for a sense of craftsmanship when you are a mere hired hand?
What incentive have wage-earners to take a personal interest in the
problems of industry, when nobody asks their advice, and everybody
resents it? If labor is apathetic, hostile to efficiency, without much
pride, it is because labor is not a part of industrial management.
People don’t take a sympathetic interest in the affairs of state until
they are voting members of the state. You can’t expect civic virtue
from a disfranchised class, nor industrial virtue from the industrially
disfranchised.
The labor problem, then, is at bottom the effort of wage-earners to
achieve power. And that effort points, neither to insurrection nor
inefficiency, but to a correction of the weakness and unimportance
which make rebellion necessary and destroy an interest in work. This is
what the fighting and turmoil are about. Employers will tell you that
they don’t mind raising wages half so much as they mind giving unions
“something to say.” Yet “something to say” is just what the workers
want. They know that better conditions are very elusive unless they
have the power to enforce them, to see that what is given with one
hand is not taken away with the other. The great battles of labor are
for recognition of the union or to maintain its integrity. It happens
that the great battles of American history have also been fought for
independence and union.
When these prime conditions are achieved, labor’s demands tend toward
an increasing share of control. The right of summary discharge is
the issue in many a strike. For unions will encroach more and more
on matters of discipline: they are seeking to raise themselves to a
partnership in the management. It is no idle guess to suppose that they
will come to demand the right to choose their own foremen, perhaps
to elect some of the directors, and to take not only wages, but a
percentage of the profits.
It is obvious, of course, that this assumption of power cannot go
to indefinite limits. There are people concerned about industry
besides the workers in it. The consumers will have a control, and the
state, which while it includes workers and purchasers is larger than
particular groups of them, the state too will have a say about the
control of industry. It is one of the immense problems of the future
to adjust these conflicts and to reach some working plan. But that
problem has only outlined itself dimly as yet. Labor is far from having
achieved anything like its legitimate influence in the conduct of
industry, and the best hope for future adjustment lies in the immense
discipline that power will enforce upon the worker.
In this movement to eat into economic absolutism, very perplexing
questions, of course, arise. What is the proper structure for a union?
Shall it be organized by crafts, or occupations, or industries? With
amalgamation or by federation? How shall the unions be governed: by
representatives or by direct vote? In fact, there is hardly a problem
of constitutional government which doesn’t appear in acute form among
the workers. And in passing, one might suggest that scholars who wish
to see sovereignty in the making cannot do better than to go among
the unions. They will find the initiative and referendum in constant
use. They will find all phases of corruption and misrepresentation:
the disappointments of indiscriminate democracy and the blight of
officialism. There is a long history of bickerings over sectional
interests as against national ones, home rule, devolution,--for all
of these matters are, under different phrases, of course, the daily
subject of union discussion.
The solutions are of very great interest to the nation. For on the
capacity of labor to develop an efficient government for itself hangs
the decision as to how much responsibility the unions can afford to
assume. It is the development of a citizenship in industry that the
labor movement has before it. It will have to work out the intricate
problem of popular control in relation to technical administration. Any
useful kind of industrial training, then, has got to serve this need.
It is obvious that mere skill at some one process is no preparation.
Nor is a generalized knowledge of industry enough. There must be added
to it an understanding of what may be called the political problem of
labor, the questions that arise in its efforts at self-government, in
its adjustments to the world that surrounds the industry.
There is nothing simple and perfectly reassuring ahead. With
wage-earners about one-tenth organized, unionism has a gigantic
problem before it. And there seems to be no limit to the methods by
which organization is thwarted. Race is played against race, religion
against religion, there are spies, black-lists, lockouts, thugs,
evictions, the denial of free speech and the right to assemble. Things
are done in America to-day which are more lurid than melodrama. After
thinking of the promise of the labor movement, you have to turn back
to present realities, to that brutal struggle in West Virginia, for
example, where a gatling gun mounted on a railroad car was run through
a mining village at night, “spitting bullets at the rate of two hundred
and fifty a minute.”
You think of the powerful organizations ready to combat every sign of
unionism, of the congestion of immigrants in the labor market, of the
hostility of courts and newspapers to the preliminaries of industrial
democracy. I don’t know, no one knows, whether labor can realize its
promise. The odds seem to be overwhelming. There is a real struggle,
a trial of strength. It is not yet a matter of justice in which “there
is much to be said on both sides.” Labor is still fighting to be
admitted to the sphere of human society where it is possible to talk of
adjusting difficulties. A few workers, like the skilled railroad men,
have just about climbed in. But the great mass has not been made part
of that world where decisions are made and policies formulated. The
unions are struggling to give the wage-earners representation, and that
is why the hopes of democracy are bound up with the labor movement.
Bound up, not with its words and dogmas, but with the purpose which
animates it. Labor needs criticism, needs inventive thought, needs
advice and help. But no one can give any of these things who has not
grasped with full sympathy that impulse for industrial democracy which
is the key to the movement. Without this sympathy the crudity of labor
is shocking, the intrigue of labor politics disgusting, the tone of
labor discouraging; but with an understanding that a new interest is
rising to power it is possible, I think, to find a glimmer of meaning
in the bewildering intricacy of the whole matter.
CHAPTER VI
The Funds of Progress
By this time, I imagine, the reader will be wondering how these modern
ambitions are to be financed. For at the core of all the spiritual
demands of the labor movement there is a perfectly frank desire for
more wealth. The consumer attempting to pull down prices and jack
up quality is making the same demand from another angle. And all
through society there runs an increasing agitation for better cities,
for a more attractive countryside, for enlarged schools, for health
campaigns, for a thousand elements of civilization which cost money and
pay in happiness. Where is this money to come from? It must come, says
the radical, out of unearned wealth.
But what is unearned wealth? Rent of land, says the single taxer; the
tariff tax, says the free trader; watered stock, inherited fortunes,
speculative profits, monopoly prices,--these have been named; rent,
interest, and dividends, say the socialists. Most employers would point
to the wages of inefficient workingmen.
There is one item of agreement: a fund of wealth exists which to-day is
being diverted into the pockets of those who do no adequate service--we
may call that fund the Social Surplus. It is made up of all the leaks,
the useless payments, the idle demands, the inefficiency, the extortion
and parasitism of industrial life. This surplus is the legitimate fund
of progress.
It is quite clear that no sane man wishes to attack the economic life
of a nation in any way that would make it less productive. So when
editorial writers and financial experts cry out that a certain tax will
ruin industry, they are making a charge which would be convincing if
it were true. But the trouble is that nine times out of ten they are
either dishonest or superstitious. They complain on every occasion
with the slightest provocation. They have cried “wolf” so often that
reformers don’t listen any more. Business has a way of shouting
before it is hurt, and pretending that the least little thing is the
sack of the world. Every labor law, every business regulation, every
insignificant tariff change calls forth clouds of gloom pierced by a
shriek that panic is upon us. It is a pity, for the chief effect of
this latent hysteria is to neutralize whatever wisdom business men
have to give. Now in the years to come, we shall have to cut into the
unearned surplus of industry. If it is done wisely, the attack will
be confined to what is really unearned. But the opinions of business
men may be no index of the truth. They will, I fear, make just as
much commotion over a tax that hits the surplus as over one that hits
production itself. When we attack the parasite they will say it is the
tree.
Yet the modern business man is actually beginning to locate portions
of the surplus. The worker who loafs is the first to catch his eye;
then the inefficient worker. So business men are advocating industrial
education as a way of making labor more productive. To employ a less
productive worker when a more efficient one is available would be
just so much waste. In large business there is a constant effort to
cut down costs, and one of the vaunted achievements of the trusts has
been to eliminate a host of middlemen, drawing profits for work that
need not be done under a proper organization. Then too, a big item in
many business houses is rent paid to a landlord. The more progressive
manufacturers are beginning to wonder whether the cost of government
couldn’t be shifted on to these landlords, who seem to be a very
unproductive class. So the single tax makes headway among business men,
under the slogan “Untax industry.”
This effort to organize out of existence the unproductive is what is
meant by an attack on “unearned” wealth. Wherever you can substitute
a machine for a man, a good worker for a poor one, a few salaried
managers for an army of jobbers, you have located some of the social
surplus. The trusts have been the leaders in this work. They have given
us a definition of unearned income. It is a payment for an unnecessary
service.
Take the case against the landlord. There are people who say that no
individual has a right to own any portion of the globe. The earth
belongs to all the people born on to it. But that is one of those
unimpeachable sentiments which mean very little in practice. In the
early days on this continent it would probably have been impossible to
open up the West unless land was given away to the settler. There is no
sense then in describing the economic rent some of those settlers took
as unearned wealth. The case against the landlord is made out only when
society has some better way of administering its natural resources. If
New York City were capable of managing its land, then landlordism in
New York City would have become unnecessary and parasitic. But if the
city isn’t capable of that task, if it can, on the other hand, spend
wisely twenty per cent. of the ground values, then landlordism has
become twenty per cent. parasitic.
Take the charge of the socialist that not only rent of land but
interest on capital is unearned. Most socialists seem to imagine that
interest is in its very nature a useless payment. The idea is clearly
too simple for the facts. Interest would be unearned if society had
devised some means of creating capital that didn’t require saving by
individuals. To a certain extent society has done that. For example,
when a city starts to build a subway it needs capital. It can go to the
bankers, but it will have to pay a very high rate of interest. It may
be that the city could do its own banking and secure the money at a
lower rate of interest. In that case the difference between the lower
and the higher rate would represent unearned wealth. Now the time may
come, I am inclined to think it is sure to come, when the government
will be operating the basic industries, railroads, mines, and so forth.
It will be possible then to finance government enterprise out of the
profits of its industries, to eliminate interest, and substitute
collective saving.
There is no blanket case against the landlord or the capitalists.
The socialist contention stands or falls by men’s ability to propose
industrial methods which operate without the need of paying rent
or interest. The landlord is an old-fashioned instrument to be
superseded as fast as a less costly one can be devised. He is like the
stage-coach, useless only when the railroad is possible. He is like the
jobber, useless when he is no longer needed. He is like the telegraph,
too costly when the wireless is possible. He is like the $100,000 man
on a salary, unnecessary when better and less expensive men are ready
to do the work.
This it seems to me is the way we shall locate the funds of progress.
When a reform administration comes into power it generally begins by
cutting out the sinecures, consolidating jobs, substituting competent
for incompetent officials. The money saved can be devoted to social
purposes. Well, a very capable administration does not step there. It
may eliminate the contractor, and do government work directly, and save
a great deal of money in the process. If it has wider plans, it may
look for new sources of wealth, as Lloyd George did in England, it may
begin to tap the rent of land. Governments can eat more and more into
unearned wealth by income taxes, graded drastically, by inheritance
taxes on large fortunes. If these funds are spent for civilization
they will not impair industry, they will on the contrary increase
its efficiency. The state may encroach continuously. The question at
issue always is whether the state can spend the money more wisely than
the private individual. Could the government make better use of Mr.
Carnegie’s huge fortune than Mr. Carnegie does?--that is the problem.
Are there better uses to which it might be put than those which Mr.
Carnegie has in mind? If there are, then the government is entirely
justified in substituting itself for Mr. Carnegie as a dispenser of
libraries and peace palaces.
The more competent government becomes, the wider its outlook and
the surer its method, the more surplus it will find available. The
community is engaged in a competition with rich men as to which can
make the better use of the nation’s wealth. There is no question of
inalienable rights. It is a question of good use and bad use, wise use
and foolish use. When Mr. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute
he did something which is wiser than most of what our government has
yet shown itself capable. But when millionaires invest in ropes of
pearls and flotillas of yachts they tempt the taxing power of even the
most stupid government.
The cry is sure to go up that all this is a proposal to destroy
“incentive.” A debater might reply quickly that there are no end
of “incentives” in the world to-day which ought by all means to be
destroyed. But the cry would not recur so regularly were there not a
genuine fear behind it. Men look at the industrial world to-day, and
find that it produces enormous quantities of goods. They reason that
any change would result in the production of less goods. That is the
logic of their fear.
Perhaps you think I’m unjust, that worldly men could not possibly
reason in so muddled a way. Well, leave the editorial writers and
the speech-making bankers. Go to the orthodox economists who talk
about incentive all the time. Prof. Marshall, for example, refers in
one place to “that measurement of motive which is the chief task of
economic science.” Obviously, if economics could perform such a task
it would be one of the most useful sciences in the world. The art of
life would have found a very solid basis if we could follow Marshall
and measure “the payment that is required to supply a sufficient
incentive.” But at no point in the whole field of political economy
is the withering effect of a bad method so evident as it is in the
very pages from which I am quoting. Marshall lays great stress on the
measurement of motive. He says that economics leads all the other
social sciences, because it deals not only with the _quality_ of human
motive but with _quantity, measurable in money_.
What ails that idea is that it conceals a vicious circle. Measure
motive in terms of money? If a man to-day receives a hundred dollars
for a piece of work, the measure of his motive is a hundred dollars.
Is it? That is just what remains to be proved. If you take the money
paid men to-day as a measure of motive, you assume what you started to
discover. For you set out to find what you need to pay him in order to
provide an incentive. You end by calling what you did pay him a measure
of motive. You have begged the question completely. It is as pure
a piece of sophistry as the statement that opium puts you to sleep
because it is an opiate.
Supposing you set out to discover how much food a man needs in order
to live. You meet a glutton and inquire about his diet. You then
announce that what this glutton eats is what this glutton needs. Would
you call that science? You meet an anemic person, register his diet,
and announce that the food he consumes is a measure of his needs. This
is literally what the orthodox economist does. He meets an economic
glutton, a millionaire, and discovers that this man built a railroad,
opened up new territory, and took fifty million dollars for the job.
That means, says the economist, that in order to provide sufficient
incentive for this magnificent enterprise fifty million dollars is
required. He meets a half-starved mill-worker, who produces cloth at
the rate of nine dollars a week. That proves, says the economist, that
you must pay nine dollars a week for this work; to pay any more would
be contrary to the principles of economics.
To say that economists measure motive in money is to say in roundabout
fashion that whatever is, is necessary; then, adding insult to
incompetence, to infer that whatever is, is right. Surely it is obvious
as sunlight that people’s incomes to-day have only a very slight
relation to the “payment that is required to supply a sufficient
incentive.” In the case of a boy who inherits eighty million dollars
from a father who inherited it from the grandfather, it is clear that
this income has nothing to do with incentive. Well, all through our
social system these crazy anomalies occur. Unskilled labor is bought in
the open market for a shabby keep and no provision for wear and tear.
Competitive wages are no index of motives: they measure what a man has
to take in order to live. Skilled labor does a bit better by organizing
a monopoly, and fighting for higher pay. The real directors of industry
are paid fixed salaries for their ability, and make fortunes “on
the side.” Inventive genius lives from hand to mouth, and some smart
person capitalizes its achievements. It pays better to own land than to
cultivate it, to draw dividends than to create them. The great fortunes
go to those who control the franchises, the forests, the water-powers,
the mines, not to the engineers, the administrators, and the workers
who are hired to use them. If I can “corner” the wheat supply, if I
can make food scarce, if I can contrive some new fraud or stimulate
some new madness in fashions, I can grow rich beyond the dreams of
honest labor. Money measure incentive: there is no real relation to-day
between money-making and useful work.
Power, position, pull, custom, weakness, oversupply, the class monopoly
of higher education, inheritance, accident, the strategy of industrial
war--these are the things which determine income--not the incentive
which is necessary. The work of the world is not done because the
producers get what stimulates them to their best effort. It is done
under the compulsion of circumstances, grounded in habit, and the lure
of big rewards is in the rarest cases a lure to human service. That
is why the industrial world is capable of tremendous reorganization
without impairing its efficiency. A better distribution of incomes
would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from
the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of
the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair.
It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
Now the working class has very excellent uses for money that it can
secure. It invests it directly in human life, in the food, clothing,
shelter, and recreation which are its basis. So the pressure of the
labor movement is a force that can make for a wiser use of wealth. If
employers find that they “cannot” pay higher wages, their real business
is not to resist labor, but to increase the efficiency of production
so that they can. They will have to learn to finance industry better,
they will have to eliminate the sinecures of their cousins and their
uncles, they will have to scale down capitalization, and do without the
hundred and one middlemen who extract a profit.
That is the only way they can meet the pressure of labor from one
side and of the consumer on the other. Both of those movements are
really demands for a wiser management of business. Both of them are
interested in industrial efficiency. This may seem a strange thing to
say in the face of labor’s hostility to labor-saving devices. But the
reason for the hostility is that labor at present gains very little,
almost nothing, by its increased productivity. When labor and the
consumer really share in industrial progress, as they will when they
are powerful enough, we shall have two forces constantly at work to
eliminate the parasite and abolish waste.
The commercial adventurer has no real interest in efficiency. Between
useful service and some mad freak the decisive point is which will
pay him the most. But consumers and workingmen are interested directly
in making industry produce the greatest quantity and the best quality
of goods at the least possible cost in effort. They are made poorer by
money devoted to producing useless luxuries. They pay all the cost of
waste, parasitism, and inefficiency. That is why the real progress of
industry is bound up intimately with their demands.
The more they press the better. I know how much this will harass the
business man. But his necessity will be the mother of invention. When
he finds that he faces on one side an organized labor movement, on
another the organized consumer, and on another the taxing power of the
state, when he is no longer able to cover waste by reducing wages or
raising prices, then he will have to devote himself more and more to
the real business of industrial management. He will begin to cut down
his extravagant selling costs, he will have to finance his enterprise
less expensively, he will have to squeeze out watered stock, he will
have to scale down futile salaries, do without some of his “side”
ventures, spend less time on the stock market, and give the best of his
thought to coördinating the industry.
These necessities will be the opportunity of the business man with a
scientific training. Already we are beginning to see that in the light
of its possibilities, industry to-day is inconceivably wasteful. The
raw product is won from the earth, it is transported hundreds of miles
over expensive railroads, it passes through ten or twenty different
manipulators, is manufactured, and passes again through an infinitely
complicated series of operations to the ultimate consumer. The great
water-power resources of this country are said to be not one-seventh
developed. Yet their primary power alone “exceeds our entire mechanical
power in use, would operate every mill, drive every spindle, propel
every train and boat, and light every city, town, and village in the
country.”[6] Coal burned on the American locomotive is estimated by the
Railway Age Gazette to be only 45% efficient. The whole conservation
movement in its infinite ramifications is an answer to the pressing
demands that people are making upon industry. So far in America we have
been spendthrifts with our resources, letting coal lie half mined,
skinning the forests, and obtaining by agriculture a yield that shames
us in the eyes of the European farmer.
The wealth exists to pay for democracy. Our dreams are not idle. We are
not a poor people who need fill our minds with gorgeous and impossible
visions. Labor can go ahead with its demands, the consumer with his, we
can enter upon social works to transform our sooty life into something
more worthy of our dignity. There are huge wastes to be eliminated,
parasitic incomes to be cut off, large classes of people to be turned
from useless into useful effort, great inventions to be utilized. But
these things will be done only if there is constant pressure on the
industrial system from those who work in it and live by it.
CHAPTER VII
“A Nation of Villagers,”
--_Bernard Shaw_
It has been said that no trust could have been created without breaking
the law. Neither could astronomy in the time of Galileo. If you build
up foolish laws and insist that invention is a crime, well--then
it is a crime. That is undeniably true, but not very interesting.
Of course, you can’t possibly treat the trusts as crimes. First of
all, nobody knows what the trust laws mean. The spectacle of an
enlightened people trying in vain for twenty-five years to find out
the intention of a statute that it has enacted--that is one of those
episodes that only madmen can appreciate. You see, it is possible to
sympathize with the difficulties of a scholar trying to decipher the
hieroglyphics of some ancient people, but when statesmen can’t read
the things they’ve written themselves, it begins to look as if some
imp had been playing pranks. The men who rule this country to-day
were all alive, and presumably sane, when the Sherman Act was passed.
They all say in public that it is a great piece of legislation--an
“exquisite instrument” someone called it the other day. The highest
paid legal intelligence has concentrated on the Act. The Supreme Court
has interpreted it many times, ending with the enormous assumption
that reason had something to do with the law. The Supreme Court was
denounced for this: the reformers said that if there was any reason in
the law, the devil himself had got hold of it. As I write, Congress is
engaged in trying to define what it thinks it means by the Act....
That uncertainty hasn’t prevented a mass of indictments, injunctions,
lawsuits. It has, if anything, invited them. But of course, you can’t
enforce the criminal law against every “unfair” business practice.
Just try to imagine the standing army of inspectors, detectives,
prosecutors, and judges, the city of courthouses and jails, the
enormous costs, and the unremitting zeal--if you cannot see the
folly, at least see the impossibility of the method. To work with it
seriously would not only bring business to a standstill, it would
drain the energy of America more thoroughly than the bitterest foreign
war. Visualize life in America, if you can, when the government at
Washington and forty-eight state governments really undertook not our
present desultory pecking, but a systematic enforcement of the criminal
law. The newspapers would enjoy it for a week, and everybody would be
excited; in two weeks it would be a bore; in six, there would be such a
revolt that everyone, radical and conservative, would be ready to wreck
the government and hang the attorney-general. For these “criminal”
practices are so deep in the texture of our lives; they affect so many,
their results are so intimate that anything like a “surgical” cutting
at evil would come close to killing the patient.
If the anti-trust people really grasped the full meaning of what they
said, and if they really had the power or the courage to do what
they propose, they would be engaged in one of the most destructive
agitations that America has known. They would be breaking up the
beginning of a collective organization, thwarting the possibility of
coöperation, and insisting upon submitting industry to the wasteful,
the planless scramble of little profiteers. They would make impossible
any deliberate and constructive use of our natural resources, they
would thwart any effort to form the great industries into coördinated
services, they would preserve commercialism as the undisputed master
of our lives, they would lay a premium on the strategy of industrial
war,--they would, if they could. For these anti-trust people have never
seen the possibilities of organized industries. They have seen only
the obvious evils, the birth-pains, the undisciplined strut of youth,
the bad manners, the greed, and the trickery. The trusts have been
ruthless, of course. No one tried to guide them; they have broken the
law in a thousand ways, largely because the law was such that they had
to.
At any rate, I should not like to answer before a just tribunal for
the harm done this country in the last twenty-five years by the
stupid hostility of anti-trust laws. How much they have perverted the
constructive genius of this country it is impossible to estimate. They
have blocked any policy of welcome and use, they have concentrated a
nation’s thinking on inessentials, they have driven creative business
men to underhand methods, and put a high money value on intrigue and
legal cunning, demagoguery and waste. The trusts have survived it all,
but in mutilated form, the battered makeshifts of a trampled promise.
They have learned every art of evasion--the only art reformers allowed
them to learn.
It is said that the economy of trusts is unreal. Yet no one has ever
tried the economies of the trust in any open, deliberate fashion. The
amount of energy that has had to go into repelling stupid attack,
the adjustments that had to be made underground--it is a wonder the
trusts achieved what they did to bring order out of chaos, and forge
an instrument for a nation’s business. You have no more right to judge
the trusts by what they are than to judge the labor movement by what it
is. Both of them are in that preliminary state where they are fighting
for existence, and any real outburst of constructive effort has been
impossible for them.
But revolutions are not stopped by blind resistance. They are only
perverted. And as an exhibition of blind resistance to a great promise,
the trust campaign of the American democracy is surely unequalled.
Think of contriving correctives for a revolution, such as ordering
business men to compete with each other. It is as if we said: “Let not
thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth; let thy right hand fight
thy left hand, and in the name of God let neither win.” Bernard Shaw
remarked several years ago that “after all, America is not submitting
to the Trusts without a struggle. The first steps have already been
taken by the village constable. He is no doubt preparing a new question
for immigrants” ... after asking them whether they are anarchists or
polygamists, he is to add “‘Do you approve of Trusts?’ but pending this
supreme measure of national defense he has declared in several states
that trusts will certainly be put in the stocks and whipped.”
There has been no American policy on the trust question: there has
been merely a widespread resentment. The small local competitors who
were wiped out became little centers of bad feeling: these nationally
organized industries were looked upon as foreign invaders. They were
arrogant, as the English in Ireland or the Germans in Alsace, and much
of the feeling for local democracy attached itself to the revolt
against these national despotisms. The trusts made enemies right and
left: they squeezed the profits of the farmer, they made life difficult
for the shopkeeper, they abolished jobbers and travelling salesmen,
they closed down factories, they exercised an enormous control over
credit through their size and through their eastern connections.
Labor was no match for them, state legislatures were impotent before
them. They came into the life of the simple American community as
a tremendous revolutionary force, upsetting custom, changing men’s
status, demanding a readjustment for which people were unready. Of
course, there was anti-trust feeling; of course, there was a blind
desire to smash them. Men had been ruined and they were too angry to
think, too hard pressed to care much about the larger life which the
trusts suggested.
This feeling came to a head in Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech
in 1896. “When you come before us and tell us that we shall disturb
your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business
interests by your action.... The man who is employed for wages is
as much a business man as his employers. The attorney in a country
town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great
metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business
man as the merchant of New York. The farmer ... is as much a business
man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price
of grain. The miners ... It is for these that we speak ... we are
fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity.”
What Bryan was really defending was the old and simple life of America,
a life that was doomed by the great organization that had come into the
world. He thought he was fighting the plutocracy: as a matter of fact
he was fighting something much deeper than that; he was fighting the
larger scale of human life. The Eastern money power controlled the new
industrial system, and Bryan fought it. But what he and his people
hated from the bottom of their souls were the economic conditions
which had upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands upon
democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village
loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal
relationships of the modern world.
Bryan has never been able to adjust himself to the new world in which
he lives. That is why he is so irresistibly funny to sophisticated
newspaper men. His virtues, his habits, his ideas, are the simple,
direct, shrewd qualities of early America. He is the true Don Quixote
of our politics, for he moves in a world that has ceased to exist.
He is a more genuine conservative than some propertied bigot. Bryan
stands for the popular tradition of America, whereas most of his
enemies stand merely for the power that is destroying that tradition.
Bryan is what America was; his critics are generally defenders of what
America has become. And neither seems to have any vision of what
America is to be.
Yet there has always been great power behind Bryan, the power of those
who in one way or another were hurt by the greater organization that
America was developing. The Populists were part of that power. La
Follette and the insurgent Republicans expressed it. It was easily
a political majority of the American people. The Republican Party
disintegrated under the pressure of the revolt. The Bull Moose gathered
much of its strength from it. The Socialists have got some of it.
But in 1912 it swept the Democratic Party, and by a combination of
circumstances, carried the country. The plutocracy was beaten in
politics, and the power that Bryan spoke for in 1896, the forces that
had made muckraking popular, captured the government. They were led by
a man who was no part of the power that he represented.
Woodrow Wilson is an outsider capable of skilled interpretation. He
is an historian, and that has helped him to know the older tradition
of America. He is a student of theory, and like most theorists of his
generation he is deeply attached to the doctrines that swayed the world
when America was founded.
But Woodrow Wilson at least knows that there is a new world. “There
is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are
discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That
singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done
twenty years ago. We are in the presence of a new organization of
society.... We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from
top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our
life.” You could not make a more sweeping statement of the case. The
President is perfectly aware of what has happened, and he says at the
very outset that “our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old
system ... the old positive formulas do not fit the present problems.”
You wait eagerly for some new formula. The new formula is this: “I
believe the time has come when the governments of this country, both
state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely and
carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of
life.” Now that is a new formula, because it means a willingness to use
the power of government much more extensively.
But for what purpose is this power to be used? There, of course, is
the rub. It is to be used to “_restore_ our politics to their full
spiritual vigor _again_, and our national life, whether in trade, in
industry, or in what concerns us only as families and individuals, to
its purity, its self-respect, and its _pristine_ strength and freedom.”
The ideal is the old ideal, the ideal of Bryan, the method is the new
one of government interference.
That, I believe, is the inner contradiction of Woodrow Wilson. He knows
that there is a new world demanding new methods, but he dreams of an
older world. He is torn between the two. It is a very deep conflict in
him between what he knows and what he feels.
His feeling is, as he says, for “the man on the make.” “For my part,
I want the pigmy to have a chance to come out” ... “Just let some of
the youngsters I know have a chance and they’ll give these gentlemen
points. Lend them a little money. They can’t get any now. See to it
that when they have got a local market they can’t be squeezed out of
it.” Nowhere in his speeches will you find any sense that it may be
possible to organize the fundamental industries on some deliberate plan
for national service. He is thinking always about somebody’s chance to
build up a profitable business; he likes the idea that somebody can
beat somebody else, and the small business man takes on the virtues of
David in a battle with Goliath.
“Have you found trusts that thought as much of their men as they did of
their machinery?” he asks, forgetting that few people have ever found
competitive textile mills or clothing factories that did. There isn’t
an evil of commercialism that Wilson isn’t ready to lay at the door of
the trusts. He becomes quite reckless in his denunciation of the New
Devil--Monopoly--and of course, by contrast the competitive business
takes on a halo of light. It is amazing how clearly he sees the evils
that trusts do, how blind he is to the evils that his supporters do.
You would think that the trusts were the first oppressors of labor;
you would think they were the first business organization that failed
to achieve the highest possible efficiency. The pretty record of
competition throughout the Nineteenth Century is forgotten. Suddenly
all that is a glorious past which we have lost. You would think
that competitive commercialism was really a generous, chivalrous,
high-minded stage of human culture.
“We design that the limitations on private enterprise shall be removed,
so that the next generation of youngsters, as they come along, will
not have to become protégés of benevolent trusts, but will be free
to go about making their own lives what they will; so that we shall
taste again the full cup, not of charity, but of liberty,--the only
wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit of a people.” That cup
of liberty--we may well ask him to go back to Manchester, to Paterson
to-day, to the garment trades of New York, and taste it for himself.
The New Freedom means the effort of small business men and farmers
to use the government against the larger collective organization of
industry. Wilson’s power comes from them; his feeling is with them; his
thinking is for them. Never a word of understanding for the new type
of administrator, the specialist, the professionally trained business
man; practically no mention of the consumer--even the tariff is for
the business man; no understanding of the new demands of labor, its
solidarity, its aspiration for some control over the management of
business; no hint that it may be necessary to organize the fundamental
industries of the country on some definite plan so that our resources
may be developed by scientific method instead of by men “on the make”;
no friendliness for the larger, collective life upon which the world
is entering, only a constant return to the commercial chances of
young men trying to set up in business. That is the push and force of
this New Freedom, a freedom for the little profiteer, but no freedom
for the nation from the narrowness, the poor incentives, the limited
vision of small competitors,--no freedom from clamorous advertisement,
from wasteful selling, from duplication of plants, from unnecessary
enterprise, from the chaos, the welter, the strategy of industrial war.
There is no doubt, I think, that President Wilson and his party
represent primarily small business in a war against the great
interests. Socialists speak of his administration as a revolution
within the bounds of capitalism. Wilson doesn’t really fight
the oppressions of property. He fights the evil done by large
property-holders to small ones. The temper of his administration was
revealed very clearly when the proposal was made to establish a Federal
Trade Commission. It was suggested at once by leading spokesmen of
the Democratic Party that corporations with a capital of less than a
million dollars should be exempted from supervision. Is that because
little corporations exploit labor or the consumer less? Not a bit of
it. It is because little corporations are in control of the political
situation.
But there are certain obstacles to the working out of the New Freedom.
First of all, there was a suspicion in Wilson’s mind, even during the
campaign, that the tendency to large organization was too powerful to
be stopped by legislation. So he left open a way of escape from the
literal achievement of what the New Freedom seemed to threaten. “_I
am for big business_,” he said, “_and I am against the trusts_.” That
is a very subtle distinction, so subtle, I suspect, that no human
legislation will ever be able to make it. The distinction is this: big
business is a business that has survived competition; a trust is an
arrangement to do away with competition. But when competition is done
away with, who is the Solomon wise enough to know whether the result
was accomplished by superior efficiency or by agreement among the
competitors or by both?
The big trusts have undoubtedly been built up in part by superior
business ability, and by successful competition, but also by ruthless
competition, by underground arrangements, by an intricate series of
facts which no earthly tribunal will ever be able to disentangle. And
why should it try? These great combinations are here. What interests
us is not their history but their future. The point is whether you are
going to split them up, and if so into how many parts. Once split,
are they to be kept from coming together again? Are you determined to
prevent men who could coöperate from coöperating? Wilson seems to imply
that a big business which has survived competition is to be let alone,
and the trusts attacked. But as there is no real way of distinguishing
between them, he leaves the question just where he found it: he must
choose between the large organization of business and the small.
It’s here that his temperament and his prejudices clash with fact
and necessity. He really would like to disintegrate large business.
“Are you not eager for the time,” he asks, “when your sons shall be
able to look forward to becoming not employees, but heads of some
small, it may be, but hopeful business...?” But to what percentage of
the population can he hold out that hope? How many small but hopeful
steel mills, coal mines, telegraph systems, oil refineries, copper
mines, can this country support? A few hundred at the outside. And for
these few hundred sons whose “best energies ... are inspired by the
knowledge that they are their own masters with the paths of the world
before them,” we are asked to give up the hope of a sane, deliberate
organization of national industry brought under democratic control.
I submit that it is an unworthy dream. I submit that the intelligent
men of my generation can find a better outlet for their energies than
in making themselves masters of little businesses. They have the vast
opportunity of introducing order and purpose into the business world,
of devising administrative methods by which the great resources of the
country can be operated on some thought-out plan. They have the whole
new field of industrial statesmanship before them, and those who prefer
the egotism of some little business are not the ones whose ambitions we
need most to cultivate.
But the disintegration which Wilson promised in the New Freedom is
not likely to be carried out. One year of public office has toned
down the audacity of the campaign speeches so much that Mr. Dooley
says you can play the President’s messages on a harp. Instead of a
“radical reconstruction” we are engaged in signing a “constitution of
peace.” These big business men who a few months ago showed not the
“least promise of disinterestedness” are to-day inspired by “a spirit
of accommodation.” The President’s own Secretary of Commerce, Mr.
Redfield, has said to the National Chamber of Commerce that the number
of trusts still operating “is conspicuously small.” Was ever wish the
father to a pleasanter thought? Was ever greater magic wrought with
less effort? Or is it that politicians in office have to pretend that
what they can’t do has happened anyway?
Wilson is against the trusts for many reasons: the political economy of
his generation was based on competition and free trade; the Democratic
Party is by tradition opposed to a strong central government, and
that opposition applies equally well to strong national business,--it
is a party attached to local rights, to village patriotism, to
humble but ambitious enterprise; its temper has always been hostile
to specialization and expert knowledge, because it admires a very
primitive man-to-man democracy. Wilson’s thought is inspired by that
outlook. It has been tempered somewhat by contact with men who have
outgrown the village culture, so that Wilson is less hostile to
experts, less oblivious to administrative problems than is Bryan.
But at the same time his speeches are marked with contempt for the
specialist: they play up quite obviously to the old democratic notion
that any man can do almost any job. You have always to except the
negro, of course, about whom the Democrats have a totally different
tradition. But among white men, special training and expert knowledge
are somewhat under suspicion in Democratic circles.
Hostility to large organization is a natural quality in village life.
Wilson is always repeating that the old personal relationships of
employer and employee have disappeared. He deplores the impersonal
nature of the modern world. Now that is a fact not to be passed over
lightly. It does change the nature of our problems enormously. Indeed,
it is just this breakdown of the old relationships which constitutes
the modern problem. So the earlier chapters of this book were devoted
to showing how in response to new organization the psychology of
business men had changed; how the very nature of property had been
altered; how the consumer has had to develop new instruments for
controlling the market, and how labor is compelled to organize its
power in order not to be trodden by gigantic economic forces.
Nobody likes the present situation very much. But where dispute arises
is over whether we can by legislation return to a simpler and more
direct stage of civilization. Bryan really hopes to do that, Wilson
does too, but his mind is too critical not to have some doubts, and
that is why he is against trusts but not against big business. But
there is a growing body of opinion which says that communication is
blotting out village culture, and opening up national and international
thought. It says that bad as big business is to-day, it has a wide
promise within it, and that the real task of our generation is to
realize it. It looks to the infusion of scientific method, the careful
application of administrative technique, the organization and education
of the consumer for control, the discipline of labor for an increasing
share of the management. Those of us who hold such a belief are pushed
from behind by what we think is an irresistible economic development,
and lured by a future which we think is possible.
We don’t imagine that the trusts are going to drift naturally into the
service of human life. We think they can be made to serve it if the
American people compel them. We think that the American people may
be able to do that if they can adjust their thinking to a new world
situation, if they apply the scientific spirit to daily life, and if
they can learn to coöperate on a large scale. Those, to be sure, are
staggering _ifs_. The conditions may never be fulfilled entirely. But
in so far as they are not fulfilled we shall drift along at the mercy
of economic forces that we are unable to master. Those who cling to
the village view of life may deflect the drift, may batter the trusts
about a bit, but they will never dominate business, never humanize its
machinery, and they will continue to be the playthings of industrial
change.
At bottom the issue is between those who are willing to enter upon an
effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a
real sense it is an adventure. We have still to explore the new scale
of human life which machinery has thrust upon us. We have still to
invent ways of dealing with it. We have still to adapt our abilities to
immense tasks. Of course, men shudder and beg to be let off in order
to go back to the simpler life for which they were trained. Of course,
they hope that competition will automatically produce the social
results they desire. Of course, they see all the evils of the trust and
none of its promise. They can point to the failure of empires and the
success of little cities. They can say that we are obliterating men in
the vast organizations we are permitting.
But they are not the only people who realize that man as he is to-day
is not big enough to master the modern world. It is this realization
which has made men speculate on the development of what they call
a “collective mind.” They hope that somehow we shall develop an
intelligence larger than the individual.
I see no evidence for that. There are no minds but human minds so far
as our problems go. It seems to me that this notion of a collective
mind over and above men and women is simply a myth created to meet
difficulties greater than men and women are as yet capable of handling.
It is a _deus ex machina_ invented to cover an enormous need,--a hope
that something outside ourselves will do our work for us. It would
be infinitely easier if such a power existed. But I can’t see any
ground for relying upon it. We shall have, it seems to me, to develop
within men and women themselves the power they need. It is an immense
ambition, and each man who approaches it must appear presumptuous. But
it is the problem of our generation: to analyze the weakness, to attack
the obstacles, to search for some of the possibilities, to realize if
we can the kind of effort by which we can face the puzzling world in
which we live.
PART II
CHAPTER VIII
A Big World and Little Men
Those who take city children out into the country for a day’s airing
can tell you one story after another about how squirrels and rabbits
are classed as cats, cattle as horses, sheep as woolly dogs, how green
things are just grass, a tree merely a tree. They will tell you that
this is the tragedy of urban civilization,--to rear children who live
in a half-noticed, carelessly classified universe, as dumb to them as
the stony pavements that serve as their playgrounds.
And yet city children are far from being especially dull-witted. They
are simply dull to an environment which really does not concern them. A
country boy may go fearlessly among restless animals or find a trail
through the woods, but a street-urchin will play baseball in the midst
of traffic. Yet we feel a pathetic difference between them, for one is
competent amidst enduring things, the other is quick about artificial
complications.
The city-dweller never meets as a personal problem the elements that
have ordered human life, plants and animals, the tides and the winds,
forest and hill. He may work at some abstract part of a complicated
manufacture, or spend his time in an office where he deals the day long
with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events. He has
practically no sense of how he is fed, clothed, or housed, has seen no
spinning and weaving, mining or reaping. He has witnessed the milking
of one cow with mixed astonishment, has forgotten that steaks come from
cattle, and mutton chops from sheep, knows that clover occasionally
appears with four leaves and signifies good luck, and spring to him
means not sowing time, and the opening of streams, but open cars and
straw hats.
This uprooted person is the despair of all those who love the flavor
of words, for his language has gone stale and abstract in a miserly
telegraphic speech. That is why literary men are forever hunting up
folk songs and seeking out backward peasants in Galway or Cornwall.
Among country people words still taste of actual things: contact with
sun and rain and earth and harvest turns the simple prose of the day’s
work into poetry for the starved imaginations of city-bred people.
There has been, to be sure, a brave attempt in recent years to admire
slang. But one insuperable difficulty stands in the way: city slang
has risen out of the interests that meet the thwarted instincts of
a restless population, from the bleachers, the poker table, and the
saloon. Slang is often vivid but it is too deeply sundered from the
older sources of our happiness. It is not set in the spectacle of
earth and sky, as the speech of peasants, and it is for the most part
trivial, strained, and raucous. Even the slang of lust is feeble,
reflected out of halted fantasy and filtered through commercialism. The
obscenity of a smoking-room is little more than the sneaking indulgence
of peeping Toms, witty at times because it comes as a relief from the
seductive wrappings of a finicky culture. But even lust has become
elaborate and secondhand.
For the slow movement of the seasons we have substituted the flicker
of fashions. The older world changed, but it repeated itself. Birth
and youth and age, summer and winter changed the world and left it
unaltered. You could think of eternal ideas, for there was beneath the
change some permanence. But in our day change is not an illusion but a
fact: we do actually move toward novelty, there is invention, and what
has never been is created each day.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human
relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker
and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation. We are not
used to a complicated civilization, we don’t know how to behave when
personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no
precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age.
We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change
ourselves.
And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is
disorganized, our passions are out-of-kilter. Those who call themselves
radical float helplessly upon a stream amidst the wreckage of old
creeds and abortive new ones, and they are inclined to mistake the
motion which carries them for their own will. Those who make no
pretensions to much theory are twisted about by fashions, “crazes,”
at the mercy of milliners and dressmakers, theatrical producers,
advertising campaigns and the premeditated gossip of the newspapers.
We live in great cities without knowing our neighbors, the loyalties
of place have broken down, and our associations are stretched over
large territories, cemented by very little direct contact. But this
impersonal quality is intolerable: people don’t like to deal with
abstractions. And so you find an overwhelming demand upon the press
for human interest stories, for personal details opened to the vast
public. Gossip is organized; and we do by telegraph what was done in
the village store.
Institutions have developed a thousand inconsistencies. Our schools,
churches, courts, governments were not built for the kind of
civilization they are expected to serve. In former times you could
make some effort to teach people what they needed to know. It was
done badly, but at least it could be attempted. Men knew the kind of
problems their children would have to face. But to-day education means
a radically different thing. We have to prepare children to meet the
unexpected, for their problems will not be the same as their fathers’.
To prepare them for the unexpected means to train them in method
instead of filling them with facts and rules. They will have to find
their own facts and make their own rules, and if schools can’t give
them that power then schools no longer educate for the modern world.
The churches face a dilemma which is a matter of life and death to
them. They come down to us with a tradition that the great things
are permanent, and they meet a population that needs above all to
understand the meaning and the direction of change. No wonder the
churches are empty, no wonder their influence has declined, no wonder
that men fight against the influence they have. Ministers are as
bewildered as the rest of us, perhaps a little more so. For they are
expected to stand up every week and interpret human life in a way that
will vitalize feeling and conduct. And for this work of interpretation
they have the simple rules of a village civilization, the injunctions
of a pastoral people. Of course they can’t interpret life on Sunday so
that the interpretation will mean something on Monday. Even supposing
that the average minister understood the scientific spirit, had studied
sociology, and knew what are the forces which agitate men, even under
those circumstances, interpretation would be an almost impossible task.
For the least hampered minds, the most imaginative and experienced men,
can only stumble through to partial explanations. To ask the clergy
to find adequate meaning in this era is to expect each minister to be
an inspired thinker. If the churches really could interpret life they
would be unable to make room for the congregations; if men felt that
they could draw anything like wisdom from them, they would be besieged
by bewildered and inquiring people. Think of the lectures people flock
to, the political meetings they throng, the dull books they work their
way through. It isn’t indifference to the great problems that leaves
the churches empty; it is the sheer intellectual failure of the
churches to meet a sudden change.
The courts have not been able to adjust themselves either. But while
people can ignore the churches, they have to fight the courts. They
fight blindly without any clear notion as to what they would like the
courts to do. They are irritated and constrained by a legal system that
was developed in a different civilization, and they find the courts, as
Prof. Roscoe Pound says, “doing nothing and obstructing everything.”
They find that whenever a legislature makes an effort to fit law to the
new facts of life, a court is there to nullify the work. They find the
courts masters of our political system, and yet these masters will not
really take the initiative. They have enormous power, but they refuse
the responsibility that goes with it. The courts are making law all
the time, of course. Now if they made law that met the new situations,
there would be no revolt against the judiciary. The American voters
are not doctrinaires. They don’t care in any academic way whether
Congress, the President, or the courts, frame legislation. They form
their opinions almost entirely by the results. If the President can
legislate better than Congress, as Roosevelt and Wilson could, the
people will support the President no matter how many lawyers shout
that the rights of Congress are being usurped. If the courts made law
that dealt with modern necessities, the people would, I believe, never
question their power. It is the bad sociology of judges and their class
prejudices that are destroying the prestige of the bench. That bad
sociology and those prejudices are in the main due to the fact that
judges have not been trained for the modern world, have never learned
how to understand its temper.
And of course, when you come to the political structure of our
government you find that it has only the faintest relation to actual
conditions. Our political constituencies are to American life what
the skeleton of a two-humped camel would be to an elephant. One is
not made to fit the other’s necessities. Take the City of New York
for example. For all practical purposes the metropolitan district
extends up into Connecticut and across into New Jersey. By “practical
purposes” I mean that as a health problem, a transportation problem,
a housing problem, a food problem, a police problem, the city which
sprawls across three states ought to be treated as one unit. Or take
New England: for any decent solution of its transportation difficulties
or for any scientific use of its natural resources its state lines are
a nuisance. On the other hand, it mustn’t be imagined that the old
political units are always too small. Far from it: thus many of the
vital functions of New York City are managed by the State legislature.
The political system which comes down to us from a totally different
civilization is sometimes too large in its unit--sometimes too small,
but in a thousand bewildering ways it does not fit. Every statesman
is hampered by conflicts of jurisdiction, by divided responsibility,
by the fact that when he tries to use the government for some public
purpose, the government is a clumsy instrument.
The regulation of the trusts is made immensely difficult by the fact
that the states are too small, and the nation is often too large. There
are natural sections of the country, like the Pacific Coast, the Ohio,
the Mississippi valley, and New England which ought for many purposes
to act as a unit. No sane person, I suppose, wishes to centralize at
Washington all the power that is needed to control business, and yet
everyone knows that if you leave that control to the states, there will
be no control.
But the fitting of government to the facts of the modern world is
sure to be a very difficult task. In the past governments have
been organized as territorial units, but with the development of
transportation the importance of geography has declined. Men are bound
together to-day by common interests far more than by living in the same
place. It is the union, the trade association, the grange, the club
and the party that command allegiance rather than the county or the
state. To anyone who is not fooled by charters and forms, it is evident
that functions of government are being developed in these groups which
are not mentioned in theoretical discussions of government. Labor
unions legislate, Boards of Trade legislate, coöperative societies are
governments in a very real sense. They make rules under which people
live, often much more compelling ones than those of some official
legislature. Now in the Eighteenth Century there was a strong sentiment
against any minor sovereignty within the political state. In France,
for example, by a law of 1791 all associations were forbidden. Our
common law looked upon them with extreme disfavor, and the Sherman Act
is an expression of that same feeling. Theorists like ex-President
Eliot in our own day are against unions because they establish little
governments within the state. But the facts are against the ideas
of the Eighteenth Century. The world is so complex that no official
government can be devised to deal with it, and men have had to organize
associations of all kinds in order to create some order in the world.
They will develop more of them, I believe, for these voluntary
groupings based on common interests are the only way yet proposed by
which a complicated society can be governed. But of course, unofficial
sovereignties within the nation create very perplexing problems. They
all tend to be imperious, to reach out and absorb more and more. And
the attempt to adjust them to each other is a task for which political
science is not prepared.
I have merely touched on some of the difficulties which arise in
our domestic affairs because the anatomy of our politics does not
correspond to the anatomy of our life. When you come to international
affairs confusion is compounded. As I write, we are in the midst of the
Mexican problem. No one knows how much authority anyone has in that
country. There are all sorts of conflicting interests and all sorts of
conflicting governments.
Does the fact that Englishmen invest in Mexico entitle the British
Empire to some authority in Mexican affairs? Are we the guardians of
Mexico, and if so where does our authority end? The new imperialism
is no simple affair: it has innumerable gradations of power. As Prof.
Beard says: “This newer imperialism does not rest primarily upon the
desire for more territory, but rather upon the necessity for markets
in which to sell manufactured goods and for opportunities to invest
surplus accumulations of capital. It begins in a search for trade,
advances to intervention on behalf of the interests involved, thence to
protectorates, and finally to annexation.” Diplomacy now talks about
“effective occupation,” “hinterland,” “sphere of influence” and “Sphere
of Legitimate Aspiration.”[7]
One of the curious ironies of history is that after many generations
of effort to establish popular government in a few countries, the real
interests of the world have overflowed frontiers and eluded democracy.
We are just about to establish a democratic state, and we find that
capitalism has become international. It seems as if we were always a
little too late for the facts. We are now engaged in building up for
the world a few of the primitive devices of internal affairs. A code
of law, a few half-hearted, impotent courts, treaties, and a little
international policing. But all these things, many of which express the
fondest hopes of sensible men, are very little more than arrangements
between antagonistic nations. Anything like a world-wide coöperative
democracy is as yet no part of the expectation of any unsentimental
person.
* * * * *
Now anyone who has talked as much about the industrial problem as I
have in these chapters is, of course, expected to present a “solution.”
But as a matter of fact there can be no such thing as a “solution”
in the sense which most people understand the word. When you solve a
puzzle, you’re done with it, but the industrial puzzle has no single
key. Nor is there such a thing for it as a remedy or a cure. You have
in a very literal sense to _educate_ the industrial situation, to draw
out its promise, discipline and strengthen it.
It means that you have to do a great variety of things to industry,
invent new ones to do, and keep on doing them. You have to make a
survey of the natural resources of the country. On the basis of that
survey you must draw up a national plan for their development. You
must eliminate waste in mining, you must conserve the forests so that
their fertility is not impaired, so that stream flow is regulated, and
the water-power of the country made available. You must bring to the
farmer a knowledge of scientific agriculture, help him to organize
coöperatively, use the taxing power to prevent land speculation and
force land to the best use, coördinate markets, build up rural
credits, and create in the country a life that shall really be
interesting.
You have the intricate problem of how to make the railroads serve the
national development of our resources. That means the fixing of rates
so that railroads become available where they are most needed. Wastes
and grafts have to be cut out, and the control of transportation
made part of a national economic policy. You have to see to it that
technical schools produce men trained for such work; you have to
establish institutes of research, that shall stimulate the economic
world not only with physical inventions, but with administrative
proposals.
You have to go about deliberately to create a large class of
professional business men. You have to enlarge the scope and the vision
of the efficiency expert so that he can begin to take out of industry
the deadening effects of machine production. You have to find vast
sums of money for experiment in methods of humanizing labor.
For each industry you must discover the most satisfactory unit, and you
must encourage these units to coöperate so that every industry shall be
conducted with a minimum of friction. You must devise a banking system
so that the nation’s capital shall be available, that it shall be there
for use at the lowest possible cost.
You have to find ways of making the worker an integral part of his
industry. That means allowing him to develop his unions, and supplying
the unions with every incentive by which they can increase their
responsibility. You have to create an industrial education by which the
worker shall be turned, not into an intelligent machine, but into an
understanding, directing partner of business. You have to encourage the
long process of self-education in democracy through which unions can
develop representative government and adequate leadership. You have to
support them in their desire to turn themselves from wage-earners into
a corporate body that participates in industrial progress.
You have to devise and try out a great variety of consumers’ controls.
For some industries you may have to use public ownership, for others
the coöperative society may be more effective, for others the
regulating commission. You will not be able to come out plump for one
method as against all the others. It will depend on the nature of the
industry which instrument is the most effective. And back of all these
methods, there is the need for industrial citizenship, for creating
in the consumer a knowledge of what he wants, and of the different
ways there are of getting it. Back of that there is the still subtler
problem of making the consumer discriminating, of educating his taste
and civilizing his desires.
All this is only a little of what has to be done. It has to be done not
by some wise and superior being but by the American people themselves.
No one man, no one group can possibly do it all. It is an immense
collaboration. It will have to be carried out against the active
opposition of class interests and sectional prejudices. At every step
there will be a clash with old rights and old habits. There will be
the cries of the beaten, the protest of the discarded. For men cling
passionately to their routines.
But you cannot institute a better industrial order by decree. It is of
necessity an educational process, a work of invention, of coöperative
training, of battles against vested rights not only in property but in
acquired skill as well, a process that is sure to be intricate, and
therefore confusing.
But that is the way democracies move: they have in literal truth to
lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Those who have some simpler
method than the one I have sketched are, it seems to me, either unaware
of the nature of the problem, interested only in some one phase of
it, or unconsciously impatient with the limitations of democracy. In
the next chapter, I shall make an attempt to describe some of the
current philosophies which try to shirk the full force of the problem.
They are all excuses for trusting to luck, for relying upon something
but ourselves. They are all substitutes for the difficulties of
self-government, concessions to the drift of our natures.
Here I want only to reach a sense of the complexity of the task, its
variety and its challenge. I have skimmed the surface, nothing more.
There is no mention of the fearful obstacles of race prejudice in the
South, no mention of the threat that recent immigration brings with
it, the threat of an alien and defenseless class of servile labor. And
there is, of course, always the distracting possibility of a foreign
war, of vast responsibilities in the other Americas.
Certainly democracy has a load to carry. It has arisen in the midst of
a civilization for which men are utterly unready, a civilization so
complex that their minds cannot grasp it, so unexpected that each man
is compelled to be something of a prophet. Its future is so uncertain
that no one can feel any assurance in the face of it. Precedent has
been wrecked because we have to act upon really new facts. Anything
like a central authority to guide us has become impossible because no
authority is wise enough, because self-government has become a really
effective desire. The old shibboleths of conduct are for the most part
meaningless: they don’t work when they are tried.
Through it all our souls have become disorganized, for they have lost
the ties which bound them. In the very period when man most needs
a whole-hearted concentration on external affairs, he is disrupted
internally by a revolution in the intimacies of his life. He has lost
his place in an eternal scheme, he is losing the ancient sanctions of
love, and his sexual nature is chaotic through the immense change that
has come into the relations of parent and child, husband and wife.
Those changes distract him so deeply that the more “advanced” he is,
the more he flounders in the bogs of his own soul.
CHAPTER IX
Drift
It seems as if the most obvious way of reacting toward evil were to
consider it a lapse from grace. The New Freedom, we are told, is “only
the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern
America.” Everywhere you hear it: that the people have been “deprived”
of ancient rights, and legislation is framed on the notion that we can
recover the alleged democracy of early America.
I once read in a learned magazine an essay on “The Oblivescence of the
Disagreeable.” As I remember it, the writer was trying to demonstrate
what he regarded as a very hopeful truth--that men tend to forget pain
more easily than pleasure. That is no doubt a comfortable faculty,
but it plays havoc with history. For in regard to those early days
of the Republic, most of our notions are marked by a well-nigh total
oblivescence of the disagreeable. We find it very difficult to
remember that there were sharp class divisions in the young Republic,
that suffrage was severely restricted, that the Fathers were a very
conscious upper class determined to maintain their privileges. Nations
make their histories to fit their illusions. That is why reformers are
so anxious to return to early America. What they know of it comes to
them filtered through the golden lies of school-books and hallowed by
the generous loyalty of their childhood.
Men generally find in the past what they miss in the present. During
the Paterson strike of 1913, I heard a very drastic I. W. W. agitator
tell a meeting of silk-weavers that they had fallen low since the
days of the great Chief Justice Marshall. In those days there were no
rich and poor, and the Constitution had not yet been abrogated by an
impudent Chief of Police! Yet in the days of Marshall even the most
peaceful trade union was outlawed, and as for the doctrines of the I.
W. W.,--imagine the sentiments of Alexander Hamilton. A few years ago
I was living in Boston when an old gentleman, unhappy over the trend
of democracy, published a book to glorify the American Tories. It
consisted largely of intimate details from the private lives of the
revolutionary heroes. Boston wouldn’t have the book, true or untrue. So
the old gentleman was denounced and his book forgotten.
For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden
age. The modern puritan locates it in the period of the most famous
ancestors from whom he can claim descent. That ancestor regretted the
loss of Eden. Rousseau’s millennial dream was a “state of nature.”
Hard-headed Adam Smith had his “original state” which was all that
England wasn’t. I know literary men who lament the passing of the
eighteenth century coffee house, and New York is full of artists
who dream of Parisian cafés. Zionists go back to David and Solomon;
Celtic revivalists worry about Kathleen ni Houlihan; Chesterton
dreams of Merrie England; scholars yearn for Fifth Century Athens;
there is a considerable vogue to-day for certain of the earlier
Egyptian dynasties, and some people, more radical than others, regard
civilization itself as a disease.
The prototype of all revivals is each man’s wistful sense of his own
childhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in the way we persist
in recalling what is by its very nature irrevocable. Perhaps each of us
is touched by unuttered disappointments, and life has not the taste we
anticipated. The weary man sinks back into the past, like a frightened
child into its mother’s arms. He glorifies what is gone when he fears
what is to come. That is why discontented husbands have a way of
admiring the cakes that mother used to bake. Beaten nations live in the
exploits of their ancestors, and all exiles lament by the waters of
Babylon. The curse of Ireland, of Poland, of Alsace is that they cannot
forget what they were. There are no people who cling so ardently to a
family tree as do those who have come down in the world. The men who
were beaten by the trusts will never see the promise of the trusts.
Whenever the future is menacing and unfamiliar, whenever the day’s
work seems insurmountable, men seek some comfort in the warmth of
memory. Only those who are really at home in their world find life more
interesting as they mature. Experience for them is not an awful chance,
but a prize they can win and embrace. They need no romance to make
life tolerable. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past
are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. They will falter
before their problems, will deal with them half-heartedly and with
diffidence. Their allegiance is not to the world. And they will never
give themselves entirely to the task of making for themselves on this
earth and in their age an adequate and civilized home.
The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is
unnecessary and happiness inevitable. The American temperament leans
generally to a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the “natural”
humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society. You meet this
faith throughout the thousand and one communistic experiments and
new religions in which America is so abundant. “If only you let men
alone, they’ll be good,” a typical American reformer said to me the
other day. He believed, as most Americans do, in the unsophisticated
man, in his basic kindliness and his instinctive practical sense. A
critical outlook seemed to the reformer an inhuman one; he distrusted,
as Bryan does, the appearance of the expert; he believed that whatever
faults the common man might show were due to some kind of Machiavellian
corruption.
He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, in the
statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the earth. So when
the trusts appeared, when the free land was gone, and America had
been congested into a nation, the only philosophy with any weight of
tradition behind it was a belief in the virtues of the spontaneous,
enterprising, untrained and unsocialized man. Trust promoters cried:
Let us alone. The little business men cried: We’re the natural men, so
let us alone. And the public cried: We’re the most natural of all, so
please do stop interfering with us. Muckraking gave an utterance to
the small business men and to the larger public, who dominated reform
politics. What did they do? They tried by all the machinery and power
they could muster to restore a business world in which each man could
again be left to his own will--a world that needed no coöperative
intelligence. In the Sherman Act is symbolized this deliberate attempt
to recreate an undeliberate society. No group of people, except
the socialists, wished to take up the enormous task of disciplining
business to popular need. For the real American was dreaming of the
Golden Age in which he could drift with impunity.
But there has arisen in our time a large group of people who look to
the future. They talk a great deal about their ultimate goal. Many
of them do not differ in any essential way from those who dream of a
glorious past. They put Paradise before them instead of behind them.
They are going to be so rich, so great, and so happy some day, that
any concern about to-morrow seems a bit sordid. They didn’t fall from
Heaven, as the reactionaries say, but they are going to Heaven with the
radicals. Now this habit of reposing in the sun of a brilliant future
is very enervating. It opens a chasm between fact and fancy, and the
whole fine dream is detached from the living zone of the present. At
the only point where effort and intelligence are needed, that point
where to-day is turning into to-morrow, there these people are not
found. At the point where human direction counts most they do not
direct. So they are like most anarchists, wild in their dreams and
unimportant in their deeds. They cultivate a castle in Spain and a flat
in Harlem; a princess in the air and a drudge in the kitchen.
Then too there are the darlings of evolution. They are quite certain
that evolution, as they put it, is ever onward and upward. For them all
things conspire to achieve that well-known, though unmentioned far-off
divine event to which the whole creation moves. They seem to imply as
Moody suggested:
“I, I, last product of the toiling ages,
Goal of heroic feet that never lagged,----”
though
“A little thing in trousers, slightly jagged.”
How the conservative goes to work with the idea of evolution has been
ably exposed by William English Walling. First, assume “progress” by
calling it inevitable: this obviates the necessity for any practical
change just now. Then assert the indubitable fact that real progress
is very slow: and infer that wisdom consists in deprecating haste. Now
when you have called progress inevitable and imperceptible, you have
done about all that philosophy could do to justify impotence.
The radical view of evolution is more optimistic, but not more
intelligent. In fact, it is generally all optimism and little else. For
though it doesn’t quite dare to say that whatever is, is right, it does
assume that whatever is going to be, is going to be right. I believe
that G. K. Chesterton once called this sort of thing progressivism by
the calendar. There is complete confidence that whatever is later in
time is better in fact, that the next phase is the desirable one, that
all change is “upward,” that God and Nature are collaborating in our
blithe ascent to the Superman. Such an outlook undermines judgment and
initiative, deliberate effort, invention, plan, and sets you adrift on
the currents of time, hoping for impossible harbors.
In a constructive social movement the harm done is immeasurable. The
most vivid illustration is that of the old-fashioned, fatalistic
Marxian socialists. They have an implicit faith that human destiny
is merely the unfolding of an original plan, some of the sketches of
which are in their possession, thanks to the labors of Karl Marx.
Strictly speaking, these men are not revolutionists as they believe
themselves to be; they are the interested pedants of destiny. They are
God’s audience, and they know the plot so well that occasionally they
prompt Him. In their system all that education, unions, leadership and
thought can do is to push along what by the theory needs no pushing.
These socialists are like the clown Marceline at the Hippodrome, who is
always very busy assisting in labor that would be done whether he were
there or not. They face the ancient dilemma of fatalism: whatever they
do is right, and nothing they do matters. Go to almost any socialist
meeting and you’ll hear it said that socialism would come if the
Socialist Party had never been heard from. Perhaps so. But why organize
a Socialist Party?
Of course, socialists don’t act upon their theory. They are too deeply
impressed with the evil that exists, too eager for the future that
they see, to trust entirely in the logic of events. They do try to
shape that future. But their old fatalism hampers them enormously the
moment any kind of action is proposed. They are out of sympathy with
conservative trade unionism, but they are still more hostile to the I.
W. W. In politics they despise the reformer, but when they themselves
obtain office they do nothing that a hundred “bourgeois” reformers
haven’t done before them. The Socialist Party in this country has
failed to develop a practical program for labor or a practical program
for politics. It claims to have a different philosophy from that of
trade unionists or reformers, but when you try to judge the difference
by its concrete results, it is imperceptible.
The theory and the temper of orthodox socialism are fatalistic, and
no fatalist can really give advice. Theory and practice are widely
sundered in the American socialist movement. There is a stumbling
revolt which lives from hand to mouth, a catch-as-catch-can struggle,
and then far removed from it, standing in majesty, a great citadel of
dogma almost impervious to new ideas. For in the real world, destiny is
one of the aliases of drift.
Closely related in essence, though outwardly quite different, is what
might be called the panacea habit of mind. Beginning very often in some
penetrating insight or successful analysis, this sort of mind soon
becomes incapable of seeing anything beside that portion of reality
which sustains the insight and is subject to the analysis. A good idea,
in short, becomes a fixed idea. One group of American socialists can
see only the advantage of strikes, another of ballots. One reformer
sees the advantages of the direct primaries in Wisconsin: they become
the universal solvent of political evil. You find engineers who don’t
see why you can’t build society on the analogy of a steam engine;
you find lawyers, like Taft, who see in the courts an intimation of
heaven; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one
vast sanitarium; lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family;
education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one
who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy
could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession
tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life. The most
amazing of all are people who deal with the currency question. Somehow
or other, long meditation seems to produce in them a feeling that they
are dealing with the crux of human difficulties.
Then there is the panacea most frequently propounded by voluble
millionaires: the high cost of living is the cost of high living,
and thrift is the queen of the virtues. Sobriety is another virtue,
highly commended,--in fact there are thousands of people who seriously
regard it as the supreme social virtue. To those of us who are sober
and still discontented, the effort to found a political party on a
colossal Don’t is not very inspiring. After thrift and sobriety, there
is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. No
one in his senses denies the importance of efficient action, just as
no one denies thrift and sober living. It is only when these virtues
become the prime duty of man that we rejoice in the poet who has the
courage to glorify the vagabond, preach a saving indolence, and glorify
Dionysus. Be not righteous overmuch is merely a terse way of saying
that virtue can defeat its own ends. Certainly, whenever a negative
command like sobriety absorbs too much attention, and morality is
obstinate and awkward, then living men have become cluttered in what
was meant to serve them.
There are thousands to-day who, out of patience with almost everything,
believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. In
the first rank stand the suffragettes who believe that votes for women
will make men chaste. I have just read a book by a college professor
which announces that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as
the abolition of slavery. There are innumerable Americans who believe
that a democratic constitution would create a democracy. Of course,
there are single taxers so single-minded that they believe a happy
civilization would result from the socialization of land values.
Everything else that seems to be needed would follow spontaneously if
only the land monopoly were abolished.
The syndicalists suffer from this habit of mind in an acute form. They
refuse to consider any scheme for the reorganization of industry.
All that will follow, they say, if only you can produce a General
Strike. But obviously you might paralyze society, you might make the
proletariat supreme, and still leave the proletariat without the
slightest idea of what to do with the power it had won.
What happens is that men gain some insight into society and concentrate
their energy upon it. Then when the facts rise up in their relentless
complexity, the only way to escape them is to say: Never mind, do what
I advocate, and all these other things shall be added unto you.
There is still another way of reacting toward a too complicated world.
That way is to see so much good in every reform that you can’t make up
your mind where to apply your own magnificent talents. The result is
that you don’t apply your talents at all.
Reform produces its Don Quixotes who never deal with reality; it
produces its Brands who are single-minded to the brink of ruin; and it
produces its Hamlets and its Rudins who can never make up their minds.
What is common to them all is a failure to deal with the real world in
the light of its possibilities. To try to follow all the aliases of
drift is like attacking the hydra by cutting off its heads. The few
examples given here of how men shirk self-government might be extended
indefinitely. They are as common to radicals as to conservatives. You
can find them flourishing in an orthodox church and among the most
rebellious socialists.
Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don’t want
the responsibility. In the main, they are looking for some benevolent
guardian, be it a “good man in office” or a perfect constitution, or
the evolution of nature. They want to be taken in charge. If they have
to think for themselves they turn either to the past or to a distant
future: but they manage to escape the real effort of the imagination
which is to weave a dream into the turning present. They trust to
destiny, a quick one or a slow one, and the whole task of judging
events is avoided. They turn to automatic devices: human initiative can
be ignored. They forbid evil, and then they feel better. They settle on
a particular analogy, or a particular virtue, or a particular policy,
and trust to luck that everything else will take care of itself.
But no one of these substitutes for self-government is really
satisfactory, and the result is that a state of chronic rebellion
appears. That is our present situation. The most hopeful thing about it
is that through the confusion we can come to some closer understanding
of why the modern man lacks stability, why his soul is scattered. We
may, perhaps, be able to see a little better just what self-government
implies.
The chronic rebellion is evident enough. I have a friend who after the
Lawrence strike was a great admirer of the I. W. W. He told me about it
one day with tears in his eyes. Two months later I met him, and he was
cursing: “They’re so successful that they’re getting ready to throw
So-and-So out of the I. W. W. for heresy.” It is one of the ironies of
the labor movement that it preaches solidarity, and seems to propagate
by fission. For there is large truth in the saying that the only thing
anarchists hate more than tyrants is an anarchist who differs with
them. Indeed the bitterness between the “red” and the “yellow” unions
is at least as great as the bitterness between the unions and the
employers. The I. W. W. hates the American Federation of Labor and many
political socialists with a vindictiveness that makes no distinction
between them and the most tyrannical boss. Revolt within the world of
revolt is an institution. If any capitalist thinks he is the object
of abuse, he ought to come and hear a debate between the Detroit I.
W. W. and the Chicago I. W. W., between believers in “direct” and in
“political” action, between “State Socialists” and Syndicalists.
The sects of the rebellious are like the variety of the Protestant
churches, and they are due to a similar cause. Once the churches
had cut off from the deeply-rooted central tradition of Rome, they
continued to cut off from each other. Now Protestantism was an effort
at a little democracy in religion, and its history is amazingly like
that of all the other revolts from the old absolutisms. For once men
had broken loose from the cohesion and obedience of the older life,
the floundering of democracy began. It was not so easy to become
self-governing as it was to bowl over a tyrant. And the long history
of schisms is really the story of how men set up a substitute for
authority, and had to revolt against it. To a man standing on the firm
foundation of an ancient faith, the instability of self-government is
its just punishment, and no doubt he smiles at the folly of men who
give up security and peace for a mess of revolt.
After Protestantism, the Romantic movement and the birth of political
democracy. It is hardly necessary to recall what troubled spirits the
romanticists were, how terrible the disillusionments. Their histories
were with few exceptions tragic: and the “unending pursuit of the
ever-fleeting object of desire” led many of them back into the arms of
the Catholic Church. One has only to read the lives of the men whose
names stand out in the nineteenth century to realize that the epoch of
revolt produced tortured and driven spirits. Whatever their virtues,
and they are many, they never attained that inner harmony whose outward
sign is a cordial human life.
No one has felt this more poignantly than the modern artist. Lost in
the clamor of commercialism, many painters seem to insist that if
they can’t make themselves admired they will at least make themselves
heard. And of course, if you live in a world of studios, drawing-rooms
and cafés, amidst idle people in little cliques, you have to draw
attention to yourself from the outside world in some other way than by
decorating or interpreting human life. The modern artist can secure
attention, but he can’t hold it. For the world is so complex that he
can’t find common experiences and common aspirations to deal with. And
because he can’t do this, he can’t become artist to a nation. He has
to be satisfied with a cult. So he specializes on some aspect of form,
exaggerates some quality of line, and produces art that only a few
people would miss if it disappeared. Then he denounces the philistine
public.
But in his heart he is unsatisfied with his work, and so he too
develops a habit of chronic rebellion: a school is no sooner founded
when there is a secession. The usual manifesto is published (they all
say about the same thing): authority and classicism are denounced in
the name of youth and adventure. “All I want,” said a friend of mine
who paints, “is to bewilder and fascinate” ... “All we need is wiggle,”
said another. “To be alive is to rebel,” said a third. But I venture to
suggest that what the rebels are rebelling against is not a classical
authority: none exists to-day that has any compelling force. They are
in rebellion against something within themselves; there are conflicts
in their souls for which they have found no solution; and their revolt
is the endless pursuit of what their own disharmony will never let them
find.
“Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
This certitude for which Matthew Arnold cries, where has it gone?
Classicists, like Prof. Babbitt of Harvard, or Mr. Paul Elmore More,
say that it has gone with the shattering of external authority in
the _débacle_ of Romanticism and the French Revolution. Their remedy
for the chaos and ineptitude of modern life is a return to what they
describe as eternal forms of justice and moderation. They would revive
authority with its dominating critics like Boileau. Romanticism for
them is a lapse from grace, full of sweet sin, and they hope to return
to the Golden Age of the classics.
I don’t see how this dream can succeed. Their solution is built on
a wild impossibility, for in order to realize it they will have to
abolish machinery and communication, newspapers and popular books. They
will have to call upon some fairy to wipe out the memory of the last
hundred years, and they will have to find a magician who can conjure up
a church and a monarchy that men will obey. They can’t do any of these
things, though they can bewail the fact and display their grief by
unremitting hostility to the modern world.
But though their remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their
diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We
are “emancipated” from an ordered world. We drift.
The loss of something outside ourselves which we can obey is a
revolutionary break with our habits. Never before have we had to
rely so completely upon ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no
precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary
men set to deal with heart-breaking perplexity. All weakness comes
to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed
powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course, our culture is
confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No
mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average
human being born into the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they
knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzled about
the day after to-morrow.
What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a
happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real
tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away
the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The
iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we
have to swim.
CHAPTER X
The Rock of Ages
I happened to be in Dublin some time ago during what was undoubtedly a
crisis in Irish history: Home Rule in sight, Ulster arming itself for
rebellion, Dublin torn by a bitter strike. No one felt any assurance
as to the outcome. Before nationalism could prevail a long controversy
seemed inevitable with the Presbyterian and industrial North. And even
if Ireland became a nation it seemed as if it would have to face at
once a sharp class struggle.
Then Mr. Hilaire Belloc arrived from England one evening to lecture
before a Catholic Society. There seemed to be no doubts in Mr. Belloc’s
mind. He announced that his Church was the heir of all the arts and the
guardian of all tradition. But the Catholic employers of Dublin, who
were breaking up the workers’ union with unparalleled bitterness, must
have been somewhat puzzled by Mr. Belloc’s statement. For in an issue
of his paper two or three weeks before he had said with resounding
conviction that the European tradition of Christendom always supported
the rebellions of labor.
The same absolutism gave Mr. Belloc and the employers untroubled
conviction, but the two convictions happened to be diametrically
opposed. Neither side suffered from the malady of doubt, the employers
being ready to defy the temporal law by locking up the men’s leaders;
the men ready to defy the laws of property by throwing packing-cases
into the river Liffey.
Now this is the peculiar fact about an absolute faith: that while
it makes a man _feel_ sure of himself, it doesn’t enable him to be
sure. Mr. Belloc in his untroubled way felt certain about events that
in plain fact were full of uncertainty. It was all very well to
say in cocksure fashion that Christian tradition was this-and-that.
Christian employers, Christian priests, Christian newspapers made
it something else. But human beings seem to be made in such a way
that they cling passionately to the emotion of certainty. If only
they can retain the feeling that God and Nature and history are with
them, they go about with every appearance of conviction and practical
power. They have far less bother about their souls than the modern
man lost in a fog of introspection. For the believer in an absolute
system has projected upon the world that certainty and harmony which
he needs. His difficulties after that are merely matters of detail.
The massive structure of his faith will dwarf the puny evidence of
fact. And so, freed from doubts as to the eternal principles of
truth and righteousness, he can give undivided attention to ordinary
events. Do not wonder then at the practical efficiency of mystics,
the executive genius of priests and cardinals, and the shrewdness of
those who profess an unworldly religion. If the genuine interests
of man lie beyond this earth, why exhibit such marvelous competence
about the things which the moths eat and the dust corrupts? That’s
a good question for a debater, but not for a student of men. Belief
does not live by logic, but by the need it fills, and absolutism
quiets the uncertainties of the soul, finds answers to unsatisfied
desire, and endows men with the sense that they are part of something
greater than themselves. In the worldly power of the Roman Church, of
Christian Science, of the Salvation Army, or the Mormons, you come to
see what a colossal, practical power there is in an untroubled faith.
But in liberal thought there is chaos, for it lacks the foundations of
certainty.
Now when a man is looking for something really trustworthy he is likely
to think of something solid, like a rock. Gibraltar has always been an
excellent symbol of the qualities a man hopes to find in his insurance
companies. And those qualities, you can rest assured, are the ones
with which he would like to insure his destiny. For real comfort, give
a man a world that will stand still, that will be the same to-morrow
as it was yesterday, so that no matter how much he is buffeted about,
there will be one place he can go and not be surprised. The mother is
such a refuge to a bewildered child, and Mother Church has been that
to her bewildered children. We are none of us progressives when we are
worried or tired; few of us are revolutionists in a personal crisis.
We have to be very healthy to love variety. We have to be exuberant
and conquering to rejoice in change. And that I imagine is why man
has always attached such high emotional value to the One, the All
Embracing, the Permanent. There are people who flatly refuse to regard
Pluralism as a philosophy of life. William James recognized that and
spent a large amount of time trying to show that a disorderly world
full of variety and spontaneous creation might still give religious
satisfaction. I doubt whether he succeeded. The only people who can
stomach a pluralistic philosophy are those who in some way or another
have grown strong enough to do without an absolute faith.
It has often been said that the Catholic Church is the greatest piece
of constructive psychology that the world has ever seen. Certainly it
would be hard to duplicate the ingenious answers it has found to human
need: the cavernous mysteries of its cathedrals converging upon the
enduring altar, the knowledge of an Eternal Family that survives the
human one, the confessional where sin could be expressed and therefore
purged, the vicarious atonement by which the consequences of human
weakness were lifted off men’s shoulders, the obliteration of death,
the sense that wisdom was there inexhaustible and infallible. Those
aren’t idle dogmas, as foolish critics have imagined, but endlessly
ingenious responses to the every-day wants of men and women. And then
the invariable presence of the Church at every important crisis in
human life--at birth, at puberty, at marriage, on the battlefield, at
the death-bed,--wherever men were troubled and in need of help, there
the Church was to be found. So men might forget the Church in their
prosperity but in sorrow they returned to it. Of course, the Church was
no aid to the inventor or to anyone who was really extending the bounds
of human power. Of course, it was hostile to democracy and to every
force that tended to make people self-sufficient.
In fact, the Church was not content to meet needs and compensate
weakness. It tried to make weakness permanent. In other words, the
Church used all its tremendous power over men to keep them wanting that
which the Church could give. “What is your age? Is it twenty, thirty,
forty, or are you still older?... Death will take from you the future,
as it took from you the past, with the rapidity of lightning ... To die
... is to go ... where you will become the prey of corruption and the
food of the most hideous reptiles.” This is from the “First Exercise
on Death” in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Take this from
the Third Exercise: “Consider--1. A few moments after your death. Your
body laid on a funeral bed, wrapped in a shroud, a veil thrown over
your face; beside you the crucifix, the holy water, friends, relatives,
a priest kneeling by your sad remains, and reciting the holy prayers,
‘De profundis clamvi ad te, Domine’; the public officer who writes in
the register of the dead all the particulars of your decease.”
In the lovely little book from which I am quoting this kind of thing
is recommended for daily contemplation, a capital way, it seems to
me, of poisoning the human will. It was this that Nietzsche had in
mind when he said that “belief is always most desired, most pressingly
needed where there is a lack of will--the less a person knows how to
command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands sternly,--a
God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party
conscience.”
Yet a stern commander is just what this age lacks. Liberalism suffuses
our lives and the outstanding fact is the decay of authority. But this
doesn’t mean for one minute that we are able to command ourselves.
In fact, if a man dare attempt to sum up the spiritual condition
of his time, he might say of ours that it has lost authority and
retained the need of it. We are freer than we are strong. We have more
responsibility than we have capacity. And if we wish to state what the
future sets for us, we might say, I think, that we must find within
ourselves the certainty which the external world has lost.
It is not fair to claim that we who attack absolutism are robbing
life of its guarantees. It is far truer to say that the enlargement
and ferment of the modern world have robbed absolutism of its excuse.
To the business man who believes sincerely in the old sanctities of
private property, the industrial situation must seem like a mine
of explosives. The legalist gasps in panic. And as for these new
aspirations of women, this push of the working-class towards an
industrial democracy, this faculty of the young for taking an interest
in life uncensored, what lamp-post is there that a man can embrace in a
giddy and reeling universe? None. It was possible to talk about eternal
principles of conduct in an old-world village where the son replaced
the father generation after generation, where the only immigrants
were babies and the only emigrants the dead. But in the new world,
where fifty races meet, and a continent is exploited, ten years is an
enormous change, a generation is a revolution.
Life has overflowed the little systems of eternity. Thought has become
humbler because its task is greater. We can invoke no monumental
creeds, because facts smile ironically upon them. And so in a changing
world, men have to cast aside the old thickset forms of their thinking
for suppler experimental ones. They think oftener. They think more
lavishly, and they don’t hang their hope of immortality on the issue
of their thoughts. It is not so comfortable. It gives none of that
harmony outside which men desire. The challenge is endless, to finer
perceptions and sharper insights. Such thinking is more accurate than
settled principles can ever be; the restless modern world has made such
thinking necessary. But gone are the repose and the sublimity and the
shelter of larger creeds. Our thought is homely, of the earth, and not
awe-inspiring. No profound homage can go out to ideas that an honest
man may have to scrap to-morrow. There is nothing of Gibraltar about
to-day’s hypothesis.
The most dramatic revelation of this crisis is among the newer
immigrants in an American city. They come suddenly from the fixed
traditions of peasant life into the distracting variety of a strange
civilization. America for them is not only a foreign country where
they have to find a living in ways to which they are unaccustomed;
America is a place where their creeds do not work, where what at home
seemed big and emphatic as the mountains is almost unnoticed. It is
a commonplace to say that the tide of emigration has shifted from
the Northwest to the Southeast of Europe, and that America to-day
is receiving a radically different stock than it did twenty years
ago. That is undoubtedly true. But the difference is not only in the
immigrants. America itself is different. Those who are coming to-day
have to bridge a much greater gap than did those who entered this
country when it was a nation of villages.
They come to a country which shatters cynically the whole structure
of their emotional life. There is a brave attempt to preserve it in
ghettos. But with no great success, and the second generation is drawn
unprotected into the new world. Parents and children often hardly
understand each others’ speech, let alone each others’ desires.
In Queenstown harbor I once talked to an Irish boy who was about to
embark for America. His home was in the West of Ireland, in a small
village where his sister and he helped their father till a meager
farm. They had saved enough for a passage to America, and they were
abandoning their home. I asked the boy whether he knew anyone in
America. He didn’t, but his parish priest at home did. He was going
to write to Father Riley every week. Would he ever return to Ireland?
“Yes,” said this boy of eighteen, “I’m going to die in Ireland.”
Where was he going to in America? To a place called New Haven. He
was, in short, going from one epoch into another, and for guidance
he had the parish priest at home and perhaps the ward boss in New
Haven. His gentleness and trust in the slums of New Haven, assaulted
by din and glare, hedged in by ugliness and cynical push,--if there
is any adventure comparable to his, I have not heard of it. At the
very moment when he needed a faith, he was cutting loose from it. If
he becomes brutal, greedy, vulgar, will it be so surprising? If he
fails to measure up to the requirements of citizenship in a world
reconstruction, is there anything strange about it?
Well, he was an immigrant in the literal sense. All of us are
immigrants spiritually. We are all of us immigrants in the industrial
world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted
people, newly arrived, and _nouveau riche_. As a nation we have all the
vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern
man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying,
alluring, and incomprehensibly big. The evidence is everywhere: the
amusements of the city; the jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that
stands for beauty, the folksongs of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic
pulpits, the cruel standards of success, raucous purity. We make love
to ragtime and we die to it. We are blown hither and thither like
litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience.
You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we
are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do
not concern us, bored with those that do. Is it a wild mistake to say
that the absence of central authority has disorganized our souls, that
our souls are like Peer Gynt’s onion, in that they lack a kernel?
PART III
CHAPTER XI
A Note on the Woman’s Movement
Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do
with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters,
why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket
and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own
life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
If all that women needed were “rights,”--the right to work, the right
to vote, and freedom from the authority of father and husband, then
feminism would be the easiest human question on the calendar. For while
there will be a continuing opposition, no one supposes that these
elementary freedoms can be withheld from women. In fact, they will be
forced upon millions of women who never troubled to ask for any of
these rights. And that isn’t because Ibsen wrote the Doll’s House, or
because Bernard Shaw writes prefaces. The mere withdrawal of industries
from the home has drawn millions of women out of the home, and left
millions idle within it. There are many other forces, all of which
have blasted the rock of ages where woman’s life was centered. The
self-conscious modern woman may insist that she has a life of her own
to lead, which neither father, nor priest, nor husband, nor Mrs. Grundy
is fit to prescribe for her. But when she begins to prescribe life for
herself, her real problems begin.
Every step in the woman’s movement is creative. There are no precedents
whatever, not even bad ones. Now the invention of new ways of living
is rare enough among men, but among women it has been almost unknown.
Housekeeping and baby-rearing are the two most primitive arts in the
whole world. They are almost the last occupations in which rule of
thumb and old wives’ tales have resisted the application of scientific
method. They are so immemorially backward, that nine people out of ten
hardly conceive the possibility of improving upon them. They are so
backward that we have developed a maudlin sentimentality about them,
have associated family life and the joy in childhood with all the
stupidity and wasted labor of the inefficient home. The idea of making
the home efficient will cause the average person to shudder, as if you
were uttering some blasphemy against monogamy. “Let science into the
home, where on earth will Cupid go to?” Almost in vain do women like
Mrs. Gilman insist that the institution of the family is not dependent
upon keeping woman a drudge amidst housekeeping arrangements inherited
from the early Egyptians. Women have invented almost nothing to lighten
their labor. They have made practically no attempt to specialize, to
coöperate. They have been the great routineers.
So people have said that woman was made to be the natural conservative,
the guardian of tradition. She would probably still be guarding the
tradition of weaving her own clothes in the parlor if an invention
hadn’t thwarted her. She still guards the tradition of buying food
retail, of going alone and unorganized to market. And she has been, of
course, a faithful conservator of superstition, the most docile and
credulous of believers. In all this, I am saying nothing that awakened
women themselves aren’t saying, nor am I trying to take a hand in that
most stupid of all debates as to whether men are superior to women.
Nor am I trying to make up my mind whether the higher education of
women and their political enfranchisement will produce in the next
generation several Darwins and a few Michelangelos. The question is not
even whether women can be as good doctors and lawyers and business
organizers as men.
It is much more immediate, and far less academic than that. The
feminists could almost afford to admit the worst that Schopenhauer,
Weininger, and Sir Almoth Wright can think of, and then go on pointing
to the fact that competent or incompetent they have got to adjust
themselves to a new world. The day of the definitely marked “sphere” is
passing under the action of forces greater than any that an irritated
medical man can control. It is no longer possible to hedge the life
of women in a set ritual, where their education, their work, their
opinion, their love, and their motherhood, are fixed in the structure
of custom. To insist that women need to be moulded by authority is
a shirking of the issue. For the authority that has moulded them is
passing. And if woman is fit only to live in a harem, it will have to
be a different kind of harem from any that has existed.
The more you pile up the case against woman in the past the more
significant does feminism become. For one fact is written across the
whole horizon, the prime element in any discussion. That fact is the
absolute necessity for a readjusting of woman’s position. And so,
every time you insist that women are backward you are adding to the
revolutionary meaning of their awakening. But what these anti-feminists
have in mind, of course, is that women are by nature incapable of any
readjustment. However, the test of that pudding is in the eating.
What women will do with the freedom that is being forced upon them is
something, that no person can foresee by thinking of women in the past.
Women to-day are embarked upon a career for which their tradition is
no guide. The first result, of course, is a vast amount of trouble.
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted
prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her
own soul. She who always took what was given to her has to find for
herself. She who passed without a break from the dominance of her
father to the dominance of her husband is suddenly compelled to govern
herself. Almost at one stroke she has lost the authority of a little
world and has been thrust into a very big one, which nobody, man or
woman, understands very well. I have tried to suggest what this change
from a world of villages has meant for politicians, clergymen and
social thinkers. Well, for women, the whole problem is aggravated by
the fact that they come from a still smaller world and from a much more
rigid authority.
It is no great wonder if there is chaos among the awakening women.
Take a cry like that for a “single standard” of morality. It means two
utterly contradictory things. For the Pankhursts it is assumed that men
should adopt women’s standards, but in the minds of thousands it means
just the reverse. For some people feminism is a movement of women to
make men chaste, for others the enforced chastity of women is a sign
of their slavery. Feminism is attacked both for being too “moral” and
too “immoral.” And these contradictions represent a real conflict, not
a theoretical debate. There is in the movement an uprising of women
who rebel against marriage which means to a husband the ultimate haven
of a sexual career. There is also a rebellion of women who want for
themselves the larger experience that most men have always taken.
Christabel Pankhurst uses the new freedom of expression to drive home
an Old Testament morality with Old Testament fervor. She finds her book
suppressed by Mr. Anthony Comstock, who differs from her far less than
he imagines. And she rouses the scorn of great numbers of people who
feel that she is out, not to free women, but to enslave men. There is
an immense vacillation between a more rigid Puritanism and the idolatry
of freedom. Women are discovering what reformers of all kinds are
learning, that there is a great gap between the overthrow of authority
and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a
period of drift and doubt. We are in it to-day.
The first impulse of emancipation seems to be in the main that woman
should model her career on man’s. But she cannot do that for the simple
reason that she is a woman. Towards love and children her attitude is
not man’s, as everyone but a doctrinaire knows. She cannot taboo her
own character in order to become suddenly an amateur male. And if she
could, it would be the sheerest folly, for there are plenty of men on
this earth.
Yet at the very time when enlightened people are crying out against the
horrors of capitalism, you will find many feminists urging women to
enter capitalism as a solution of their problems. Of course, millions
have been drawn in against their will, but there is still a good number
who go in voluntarily, because they feel that their self-respect
demands it.
They go in response to the desire for economic independence. And
they find almost no real independence in the industrial world. What
has happened, it seems to me, is this: the women who argue for the
necessity of making one’s own living are almost without exception upper
class women, either because they have special talents or because they
have special opportunities. Some time ago I attended a feminist meeting
where a brilliant woman was presented to the audience as an example of
how it was possible to earn a living and have twins at the same time.
But it happened that the woman was a lecturer who could earn a very
comfortable sum by speaking a few hours a week. Another woman at the
same meeting was an actress, another had been a minister, another was a
popular novelist; the only woman present who was concerned with factory
work said not one word about the pleasure of earning your own living.
Now, only a very small percentage of men or women can enter the
professions. For the great mass, economic independence means going
to work. And the theorists of feminism have yet to make up their
minds whether they can seriously urge women to go into industry as it
is to-day or is likely to be in the near future. I, for one, should
say that the presence of women in the labor market is an evil to be
combatted by every means at our command. The army of women in industry
to-day is not a blessing but the curse of a badly organized society.
Their position there is not the outpost of an advance toward a fuller
life but an outrage upon the race, and I believe that the future will
regard it as a passing phase of human servitude.
For the great mass, women’s work in the future will, I believe, be
in the application of the arts and sciences to a deepened and more
extensively organized home. There is nothing narrowing about that, no
thrusting of women back into the chimney corner. There is opportunity
for every kind of talent, and for the sharing of every kind of
interest. It does not mean that women need not concern themselves with
industry. Far from it. For any decent kind of home women will have to
develop beyond anything we have to-day an intelligent and powerful
consumers’ control. They must go into politics, of course, for no home
exists that doesn’t touch in a hundred ways upon the government of
cities, states and the nation. They have the whole educational system
to deal with, not only from the public school up, but also, what is
beginning to be recognized as most important of all, from infancy to
school age. Nor does it mean that every woman must be an incompetent
amateur of all the arts, as she is to-day, a cook, a purchaser, a
housekeeper, a trained nurse and a kindergarten teacher. Woman’s work
can and will be specialized, as Mrs. Gilman has pointed out, so that
a woman will have a very wide choice in a host of new careers that
are going to be created. A great many things which are done in each
house will be done by the collective action of a group of houses. The
idea of having forty kitchens, forty furnaces, forty laundries, and
forty useless backyards in one square block, managed by forty separate
overworked women, each going helplessly to market, each bringing up
children by rule of thumb,--all that is a kind of individualism which
the world will get away from.
To get away from it is an effort that will provide ample careers
for most women. The elementary facts of coöperation and division of
labor are being forced upon women by the wastefulness of the old
kind of housekeeping. We see already the organization of housewives’
associations, of common playgrounds, which some people object to
when they have a roof and are called common nurseries. There are
neighborhood associations, and women’s municipal leagues. There are
kindergartens which take away from each mother the necessity of being
an accomplished teacher of the most subtly plastic period of human life.
Now with the development of some division of labor among women, they
will begin to earn salaries. To be paid for work in money is possible
only when you don’t do all the work. So the moment you divide the work
the only way you can share the product is by paying money to each
worker. A woman who does her own cooking gets no pay. A woman who does
someone else’s cooking gets pay. And when women introduce into the
work of the home the principle of division of labor and coöperative
organization, they also will receive pay, and what is called “economic
independence” will be open to them.
That will, of course, be a real emancipation. If women are trained
to do all the things that the existing home requires, that is, if
they become amateur cooks, marketers, and Montessori mothers, and
specialists in none of these things, then they have to wait till they
can have a home of their own in which to display their versatility.
They have to wait for a man who loves them enough to put up with their
general amateurishness, or one who doesn’t know any better. But the
moment they specialize, so that women can do some one thing very well,
they can begin to do homework before they are married. A kindergarten
teacher doesn’t have to bear a child before she can begin to teach a
child. She has a place in the world, a livelihood, and a self-respect
because she can do something which is needed. She can marry for love,
because she desires children of her own, because she wants what the
family can give, not because she is a detached and meaningless female
until she is married.
What this will mean for everyone is almost beyond the imagination of
most people to-day. We are just beginning to realize that the intense
narrowness of women is one of the things that thwarts human effort.
The number of wives who have egged their husbands on to ruthless
business practices, the inventive minds that have been stunted by a
fierce absorption in the little interests of the household--all the
individualism of women is a constant obstacle to a larger coöperative
life. If we knew the details of why men falter, why they are pulled
away from common action, we should find, I believe, in unnumbered cases
that there was some woman at home, a mother or a wife, who, limited in
her whole vision, was clinging desperately to some immediate, personal
advantage. And as for children, in their most educable period, they
are surrounded by an example of isolation, made to feel that the
supreme concern of human life is to look in towards the home, instead
of out from it. It is no wonder that democracy is so difficult, that
collective action is impeded by a thousand conflicting egotisms. Every
one of us is trained in a little water-tight compartment of his own.
From the economic and spiritual subjection of his mother the child
forms its ideal of the relation of men and women. We speak about
the influence of the parents. It is deeper than most of us realize.
The child is influenced by its parents, but not only for good, as
sentimentalists seem to imagine. The boy may absorb all the admirable
qualities of his father, but he is just as capable of absorbing his
father’s contempt for woman’s mind, his father’s capacity for playing
the little tyrant, and his father’s bad economic habits. The girl
learns to obey, to wait on the lordly male, to feel unimportant in
human affairs, to hold on with unremitting force to the privileges that
sex gives her. And out of it all we get the people of to-day, unused
to the very meaning of democracy, grasping their own with an almost
hysterical tenacity.
The sense of property may be a deep instinct. But surely the nineteenth
century home stimulated that instinct to the point of morbidity. For
it did almost nothing to bring the child into contact with the real
antidote to acquisitiveness--a sense of social property. To own things
in common is, it seems to me, one of the most educating experiences
in the world. Those people who can feel that they possess the parks,
the libraries, the museums of their city, are likely to be far more
civilized people than those who want a park which they can enclose,
and who want to own a masterpiece all by themselves. It is well known
that there is among sea-faring people a rare comradeship. May this not
be due to the fact that the sea is there for all to use and none to
own? On the high road men salute each other in passing. Farmers seem at
times to have a kind of personal friendship with the weather and the
turning seasons, and those things which no single man can appropriate.
Now in the complicated civilization upon which we are entering, it
will be impossible for many people to enjoy the primitive sense of
absolute possession. We shall need men and women who can take an
interest in collective property, who can feel personally and vividly
about it. One of the great promises of the conservation movement is
the evidence it gave of a passionate attachment to public possessions.
But that attachment is something that almost everyone to-day has had
to acquire after he was grown up. We are all of us compelled to
overcome the habits and ideals of a childhood where social property
was almost unknown. In this respect the only child is perhaps the most
deeply miseducated. He has had what he had as his in fee simple. But
all children have far too little contact with other children--too few
toys that are owned in common, too few group nurseries. Now boys, when
they grow to be a bit older, do come in for a little social education.
The gang is a fine experience, even though a few windows are smashed.
The boy who can talk about “us fellers” has a better start for the
modern world than the little girl of the same age who is imitating
her mother’s housekeeping. From the gang to the athletic team,
class spirit, school spirit--with all their faults and misdirected
energy--they do mean loyalty to something larger than the petty details
of the moment.
One of the supreme values of feminism is that it will have to socialize
the home. When women seek a career they have to specialize. When they
specialize they have to coöperate. They have to abandon more and
more the self-sufficient individualism of the older family. They will
have to market through associations. They will do a great deal more
of the housework through associations, just as they are now beginning
to have bread baked outside and the washing done by laundries that
are not part of the home. If they are not satisfied with the kind
of work that is done for the home but outside of it, they will have
to learn that difficult business of democracy which consists in
expressing and enforcing their desires upon industry. And just as
from the kindergarten up, education has become a collective function,
so undoubtedly a great deal of the care and training of infants will
become specialized.
This doesn’t mean baby-farms or barracks or any of the other nightmares
of the hysterical imagination. Nobody is proposing to separate the
child from its parents any more than the child is now separated. It is
curious how readily any woman who can afford it will trust her infant
to the most ignorant nurse-girl, and then be horribly shocked at the
idea of trusting her child to day nurseries in charge of trained women.
The private nurse-girl often abuses the child in unmentionable ways,
but she is preferred because she seems somehow to satisfy the feeling
of possession. The penalty that grown-ups pay for the sins of the
superstitious and unsocialized nursery is something that we are just
beginning to understand from the researches of the psychiatrists.
There is one question about feminism which is sure to have risen in the
mind of any reader who has followed the argument up to this point. Does
the awakening of women mean an attack upon monogamy? For the moment
anyone dares to criticize any arrangement of the existing home he might
as well be prepared to find himself classed as a sexual anarchist. It
is curious how little faith conservatives have in the institution of
the family. They will tell you how deep it is in the needs of mankind,
and they will turn around and act as if the home were so fragile that
collapse would follow the first whiff of criticism.
Now I believe that the family _is_ deeply grounded in the needs of
mankind, or it would never survive the destructive attacks made upon
it, not by radical theorists, mind you, but by social conditions.
At the present moment over half the men of the working-class do not
earn enough to support a family, and that’s why their wives and their
daughters are drawn into industry. The family survives that, men and
women do still want to marry and have children. But we put every kind
of obstacle in their way. We pay such wages that young men can’t afford
to marry. We do not teach them the elementary facts of sex. We allow
them to pick up knowledge in whispered and hidden ways. We surround
them with the tingle and glare of cities, stimulate them, and then fall
upon them with a morality which shows no quarter. We support a large
class of women in idleness, the soil in which every foolish freak can
flourish. We thrust people into marriage and forbid them with fearful
penalties to learn any way of controlling their own fertility. We do
almost no single, sensible, and deliberate thing to make family life a
success. And still the family survives.
It has survived all manner of stupidity. It will survive the
application of intelligence. It will not collapse because the home is
no longer the scene of drudgery and wasted labor or because children
are reared to meet modern civilization. It will not collapse because
women have become educated, or because they have attained a new
self-respect.
But in answer to the direct question whether monogamy is to go by
the board, the only possible answer is this: there is no reason for
supposing that there will be any less of it than there is to-day.
That is not saying very much, perhaps, but more than that no honest
person can guarantee. He can believe that when the thousand irritations
of married life are reduced, the irritations of an unsound economic
status, of ignorance in the art of love, then the family will have a
better chance than it has ever had. How many homes have been wrecked
by the sheer inability of men and women to understand each other can
be seen by the enormous use made of the theme in modern literature.
It does not seem to me that education and a growing sensitiveness are
likely to make for promiscuity.
For you have to hold yourself very cheaply to endure the appalling
and unselective intimacy that promiscuity means. To treat women as
things and yourself as a predatory animal is the product not of
emancipation and self-respect, but of ignorance and inferiority. The
uprising of women as personalities is not likely to make them value
themselves less, nor is it likely that they will be satisfied with the
fragments of love they now attain. Of course, every movement attracts
what Roosevelt calls its “lunatic fringe,” and feminism has collected
about it a great rag-tag of bohemianism. But it cannot be judged by
that; it must be judged by its effect on the great mass of women who,
half-consciously for the most part, are seeking not a new form of
studio and café life, but a readjustment to work and love and interest.
There is among them, so far as I can see, no indication of any desire
for an impressionistic sexual career.
To be sure they don’t treat a woman who has had relations out of
marriage as if she were a leper. They are not inclined to visit upon
the offspring of illegitimacy the curse of patriarchal Judæa. But so
far as their own demands go they are set in overwhelming measure upon
greater sexual sincerity. They are, if anything, too stern in their
morality and, perhaps, too naïve. But the legislation they initiate,
the books they write, look almost entirely to the establishment of a
far more enduring and intelligently directed family.
The effect of the woman’s movement will accumulate with the
generations. The results are bound to be so far-reaching that we
can hardly guess them to-day. For we are tapping a reservoir of
possibilities when women begin to use not only their generalized
womanliness but their special abilities. For the child it means, as
I have tried to suggest, a change in the very conditions where the
property sense is aggravated and where the need for authority and
individual assertiveness is built up. The greatest obstacles to a
coöperative civilization are under fire from the feminists. Those
obstacles to-day are more than anything else a childhood in which
the anti-social impulses are fixed. The awakening of women points
straight to the discipline of coöperation. And so it is laying the real
foundations for the modern world.
For understand that the forms of coöperation are of precious little
value without a people trained to use them. The old family with its
dominating father, its submissive and amateurish mother produced
inevitably men who had little sense of a common life, and women who
were jealous of an enlarging civilization. It is this that feminism
comes to correct, and that is why its promise reaches far beyond the
present bewilderment.
CHAPTER XII
Bogeys
There are people who are always waiting for the heavens to fall. In
1879, when Massachusetts granted school suffrage to women, a legislator
arose and said: “If we make this experiment we shall destroy the
race, which will be blasted by Almighty God.” That silly man was not
a prehistoric specimen. He is always with us. And he is in the soul
of most of us. He is the panic that seized Chicago over the Haymarket
anarchists; he is what makes preachers cry out that the tango is
wrecking the nation; he is the white slave legend; he is Mr. Taft
contemplating the recall of judges.
I know how bogeys are made. I was a child of four during the panic of
’93, and Cleveland has always been a sinister figure to me. His name
was uttered with monstrous dread in the household. Then came Bryan, an
ogre from the West, and a waiting for the election returns of 1896 with
beating heart. And to this day I find myself with a subtle prejudice
against Democrats that goes deeper than what we call political
conviction.
I can remember a birthday “party” for two or three chums which
developed into a “rough-house.” In the excitement we used cakes as
ammunition, leaving the carpet in a shocking state. This angered the
maid who was responsible for the tidiness of my room to such a pitch
that only religion seemed adequate for the occasion. In the late
afternoon she began to talk to me in a solemn voice. I would have
preferred a thousand beatings to that voice in the wretched gaslight
which used to darken homes before electricity reached the middle-class.
The flickering shadows on the cake-strewn carpet were unbearable and
accusing shapes full of foreboding to boys lost in sin. I burst into
tears at the impending wrath of God. And for years God was the terror
of the twilight.
With that somehow or other was associated a belief that the world was
about to come to an end. I think the nurse had read the predictions of
some astronomer in a newspaper, and the news was communicated to me. It
became part of the twilight, and was mixed up with thunderstorms, and
going into a dark room. Then too, there were ghosts, but I laid them
one night after everyone had gone to bed in what is undoubtedly the
most heroic exploit of my life. I still glow with pride in the telling.
I got out of bed and turned on the light, identified the ghost with the
lace curtain, went back to bed, turned on the light once more, made
sure that the ghost _was_ the curtain, and felt immeasurably happier.
Generally, however, we create the bogey by pulling the bed-clothes over
our heads. A friend of mine couldn’t be cured of his socialist phobia
until he happened one day to see the most terrible agitator of them all
buying a pair of suspenders. For in the seclusion and half-light of
class tradition and private superstition, in a whispered and hesitant
atmosphere, phantoms thrive. But in direct contact by an unromantic
light evil is no longer a bogey but a problem. That is the way to
approach evil: by stating it and manhandling it: the fevered gloom
subsides, for that gloom does not belong to evil; it is merely the
feeling of a person who is afraid of evil. “Death,” said a wise man,
“is not feared because it is evil, but it is evil because it is feared.”
To overcome the subjective terrors: that is an important aspect of the
age-long struggle out of barbarism. Romantic persons like to paint
savages as care-free poets living in thoughtless happiness from day to
day. Nothing could be further from the facts. The life of a savage is
beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated
world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are
obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to
propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical
and capricious, the simplest thing is occult. In that atmosphere there
is no possibility of men being able to face their life without heroics
and without terror, simply and gladly. They need authority: they need
to be taken in charge; they cannot trust themselves.
That is why the exorcising of bogeys is so intimate a part of the
effort at self-government. Think of the ordinary business man’s
notion of an anarchist, or the anarchist’s notion of a business man;
many men’s feeling about Theodore Roosevelt, or Bill Haywood, or the
Capitalist Class, or the Money Power, or Sex Reform--I use capital
letters because these fantasies have become terrific monsters of the
imagination. Our life is overwrought with timidities and panics,
distorting superstitions and fantastic lures: our souls are misshapen
by the plucking of invisible hands.
The regiment of bogeys is waiting for people at birth, where the
cruellest unreason clusters about illegitimacy. It attacks the young
child who asks how he was born. For answer he is given lies and a
sense of shame; for ever afterwards he too lies and is ashamed. And
so we begin to build up the sense of sin and the furtiveness of sex.
The body becomes the object of a sneaking curiosity, of a tingling and
embarrassing interest. We surround the obvious with great wastes of
silence, and over the simplest facts we teach the soul to stutter.
What we call purity is not honest and temperate desire, but a divided
life in which our “Better Nature” occasionally wins a bankrupt victory.
Children are immured in what their parents fondly picture to be a
citadel of innocence. In reality, they are plunged into fantastic
brooding or into a haphazard education. Behind innocence there gathers
a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse;
clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.
Then too the whole edifice of class-feeling--what “is done” and
what “isn’t done,” and who are “the best people” and who are the
“impossible,” and sleepless nights over whether you were correctly
dressed, or whether you will be invited to be seen with Mrs. So-and-So.
It makes sheep out of those who conform and freaks out of those who
rebel. Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of
respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
The mere fact that the weight of custom is on the accidents of class
is a tremendous item in the lives of those who try to live in a human
sphere. No one escapes the deformity altogether. Certainly not the
modern rebel. His impulse is to break away from the worship of idols
to central human values. But the obstruction of class feeling is so
great that he becomes a kind of specialist in rebellion. He is so busy
asserting that he isn’t conventional that the easy, natural humanity
he professes to admire is almost the last thing he achieves. Hence the
eccentricity and the paradox, the malice and the wantonness of the
iconoclast.
The fear of losing one’s job, the necessity of being somebody in a
crowded and clamorous world, the terror that old age will not be
secured, that your children will lack opportunity--there are a thousand
terrors which arise out of the unorganized and unstable economic system
under which we live. These are not terrors which can be blown away by
criticism; they will go only when society is intelligent enough to
have made destitution impossible, when it secures opportunity to every
child, when it establishes for every human being a minimum of comfort
below which he cannot sink. Then a great amount of social hesitancy
will disappear. Every issue will not be fought as if life depended
upon it, and mankind will have emerged from a fear economy. There are
those who cannot conceive of a nation not driven by fear. They seem to
feel that enterprise would diminish in a sort of placid contentment.
That, it seems to me, is a serious error. The regime of fear produces
dreaming and servile races, as in India and China and parts of Ireland.
The enterprise that will be fruitful to modern civilization is not
the undernourished child of hard necessity, but the high spirits and
exuberant well-being of a happy people.
It is a common observation that no man can live well who fears death.
The overcareful person is really dying all his life. He is a miser, and
he pays the miser’s penalty: he never enjoys his own treasure because
he will not spend it. And so when we hear that he who would find his
own soul must lose it first, we are not listening to an idle paradox or
to some counsel of perfection. Those who hold life lightly are the real
masters of it: the lavish givers have the most to give.
But anyone who picks his way through the world as if he were walking
on eggs will find it a difficult and unsatisfactory place. Writers
and scientists and statesmen who are forever preoccupied with their
immediate reputation, always counting the costs, are buying rubbish
for a fortune. The thinker who has a mortal fear of being wrong will
give all that is valuable in himself to that little ambition. A mistake
matters far less than most of us imagine: the world is not brittle, but
elastic.
If we could know the inner history of weakness, of what disappoints
us in leaders, the timidity of thought, the hesitancy and the drift,
we should find in endless cases that the imagination had been blinded
and the will scattered by the haunting horror of constructed evils. We
falter from childhood amidst shames and fears, we move in closed spaces
where stale tradition enervates, we grow hysterical over success and
failure, and so by surrounding instinct with terror, we prepare the
soul for weakness.
There is a brilliant statement of Freud’s that in the Middle Ages
people withdrew to a monastery, whereas in modern times they become
nervous. He means that formerly men could find refuge from their sense
of sin, their bogeys, and their conflicts, in a special environment
and a fulfilling religion. But to-day they are the victims of their
weakness. So if confidence is to become adequate for us we must set
about expunging that weakness and disciplining a new strength.
A great deal can be done by exorcising bogeys--by refusing to add the
terrors of the imagination to the terrors of fact. But there is in
addition more positive work to do. We have to build up a disciplined
love of the real world. It is no easy task. As yet, we see only in the
vaguest way the affirmative direction of democratic culture. For the
breakdown of absolutism is more evident than the way to mastery.
CHAPTER XIII
Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the ideals of a self-governing
people. Occasionally, however, some well-fed old gentleman announces
that it would be wrong to abolish want because poverty is such an
excellent training ground for character. The sentiment does not attract
the poor, of course, and even the friends of the old gentleman wish
that he had not made an ass of himself. And of course, there are not
many modern people who could agree with the mediæval theory that
celibacy is more blessed than marriage. They prefer a father and a
mother to a monk and a nun, and St. Paul’s dictum that it is better
to marry than burn will not seem to them a very noble tribute to the
family. As to obedience, they continue to like it pretty well in other
people, no doubt, and yet their greatest admiration goes out to those
who stand on their own feet.
These mediæval vows are the true discipline of authority. In their
absolute form they were meant only for those who sought absolute
perfection. But to ordinary mortals, who could accept them only
in moderation, they were still the best atmosphere for a world in
which democracy was impossible. I do not mean to imply that the
Church deliberately created an ideal which sapped the possibility
of self-government. That would be to endow the Church with an
inconceivably deliberate intelligence. All I mean is that in the
undemocratic world which the Church dominated, ideals grew up which
expressed the truth about that world.
The desire for self-government has become vivid with the accumulation
of a great surplus of wealth. Man to-day has at last seen the
possibility of freeing himself from his supreme difficulty. It wasn’t
easy to think much of the possibilities of this world while he lived
on the edge of starvation. Resignation to hardship was a much more
natural outlook. But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes
ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last justified, and dreams
have a basis in fact.
Of course, there are immense sections of the globe where the hard
conditions of the older life still prevail, and there the ideal of
democracy is still a very ineffective phrase. But the United States has
for the most part lifted itself out of primitive hardship, and that
fact, more than our supposedly democratic constitution, is what has
justified in some measure the hope which inspires our history. We have
been far from wise with the great treasure we possessed, and no nation
has such cause for shame at the existence of poverty. We have only our
shortsighted selves to blame. But the blunders are not fatal: American
wealth has hardly been tapped. And that is why America still offers the
greatest promise to democracy.
The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole
population well above the misery line. To create a minimum standard
of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary
duty of the democratic state. For those who go below the line of
civilized decency not only suffer wretchedly: they breed the poisons of
self-government. They form the famous slum proletariat about whom even
the socialists despair. Occasionally some dramatic figure rises out of
them, occasionally they mutter and rebel and send the newspapers into a
panic. But for the purposes of constructive revolution this submerged
mass is of little use, for it is harassed, beaten, helpless. These last
will not be first. They may scare the rest of us into a little reform.
But out of sheer wretchedness will come little of the material or the
power of democracy, for as Walter Weyl has said, “A man or a class,
crushed to earth--is crushed to earth.”
Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most
easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. You can’t build a
modern nation out of Georgia crackers, poverty-stricken negroes, the
homeless and helpless of the great cities. They make a governing class
essential. They are used by the forces of reaction. Once in a while
they are used by revolutionists for agitation, but always they are
used. Before you can begin to have democracy you need a country in
which everyone has some stake and some taste of its promise.
Now to link chastity with poverty as one of the props of absolutism
is to prepare for yourself a peck of trouble. “Do you advocate
unchastity?” shrieks the frightened person. As unchastity means to most
people promiscuity, I say emphatically, “No, it isn’t unchastity that
we wish.” We don’t wish poverty, but that doesn’t mean that we are for
parvenus and millionaires. And so for sex, we don’t seek Don Juans or
ascetics, we seek fathers and mothers, and a life that isn’t swamped by
sex.
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally
satisfied. Those who can’t have a piece of flesh, said Nietzsche, often
grasp at a piece of spirit. I must confess I never saw anything very
noble or pure in the dreams of St. Theresa. And as for St. Anthony in
the Wilderness--surely that was no solution of the sex problem. But
it was a wonderful way of cementing loyalty, to deny men and women a
human life, and suggest that they marry the Church. The mediæval vow
of chastity did not mean a sudden disappearance of the sexual life: it
meant a concentration of that life upon the spiritual authority.
With poverty and chastity effectively enforced, there would have
been very little need to preach obedience. That was necessary only
because human nature didn’t permit of any thoroughgoing application
of the first two vows. Had the Church achieved its full ambition,
to be glorious and rich amidst poverty, to offer the only spiritual
compensation to thwarted lives, then the Church would have had few
disloyal sons. But as it didn’t succeed completely, it had to demand
the third vow--obedience--as a kind of extra prop if the other two
failed.
It is no wonder then, that the upholders of authority recognize in the
labor movement and the women’s awakening their mortal foes, or that
Ibsen in that classic prophecy of his, should have seen in these same
movements the two greatest forces for human emancipation. They are the
power through which there will be accomplished that transvaluation
of values which democracy means. They are pointed toward a frank
worldliness, a coöperation among free people, they are pointed away
from submissive want, balked impulse, and unquestioned obedience.
We can begin to see, then, a little of what democratic culture implies.
There was a time, not so long ago, when scholars, and “cultured people”
generally, regarded Ruskin’s interest in political economy as the
unfortunate perversion of a man who was born to better things. We
do no longer regard it as “sordid” to take an interest in economic
problems. I have met artists who deplore Mr. George Russell’s interest
in agricultural coöperation as unworthy of the poet who is known to
the world by the mystic letters Æ. The interest of the working-class
in its bread and butter problem is still occasionally the chance for
a scolding about its “materialism.” But in the main, modern democrats
recognize that the abolition of poverty is the most immediate question
before the world to-day, and they have imagination enough to know that
the success of the war against poverty will be the conquest of new
territory for civilized life.
So too, the day is passing when the child is taught to regard the
body as a filthy thing. We train quite frankly for parenthood, not
for the ecstasies of the celibate. Our interest in sex is no longer
to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities
for its expression. We hope to organize industry and housekeeping so
that normal mating shall not be a monstrously difficult problem. And
there is an increasing number of people who judge sexual conduct by its
results in the quality of human life. They don’t think that marriage
justifies licentiousness, nor will they say that every unconventional
union is necessarily evil. They know the tyrannies that indissoluble
marriage produces, and they are beginning to know the equal oppressions
of what is called “Free love.” They are becoming concrete and realistic
about sex. They are saying that where love exists with self-respect
and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the
parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor
let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that
modern men are seeking to create. They desire such a family not because
they are afraid not to advocate it, but because they have reason to
believe that this is the most fruitful way of ordering human life.
When we speak of the modern intellect we mean this habit of judging
rules by their results instead of by their sources. The fact that an
idea is old or that it is “advanced,” that the Pope said it or Bernard
Shaw, all that is of no decisive importance. The real question always
turns on what an idea is worth in the satisfaction of human desire.
Objections will arise at once. It will be said that you can’t judge
rules of life or beliefs by their results, because many an idea of the
greatest value may at first be very disagreeable. In other words, it is
often necessary to sacrifice immediate advantages to distant results.
That is perfectly true, of course, and the balancing of present wants
against the future is really the central problem of ethics. Will you
weigh action by its results on this particular venture, or on your
whole life, or by its results on your generation, or on the generations
to come? There is no simple answer to those questions. Every human
being makes his own particular compromise. There are few people so
concentrated on the immediate that they don’t look ahead a little, if
it’s only to the extent of taking out a life insurance policy. There
have been a few fanatics who lived so absolutely for the millennium
that they made a little hell for their companions. But the wiser a man
is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of
the evolving present. He doesn’t break the flow of life, he directs it,
hastens it, but preserves its continuity. The people who really matter
in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule,
or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.
But of course, to act for results instead of in response to authority
requires a readiness of thought that no one can achieve at all times.
You cannot question everything radically at every moment. You have to
do an infinite number of acts without thinking about their results. I
have to follow the orders of my physician. We all of us have to follow
the lead of specialists.
And so, it is easy to score points against anyone who suggests that
modern thought is substituting the pragmatic test by results for the
old obedience to authority. It can’t do that altogether. We cannot be
absolute pragmatists. But we judge by results as much as we can, as
much as our human limitations allow. Where we have to accept dogmas
without question we do so not because we have any special awe of them,
but because we know that we are too ignorant, or too busy, to analyze
them through. I know how unphilosophical this will sound to those who
worship neatness in thought.
Well, if they can find some surer key to the complexity of life, all
power to them. But let them be careful that they are not building a
theory which is symmetrical only on the printed page. Nothing is easier
than to simplify life and then make a philosophy about it. The trouble
is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified
life. If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules
of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o’clock in the
morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love
affair,--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only
that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.
In some such spirit as I have tried to suggest, the modern world is
reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to
make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use
of the earth’s resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature
of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of
his desires. Democracy is a turning upon those ideals in a pursuit,
at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for
themselves.
CHAPTER XIV
Mastery
The Dyaks of Borneo, it is said, were not accustomed to chopping down a
tree, as white men do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. “Hence,” says Mr.
Marett in telling the story, “any Dyak caught imitating the European
fashion was punished by a fine. And yet so well aware were they that
this method was an improvement on their own that, when they could trust
each other not to tell, they would surreptitiously use it.”
If you went to an elder of the Dyak race and asked him why the newer
method was forbidden, he would probably have told you that it was
wrong. The answer would not have satisfied you, but the Dyak would
have inquired no further. What was wrong was filled with impending
calamity. Now, of course, there is no end of conservatism to-day which
is just as instinctive, just as fearful of unimagined evil, and just
as dumbly irrational as the Dyaks’. I have heard a middle-aged woman
say “It isn’t done” as if the voice of the universe spoke through her.
But there is a rationalized conservatism. If you go to an elder of
the Boston race and ask why new projects are so unexceptionally bad,
he will tell you that without reverence for tradition life becomes
unsettled, and a nation loses itself for lack of cohesion.
These essays are based upon that observation, but added to it is the
observation, just as important, that tradition will not work in the
complexity of modern life. For if you ask Americans to remain true to
the traditions of all their Fathers, there would be a pretty confusion
if they followed your advice. There is great confusion, as it is, due
in large measure to the persistency which men follow tradition in a
world unsuited to it. They modify a bit, however, they apply “the
rule of reason” to their old loyalties, and so a little adjustment is
possible. But there can be no real cohesion for America in following
scrupulously the inherited ideals of our people. Between the Sons of
the Revolution, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Orangemen, the
plantation life of the South, the refugees from Russia, the Balkan
Slavs, there is in their traditions a conflict of prejudice and custom
that would make all America as clamorous as the Stock Exchange on a
busy day. Nor is there going to be lasting inspiration for Bulgarian
immigrants in the legend of the Mayflower.
The only possible cohesion now is a loyalty that looks forward. America
is preëminently the country where there is practical substance in
Nietzsche’s advice that we should live not for our fatherland but for
our children’s land.
To do this men have to substitute purpose for tradition: and that is,
I believe, the profoundest change that has ever taken place in human
history. We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled
down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social
organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and
control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned.
We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means.
The massive part of man’s life has always been, and still is,
subconscious. The influence of his intelligence seems insignificant
in comparison with attachments and desires, brute forces, and natural
catastrophes. Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors
in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can
we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity
pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed
that we should be what we are. And so we have come to call mysterious
everything that counts, and the more mysterious the better some of us
pretend to think it is. We drift into our work, we fall in love, and
our lives seem like the intermittent flicker of an obstinate lamp. War
panics, and financial panics, revivals, fads sweep us before them. Men
go to war not knowing why, hurl themselves at cannon as if they were
bags of flour, seek impossible goals, submit to senseless wrongs, for
mankind lives to-day only in the intervals of a fitful sleep.
There is indeed a dreaming quality in life: moved as it is from within
by unconscious desires and habits, and from without by the brute forces
of climate and soil and wind and tide. There are stretches in every day
when we have no sense of ourselves at all, and men often wake up with a
start: “Have I lived as long as I’m supposed to have lived?... Here I
am, this kind of person who has passed through these experiences--well,
I didn’t quite know it.”
That, I think, is the beginning of what we call reflection: a desire
to realize the drama in which we are acting, to be awake during our
own lifetime. When we cultivate reflection by watching ourselves and
the world outside, the thing we call science begins. We draw the hidden
into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of it,
note its history, experiment, reflect on error, and we find that our
conscious life is no longer a trivial iridescence, but a progressively
powerful way of domesticating the brute.
This is what mastery means: the substitution of conscious intention
for unconscious striving. Civilization, it seems to me, is just this
constant effort to introduce plan where there has been clash, and
purpose into the jungles of disordered growth. But to shape the world
nearer to the heart’s desire requires a knowledge of the heart’s desire
and of the world. You cannot throw yourself blindly against unknown
facts and trust to luck that the result will be satisfactory.
Yet from the way many business men, minor artists, and modern
philosophers talk you would think that the best world can be created by
the mere conflict of economic egotisms, the mere eruption of fantasy,
and the mere surge of blind instinct. There is to-day a widespread
attempt to show the futility of ideas. Now in so far as this movement
represents a critical insight into the emotional basis of ideas, it
is a fundamental contribution to human power. But when it seeks to
fall back upon the unconscious, when the return to nature is the ideal
of a deliberate vegetable, this movement is like the effort of the
animal that tried to eat itself: the tail could be managed and the
hind legs, but the head was an insurmountable difficulty. You can have
misleading ideas, but you cannot escape ideas. To give up theory, to
cease formulating your desire is not to reach back, as some people
imagine, to profounder sources of inspiration. It is to put yourself at
the mercy of stray ideas, of ancient impositions or trumped-up fads.
Accident becomes the master, the accident largely of your own training,
and you become the plaything of whatever happens to have accumulated at
the bottom of your mind, or to find itself sanctified in the newspaper
you read and the suburb that suited your income.
There have been fine things produced in the world without intention.
Most of our happiness has come to us, I imagine, by the fortunate
meeting of events. But happiness has always been a precarious incident,
elusive and shifting in an unaccountable world. In love, especially,
men rejoice and suffer through what are to them mysterious ways. Yet
when it is suggested that the intelligence must invade our unconscious
life, men shrink from it as from dangerous and clumsy meddling. It is
dangerous and clumsy now, but it is the path we shall have to follow.
We have to penetrate the dreaming brute in ourselves, and make him
answerable to our waking life.
It is a long and difficult process, one for which we are just beginning
to find a method. But there is no other way that offers any hope.
To shove our impulses underground by the taboo is to force them to
virulent and uncontrolled expression. To follow impulse wherever it
leads means the satisfaction of one impulse at the expense of all the
others. The glutton and the rake can satisfy only their gluttonous and
rakish impulses, and that isn’t enough for happiness. What civilized
men aim at is neither whim nor taboo, but a frank recognition of
desire, disciplined by a knowledge of what is possible, and ordered by
the conscious purpose of their lives.
There is a story that experimental psychology grew from the discovery
that two astronomers trying to time the movement of the same heavenly
body reached different results. It became necessary then to time the
astronomers themselves in order to discount the differences in the
speed of their reactions. Now whether the story is literally true or
not, it is very significant. For it symbolizes the essential quality
of modern science--its growing self-consciousness. There have been
scientific discoveries all through the ages. Heron of Alexandria
invented a steam-turbine about 200 B. C. They had gunpowder in Ancient
China. But these discoveries lay dormant, and they appear to us now as
interesting accidents. What we have learned is to organize invention
deliberately, to create a record for it and preserve its continuity,
to subsidize it, and surround it with criticism. We have not only
scientific work, but a philosophy of science, and that philosophy is
the source of fruitful scientific work. We have become conscious about
scientific method; we have set about studying the minds of scientists.
This gives us an infinitely greater control of human invention, for we
are learning to control the inventor. We are able already to discount
some of the limitations of those engaged in research: we should not,
for example, send a man who was color blind to report on the protective
coloring of animals; we begin to see how much it matters in many
investigations whether the student is an auditory or a visualizing
type. Well, psychology opens up greater possibilities than this for
the conscious control of scientific progress. It has begun to penetrate
emotional prejudice, to show why some men are so deeply attached
to authority, why philosophers have such unphilosophical likes and
dislikes. We ask now of an economist, who his friends are, what his
ambitions, his class bias. When one thinker exalts absolute freedom,
another violent repression, we have ceased to take such ideas at their
face value, and modern psychology, especially the school of Freud, has
begun to work out a technique for cutting under the surface of our
thoughts.
The power of criticizing the scientific mind is, I believe, our best
guarantee for the progress of scientific discovery. This is the inner
sanctuary of civilized power. For when science becomes its own critic
it assures its own future. It is able, then, to attack the source of
error itself; to forestall its own timidities, and control its own bias.
If the scientific temper were as much a part of us as the faltering
ethics we now absorb in our childhood, then we might hope to face our
problems with something like assurance. A mere emotion of futurity,
that sense of “vital urge” which is so common to-day, will fritter
itself away unless it comes under the scientific discipline, where
men use language accurately, know fact from fancy, search out their
own prejudice, are willing to learn from failures, and do not shrink
from the long process of close observation. Then only shall we have a
substitute for authority. Rightly understood science is the culture
under which people can live forward in the midst of complexity, and
treat life not as something given but as something to be shaped. Custom
and authority will work in a simple and unchanging civilization, but in
our world only those will conquer who can understand.
There is nothing accidental then in the fact that democracy in politics
is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together.
As absolutism falls, science arises. It _is_ self-government. For when
the impulse which overthrows kings and priests and unquestioned creeds
becomes self-conscious we call it science.
Inventions and laboratories, Greek words, mathematical formulæ, fat
books, are only the outward sign of an attitude toward life, an
attitude which is self-governing, and most adequately named humanistic.
Science is the irreconcilable foe of bogeys, and therefore, a method
of laying the conflicts of the soul. It is the unfrightened, masterful
and humble approach to reality--the needs of our natures and the
possibilities of the world. The scientific spirit is the discipline
of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of a free man. Its
direction is to distinguish fact from fancy; its “enthusiasm is for the
possible”; its promise is the shaping of fact to a chastened and honest
dream.
CHAPTER XV
Modern Communion
But, you will say, granted that the breakdown of authority in a
complicated world has left men spiritually homeless, and made their
souls uneasy; granted that it may be possible to exorcise many of
the bogeys which haunt them, and to cultivate a natural worldliness
in which economic and sexual terror will have been reduced; granted
that women are tending to create a new environment for the child in
which the property sense will not be stimulated morbidly, and where
coöperation will become as obvious as obedience and isolation were
in the past; suppose too, that an expanding civilization gives such
varied resources that man will live more fully, and rely less on the
compensations of thwarted desire; suppose that the spirit of science
pervades his daily work, not as a mutilated specialty, but as a rich
interest in the world with a vivid desire to shape it,--suppose all
that, would there not be lacking the one supreme virtue of the older
creeds, their capacity for binding the world together?
There would be justice in such a criticism. There is a terrible
loneliness that comes to men when they realize their feebleness before
a brutally uninterested universe. In his own life-work, say as a
teacher, a person may be making some one class-room more serviceable to
a few children. But he will feel, as the more imaginative teachers do,
that his work is like that of Sisyphus, he no sooner achieves a thing
than it is undone. How can he educate a child for a few hours a day,
when the home, the streets, the newspapers, the movies, the shop, are
all busy miseducating? Wherever there is a constructive man at work
you are likely to find this same complaint, that he is working alone.
He may be heartwhole and eager, without bogeys or unnecessary fears.
He may be free of the weaknesses that have reared so many faiths, and
yet he seeks assurance in a communion with something outside himself,
at the most perhaps, in a common purpose, at least, in a fellowship of
effort.
Religions have placed human action in a large and friendly setting.
They have enabled men to play their little rôle by making it essential
to the drama of eternity. “God needs me, Christ died for me, after
all I may be a poor creature, but I’m indispensable.” And, as if by
feeling themselves part of greatness, men have added to their stature.
So even the meekest freshman in a grandstand is a more exalted person
because his college team has captured the front page of the newspapers.
He may be merely one in thousands who cheered for the eleven heroes,
yet somehow he has partaken of their heroism. He is like the cockney
who talks of “our Empire,” like the Irish immigrants who tell how we
licked the British at Yorktown, like the crank whose society of eight
people is entitled “Association for Advancing the Human Race.” It is
well known that in a strike it matters enormously whether the men are
fighting for a “fair day’s wage” or for “the emancipation of labor.”
The history of martyrs is the history of people who expanded to their
faith. Indeed, men have shaken destiny because they felt they embodied
it. Patriotism, the Cause, Humanity, Perfection, Righteousness,
Liberty,--all of them large and windy abstractions to outsiders, are
more powerful than dynamite to those who feel them. “My country is the
world,” said Garrison, while Boston hated him. “I fight for women,”
says Mrs. Pankhurst. “I am a fate,” said Nietzsche. “This is the
true joy in life,” says Bernard Shaw, “the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”
It is no idle question then to ask what there is in the outlook of a
modern man to bind his world together. Well, if he is looking for
absolute assurance, an infallible refuge in weakness and terror, we
have to answer that there is no such certainty. He may learn that
while there is no promise of ultimate salvation, there is at least
no fear of ultimate damnation; that in the modern world things are
not so irremediable, and he may meet a large charity in its endless
variety. He can find some understanding, an assurance perhaps of life’s
resiliency, he may come to know that nothing is so final as he thought
it was, that the future is not staked on one enterprise, that life
rises out of its own ashes, and renews its own opportunities. But if he
demands personal guarantees, he may have to lie in order to get them.
Almost all men do require something to focus their interest in order
to sustain it. A great idea like Socialism has done that for millions.
But Socialism simply as a great passion can easily produce its
superstitions and its barbarisms. What men need in their specialties
in order to enable them to coöperate is not alone a binding passion,
but a common discipline. Science, I believe, implies such a discipline.
It is the fact that scientists approach the world with an understood
method that enables them to give and take from each other whether
they live in Calcutta or in San Francisco. The scientific world is
the best example we have to-day of how specialists can coöperate. Of
course there are profound disagreements, intrigues, racial and national
prejudices, even among scientific men, for a common method will not
wipe out the older cleavages, and it is not a perfectly cohesive force.
But for the kind of civilization we are entering it is as yet the best
we know.
There are undoubtedly beginnings of such a common method in public
affairs. We read English books for help in dealing with American
conditions. Social legislation is to-day a world-wide interest, so
that reformers in Oregon may draw upon Australasian experiment. The
labor movement has international organization with the result that
its experience becomes available for use. There is no need to multiply
examples. Instruments of a coöperative mind are being forged, be it the
world-wide moving picture or some immense generalization of natural
science.
This work has aroused in many men the old sense of cosmic wonder,
and called forth devotion to impersonal ends. Nor can it be denied
that in the study of institutions, in laboratories of research, there
have appeared the same loyalty and courage to which the old religions
could point as to their finest flower. Moreover, these devotions which
science can show, come in the main redeemed from barbarism and pointed
to civilized use. There is, to be sure, a certain raw novelty in modern
forms of devotion, as there is in uninhabited houses, in new clothes
and in new wine--they have hardly felt the mellowing of human contact,
that saturation of brute things with the qualities of their users,
which makes men love the old, the inadequate, the foolish, as against
what is sane and clean, but unfamiliar. Science, too, is a concrete
and essentially humble enterprise; spiritually sufficient it may be,
to-day, only for the more robust. But the release from economic want,
the emancipation from manufactured bogeys, the franker acceptance of
normal desire, should tend to make men surer of themselves. And so most
of them may not find it necessary to believe the impossible, but will
reach their satisfaction in contemplating reality, in decorating it,
shaping it, and conquering it.
They may find, as Santayana suggests, that “to see better what we now
see, to see by anticipation what we should actually see under other
conditions, is wonderfully to satisfy curiosity and to enlighten
conduct. At the same time, scientific thinking involves no less inward
excitement than dramatic fiction does. It summons before us an even
larger number of objects in their fatal direction upon our interests.
Were science adequate it would indeed absorb those passions which now,
since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic
myths.... All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then
inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts
from the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross
and basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems
comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista
opens through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then,
perhaps, we recognize that in science we are surveying all it concerns
us to know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be.”
For the discipline of science is the only one which gives any assurance
that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same
conclusion. And as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort
of innumerable people we have a right to call science the discipline
of democracy. No omnipotent ruler can deal with our world, nor the
scattered anarchy of individual temperaments. Mastery is inevitably
a matter of coöperation, which means that a great variety of people
working in different ways must find some order in their specialties.
They will find it, I think, in a common discipline which distinguishes
between fact and fancy, and works always with the implied resolution to
make the best out of what is possible.
For behind this development of common method there are profound desires
at work. As yet they are vaguely humanitarian. But they can be enriched
by withdrawing them from vague fantasy in order to center them on a
conception of what human life might be. This is what morality meant to
the Greeks in their best period, an estimate of what was valuable, not
a code of what should be forbidden. It is this task that morality must
resume, for with the reappearance of a deliberate worldliness, it means
again a searching for the sources of earthly happiness.
In some men this quest may lead to luminous passion. “The state-making
dream,” Wells calls it, and he speaks of those who “have imagined
cities grown more powerful and peoples made rich and multitudinous by
their efforts, they thought in terms of harbors and shining navies,
great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts
conquered, the ending of muddle and dirt and misery; the ending of
confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things
with passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender
beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered by
this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly everyone who reads and
thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering response.”
And then with careful truth he adds, “But in every one it presents
itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate
things.”
We begin to recognize a vague spirit which may suggest a common
purpose. We live in a fellowship with scientists whose books we cannot
read, with educators whose work we do not understand. Conservative
critics laugh at what they call the futurist habit of mind. It is very
easy to point out how blind and unintelligent is the enthusiasm of
liberal people, how eager they are to accept Bergson, Montessori, Freud
and the Cubists. But there is something fundamentally dull in these
sneers. For granted the faddishness of modern people, there is yet more
than faddishness in being friendly to novelty in a novel environment.
It is the glimmer of intention, the absurd, human contradictory sign
of faith. Men call it by different names--progress, the welfare of the
race--it is perhaps not ready for precise formulation in a neat and
inspiring slogan. But nevertheless, it is the business of critics to
understand these beginnings, for they are already a great practical
force. They enable men to share their hopes with strangers, to travel
about and talk to people of widely different professions and origin,
yet to find the assurance that they are part of a great undertaking.
CHAPTER XVI
Fact and Fancy
Most people still feel that there is something inhuman about the
scientific attitude. They think at once of a world grown over-precise,
of love regulated by galvanometers and sphygmographs, of table talk
abolished because nutrition is confined to capsules prepared in a
laboratory, of babies brought up in incubators. Instead of desire,
statistical abstracts; a chilly, measured, weighed, and labelled
existence. There is a famous cartoon of Max Beerbohm’s in which H.
G. Wells is depicted “conjuring up the darling future.” A spectacled
mother holds in her arm a spectacled infant, mostly head like a
pollywog, while she dangles before it a pair of geometrical dividers.
Mr. Chesterton’s nightmare of a future in which jolly beer and
jolly dirt and jolly superstition shall have disappeared is merely a
somewhat violently literary expression of what the average man feels.
Science as it comes through the newspapers announces that kissing is
unhygienic and that love is a form of lunacy. Science is the occupation
of absent-minded professors, of difficult and unsociable persons, wise
enough, no doubt, but not altogether in their right minds. And then,
of course, when wireless telegraphy is perfected, science becomes an
omnipotent magic, wonderful or fearful, infinite in its power, but
always something above and beyond the ordinary thoughts of men. So
the suggestion that Twentieth Century democracy is bound up with the
progress of the scientific spirit will make many people think of
“Organized charity, all cold and iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.”
There is a basis for these fears. Scientists have often been very
arrogant, unnecessarily sure of themselves, and only too glad to
pooh-pooh what they couldn’t fit into some theory. This was especially
true of those who grew up in the controversies of the nineteenth
century. There was a kind of malicious fun in telling a devout man
that thought depended on phosphor and that his magnificent visions
were merely an excitation of the cortex. Of course, far-seeing men
like Huxley protested that the sensation of red had not been destroyed
because light-waves had been measured.
Yet there were plenty of scientific bigots who would have liked to
annihilate what they could not weigh. Certainly it is true that the
general effect of science at first was to create impatience with the
emotional life. Many proud possessors of the Spencerian mind devoted
their glowing youth to a study of those bleak books which used to pass
for scientific manuals. They regarded religion with scorn and art with
condescension, and sometimes they nerved themselves up to admire beauty
as one of the necessary weaknesses of an otherwise reasonable man.
Truth for them was as neat as a checkerboard, and they made you feel
like the man from Corinth who asked a Spartan “whether the trees grew
square in his country.”
It always surprises one of these hard-headed people to be told that
he lives in a world, which has a fantastic resemblance to a cubist
painting. For the rationalist’s vision expresses his own love of form,
while it distorts the object. Now in a thinker who pretends to be
dealing with actual events this is a dangerous delusion. He will come
to believe that square things, sharply defined things, very tangible
things, are somehow more genuine than elusive and changing ones. It’s
a short step from this to denying the existence of anything which is
not easily defined. But note what he has done: seduced by a method
of thought, the rigorous, classifying method where each color is all
one tone, he has come to regard his method as more important than the
blendings and interweavings of reality. Like any dreamer he gives up
the search for truth in order to coddle himself in his simple, private
universe. The hardness of such a rationalist is on the surface only: at
bottom there is a weakness which clings to stiff and solid frames of
thought because the subtlety of life is distressing.
It is a great deal easier, for example, to talk of Labor and Capital
than to keep in mind all the different kinds of workers or how they
shade off into capitalists. It is immensely difficult to think about
the actual complexity in the relations of men, and that is why eager
and active people substitute for the facts those large abstractions
with their rigid simplicity. But the workingman who is something of a
capitalist himself, the employer who works as hard as anyone under him,
can’t see how the straight conflict between Exploited and Exploiter,
Labor and Capital, applies in the particular situation.
What puzzles them is one of the oldest difficulties of thought: that
any large classification fits each single fact very badly. They are
like “the bewildered porter in Punch” quoted by Graham Wallas, “who
had to arrange the subtleties of nature according to the unsubtle
tariff-schedule of his company. ‘Cats ... is dogs, and guinea-pigs is
dogs, but this ’ere tortoise is a hinsect.’”
Now we all have to do the same injustice to the tortoise, or in the
language of philosophy, we have to use concepts. How much we shall
use them depends upon what we are trying to do. For the purposes of
the soap-box a few very rough distinctions are about all anyone can
handle. In a group of friends, you can be a bit subtler. The moment
you act in some real situation, say in some labor dispute, your large
generalizations have to undergo enormous modification. For you will
find yourself dealing there with a particular employer who is not
exactly like any other employer and with workers for whom race and
education, the fact that it’s a cold winter, and a hundred other
little complications turn the balance.
The only rule to follow, it seems to me, is that of James: “Use
concepts when they help, and drop them when they hinder understanding.”
For “the world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible,
except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the contributions of
intellect from those of sense. They are wrapped and rolled together as
a gunshot in the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on fold of echo
and reverberative clamor.... The two mental functions thus play into
each other’s hands. Perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn
enriches our perception. The more we see, the more we think; while the
more we think, the more we see in our immediate experiences, and the
greater grows the detail and the more significant the articulateness of
our perception.”
There is nothing in the scientific temper which need make it inevitably
hostile to the variety of life. But many scientists have been hostile.
And the reason for that is not so difficult to see. The first triumphs
of the scientific mind were in mathematics, astronomy, and physics, out
of which grows engineering. The habit of mind which produced such great
results was naturally exalted, so that men began to feel that science
which wasn’t mechanical, wasn’t science. They dreamt of a time when
living bodies, consciousness and human relations, would be adjusted
with the accuracy of a machine. But they were merely following an
analogy, which a real scientist would abandon the moment it appeared
that living organisms differ from the inert. I do not know whether any
such distinction must be made, but there is nothing in the scientific
temper which would preclude it.
* * * * *
In the long controversy with religious belief the true temper of
the scientific mind was revealed. There have been hasty people who
announced boldly that any interest in the immortality of the soul
was “unscientific.” William James, in fact, was accused of treason
because he listened to mystics and indulged in psychical research.
Wasn’t he opening the gates to superstition and obscurantism? It was
an ignorant attack. For the attitude of William James toward “ghosts”
was the very opposite of blind belief. He listened to evidence. No
apostle of authority can find the least comfort in that. For the moment
you test belief by experience you have destroyed the whole structure
of authority. It may well happen that the growth of knowledge will
prove the wisdom in many a popular saying, or confirm the truth of
a “superstition.” It would be surprising if it didn’t, for the long
adjustments of the race must have accumulated much unconscious truth.
But when these truths are held because there is evidence for them,
their whole character is changed. They are no longer blind beliefs;
they are subject to amendment when new evidence appears, and their
danger is gone.
The last few years have produced a striking illustration of this within
the Catholic Church. The Modernist movement is nothing but an outburst
of the scientific spirit in the very citadel of authority. For the
Modernists propose to accept Catholicism on the basis of experience.
It is no wonder, then, that the Pope issued his Encyclical letter
denouncing the Modernists root and branch, for once you substitute
evidence for authoritative revelation the ruin of absolutism is
prepared. There is no compromise possible between authority and
the scientific spirit. They may happen to agree on some particular
point to-day, but there is no guarantee that they will not disagree
to-morrow. The Modernist may subscribe to the whole creed, but from
the point of view of the absolutist his heresy is of the deepest and
subtlest kind. All the fixity of eternal principles comes crashing
about your head if you derive them simply from human experience. There
is a sentence of Santayana’s which destroys with a terrible brevity
the ambitions of those who accept the scientific spirit and cling to
traditional authority. “The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses
but as hypotheses they are not gods.”
There is no question that science has won its way, in part, by insult
and blindness, often by a harsh ignorance of the value of older creeds.
It is associated with a certain hardness of mind and narrowness of
feeling, as if it were a vandal in a sanctuary. But that also is not
essential to the scientific mind; it is rather an accompaniment of the
bitter controversy in which science grew up.
We can begin now to define the attitude of science toward the past. It
may be summed up, I think, by saying that only when we have destroyed
the authority of tradition can we appreciate its treasure. So long as
tradition is a blind command it is for our world an evil and dangerous
thing. But once you see the past merely as a theater of human effort,
it overflows with suggestion.
Men can reverence the dead if they are buried. But they will no longer
sit at table with corpses, ghosts, and skeletons. They can respect
both life and death; they must resent a confusion of life and death.
The conservative has made such a confusion, and out of it arises our
contempt for the traditionalist mind. Scorn of the antiquarian has been
transferred to antiquity. Modern men have said in a way that rather
than deal with the past through a conservative, they would leave it to
him as his exclusive domain.
There is hardly need to rehearse the grounds of this contempt.
Whenever evil is defended or tyranny devised, it is done in the name
of tradition. So the loss of a sense of the past has come to mean a
definite emancipation. Then, too, it looks at times as if men felt they
could not move forward if they stared backward,--that Greece and Rome
are a fatal lure which enervate and render dry-as-dust. They think of
pedants in closed university ground, walled in from all enthusiasm,
tangled in the creepers that shackle with their beauty.
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement,
but its other face is human defeat. Too often it speaks through the
words of Koheleth the Preacher,--that which is crooked cannot be made
straight. History is full of unbearable analogies which make enthusiasm
cold and stale. It tells of the complications that are not foreseen, of
the successes that caricature the vision. Conservatives may dwell upon
the perspective which history gives. It is just this perspective which
men fear, the looking at life through the wrong end of the opera glass.
It is a good instinct which refuses to see the present as a bubble on
the stream of time. For the bubble in which we live is more of our
concern than all the rivers which have flowed into the sea.
And yet, the past can be a way to freedom. The present order is held
very lightly and without undue reverence in a mind which knows how
varied is human experience. An imagination fed on the past will come
to see the present as a very temporary thing. Wherever routine and
convention become unbearable weights, the abundance of the past is a
source of liberty. Merely to realize that your way of living is not the
only way, is to free yourself from its authority. It brings a kind of
lucidity in which society is rocked by a devastating Why? Why should
men who have one life to live submit to the drudgeries and vexations
that we call civilization? The whole shell is strained by a wild
rationality.
The past has been used to throttle the present. Why should we not turn
around and use it for a different purpose? We have sunk under the
weight of its gloomy sanctity. Can we not free ourselves in the light
of its great variety?
That is just what the best scholarship of our time has tried to do. The
Nineteenth Century undoubtedly meant a shattering of the traditional
faiths. And yet no century has ever been so eager to understand the
very idols it was breaking. The same period in which the secular
spirit won its greatest triumphs saw the first real effort at an
understanding of superstition and magic, ritual and taboo, religious
need and doctrinal sources. Indeed, the interest of the scientific
spirit in the past has been so masterful that all previous history
looks like village gossip. It is utterly untrue, therefore, to say that
the modern outlook means an abrupt break with the accumulated wisdom
of the past. It has meant a break with blind obedience to an ignorant
fabrication about the past. But that break is what has opened to us
the lessons of history as they have never been opened to any other
people. It has been said that we know more about Homer than Plato did;
no one would dream of comparing the modern knowledge of classical
antiquity with Dante’s or with Shakespeare’s. The Biblical scholars
of the last hundred years, in spite of all their so-called atheism,
have, I believe, seen deeper into the basis of Christianity than the
Church which has represented it. And while they have undoubtedly
shaken authority, they have built up a sympathetic understanding of the
human values it contained. All this is the sheerest commonplace, yet
conservatives continue to accuse the scientific spirit of blindness to
the great past. They deceive themselves in their outcry. They don’t
really fear a neglect of the past. They don’t really mean that modern
men ignore it. What they miss in modern science is submission. They
feel vaguely that scientific interest in the past makes of history a
double-edged weapon. The absolutist has suddenly discovered that a
study of the very thing he adores destroys obedience to it. The men
who talk most about reverence for the American Constitution are the
last people in the world to welcome a study of its origin. For the
conservative is not devoted to a real past. He is devoted to his own
comfortable image of it.
We have come to look at history with ease and without too much
reverence. To be sure that puts a bridle on a great deal of haphazard
optimism. There is a strain of doubt in the speculations of an
historian. But there is a full compensation for the loss of barren
hopes in the bodily warmth that comes from knowing how millions of men
have acted, have hoped, have built better than they knew, or failed. If
the dream of perfection and endless progress fades, is that necessarily
so great a loss? It does not seem possible that life will lose its
flavor because we have robbed it of a few abstract and careless
dreams. For the modern sense of what the past contains can give a new
realization of the fertility in existence. That is a rock upon which
to build. Instead of a “featureless future,” instead of an aspiring
vacuum, which ends in disappointment, we may see a more modest future,
but one inhabited by living people. This is the great boon of the past,
that it saturates thought with concrete images. And it leaves scope for
invention, for the control of nature and buoyant living. For by taking
with a certain levity our schemes for improvement we shatter the sects
and liberate thought.
There is, however, a persistent feeling that science means the
abandonment of the imagination for a grubby absorption in facts. It
is far truer to say that with the scientific spirit the imagination
comes into its own. Fantasy has been a solace in defeat, a refuge from
reality, a compensation to the thwarted, a dreaming desire for better
things. But under the discipline of science, desire becomes concrete:
it not only imagines, but it creates as well. So we can say with real
justice that vision is for the first time able to direct the shaping of
a world.
One of the myths that modern critics are overthrowing is the notion
that science is a passionless pursuit of dead facts. For even in the
most “disinterested” inquiry, there is, as Bertrand Russell says, some
interest that determines the direction of our curiosity. Men will endow
medical schools and institutes of technology, but only very idle and
superfluously rich persons would think of devoting much time to the
use of adverbs in the Bible or to the comparative history of Icelandic
particles. Science is a very human thing. It springs from a need, is
directed by curiosity to choose an interesting field of study, and in
that field seeks results that concern men. The ideal of science, it
seems to me, is to seek interesting truth critical of one’s interest.
If the student is merely disinterested, he is a pedant; if he seeks
only what catches his passing fancy, he is romantic. The true scientist
is inspired by a vision without being the victim of it.
Before the scientific spirit can reach its full bloom, it will have to
acquire an honest sense of the rôle that fantasy plays in all its work.
This is true especially of the social sciences. We are just beginning
to realize the importance in economics of the economist’s utopia. We
are learning the determining influence of a thinker’s dream. Thus Adam
Smith’s utopia was a place where enterprise was unshackled: he longed
for a freedom which the corporate guilds and feudal restrictions of
his time denied. He had seen Watts persecuted for his steam engine;
had seen him take refuge in the university grounds at Glasgow from a
crusted society that had no use for disturbing inventions. So Adam
Smith endowed nature and men with the virtues that Eighteenth Century
England lacked,--he dreamed his utopia of laissez-faire. Guided by
that utopia, he sought facts and built arguments into a science of
economics. He justified his dream. It was timely, for it uttered the
hopes of England. His facts were plausible almost immediately, his
arguments swam with the flood-tide of opinion. The “Wealth of Nations”
became the Bible of English trade,--like all Bibles it was true to hope
and practical for those who used it.
One man, at least, in the Nineteenth Century, achieved a result similar
to Adam Smith’s. Ricardo didn’t. As Prof. Marshall points out, Ricardo,
who was a stockbroker, erected the “pure science” of economics on the
very limited motives he knew. Even a fine spirit like John Stuart Mill
was doomed to a large measure of sterility because he did not grasp
the revolutionary dream that was rising in his time. What Ricardo had
no idea of doing, what Mill failed to do, Karl Marx did. In his own
time, the ’50’s and ’60’s, Marx saw through a bewildering maze of facts
and put his hand upon the revolutionary trend. And so he stood in as
commanding a position to the middle age of capitalism as Adam Smith did
to its infancy. Marx won out, not because his books are easy reading:
they are not, except for occasional bursts of irony and wrath. He did
not win out because the respectable of the world founded universities
in his honor; they didn’t. He won out because his vision was a rising
one in the facts of his time.
The facts have changed in sixty years, and with them our vision:
Marx was not omniscient, and the revolutionary movement is no longer
adequately expressed by him. You do not have to go to the hostile
critics of Marx. The inadequacy of Marx for the present age is freely
admitted by a rising group within the socialist movement. In many
essential ways, events have not justified his prophecies. The middle
class has not disappeared: in this country it is the dominant power
expressing itself through the Progressives, and through the Wilson
Administration. The middle class has put the “Money Power” on the
defensive. Big business is losing its control of the government. The
farmers are a class with enormous power, misunderstood and neglected by
the city-bred theories of socialism. The great line-up of two hostile
classes hasn’t happened. There have been fierce conflicts between
employers and employees, but a united working class facing united
capitalists is an unreal picture of American conditions. Labor has
within itself innumerable deep conflicts of interest. Business men are
divided by trades and by sections. And there is an unexpected burst of
sheerly democratic impulse which blurs class lines. Internationalism
is still a very distant dream, and while men are less provincial, it is
doubtful whether the national idea is any weaker. Patriotism itself has
gained a new dignity by its increasing alliance with democratic reform,
and there is actually ground for supposing that love of country is
coming to mean love of country and not hatred of other countries. There
is a growth of that abused thing, public spirit, and the growth is so
powerful that it may be able to ride the mere clashing of self-interest.
I repeat these commonplaces with no intention of casting any doubts
upon the historic service of Karl Marx. If they go to show anything
it is this: that the probabilities have changed, and that only by
expressing that fact can _our_ social science be built up. Adam Smith
and Karl Marx, each in his own way, took a revolutionary purpose and
expressed it. One can say without fear of contradiction that they are
the two most fertile minds that have dealt with the modern problem.
But the orthodox economists and the orthodox Marxians are out of
touch with the latent forces of this age: both have proved themselves
largely sterile. They have built a dialectic, one might almost say, a
dialect, upon the texts of their masters; they have lost their command
over change, and so they have become apologetic, and eager to save
their faces in the wreck of their creed. The effect on socialism has
been very disastrous. In America, to borrow no unnecessary trouble,
socialist thinking has almost come to a standstill. The leaders of the
movement write one weary book after another in which the old formulæ
are restated. But not a single study of any depth has been made by an
American Marxian of the American trust, trade union, political system
or foreign policy. And as for the underlying spiritual habits of the
American people, there is hardly any recognition that such habits
exist. There has been on the other hand a very noticeable hostility
to original effort. Yet even if Karl Marx captured the secret of
social evolution (which is doubtful), and even if Karl Kautsky is his
vicar, the necessity still remains of showing concretely how that key
unlocks the American difficulty. A principle is at best a guide: it
is certainly not an open sesame to the future to be applied without
hesitation by any pamphleteer. It is no longer very illuminating to
meet the American problem with the stale vision of continental Europe
in 1850.
The first way to estimate a social philosophy is to test the vision
which it embodies. For this is what determines the direction of the
thinker’s interest, and from it his arguments take their lead. But you
cannot always trust his own statement as to his purpose. Every thinker
is abstractedly devoted to truth, and almost everybody presents himself
as a lover of justice and righteousness. But he may see justice in
almost anything,--in the unfettered action of business men, or the
“dictatorship of the proletariat.” Real criticism would find out what
he sees and admires instinctively,--what are, in short, the governing
assumptions of his thought. Thus Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” is
laid in the main upon sympathy with “those on the make,” with the
man looking for a career; upon horror at the crimes of monopoly, and
little recognition of the crimes of competition. It is, I believe,
a vigorous restatement of the traditional American utopia in which
justice is to be attained by the balance of self-interest. There is a
kind of hope that an equality in push will neutralize all dangers, and
produce an automatic coöperation. So Wilson seems to see the working
man merely as a possible shopkeeper. The assumptions are those of
a generous commercialism. It is a vision of chivalrous enterprise.
Or take the message of Haywood: he sees the unskilled laborer, the
genuine proletarian without property in things or in craft; he sees
the outcast, the convict, the casual, the bum, the peon, with such
wonderful warmth and great understanding that they have come to embody
for him the whole social problem. What are the troubles of a business
man harassed by a bad credit system to these ultimate miseries in which
are concentrated the failures of our civilization? Do you think there
will be any “reason” for Haywood in a social philosophy which seems to
forget the very things which fill his sky? He has only to take a walk
through Union Square to feel what fools his critics are.
It may seem curious to approach a pretentiously scientific volume
with the question: What is this man’s dearest wish? The usual method
is to regard that as of no importance, and to turn immediately to
testing of logic or criticism of fact. It is no wonder that writers are
not convinced by hostile reviews, or that editorials make so little
impression on propagandists. Unless you go to the passionate source
of ideas, you are a cat looking at a king. What does it matter to the
suffragettes that they are called hysterical and lectured about their
mistaken tactics? That is so much scrubby, withered stupidity fit only
to set off vividly the grandeur of ideas it attacks. Or does anyone
suppose that feminism is dependent on the logic of its supporters
or opponents? Certainly not. Until you begin to see in feminism the
opposition of attitudes toward life, drawn by hope and pushed by
events, you are still the six-weeks convert who can rattle off her
argument and repartee in a fusillade across the dinner-table.
Criticism will have to slough off the prejudices of the older
rationalism if it is to have any radical influence on ideas. It is
sophomoric to suppose that the emotional life can be treated as a
decadent survival. Men’s desires are not something barbaric which the
intellect must shun. Their desires are what make their lives, they are
what move and govern. You are not talking of human beings when you
talk of “pure reason.” And, therefore, anyone who deepens the conflict
between thought and feeling is merely adding confusion to difficulty.
The practical line of construction is to saturate feeling with
ideas. That is the only way in which men can tap their own power,--by
passionate ideas. There is, of course, no greater difficulty in thought
than to attain a delicate adjustment of our own desires to what is
possible. All important thinking achieves such an adjustment, and we
recognize its success by the fact that it gives us control over brute
things. That sense of control is the yielding of fact to intelligent
desire. But if we try to ignore the desire that moves our thought,
if we try in short to be “absolutely objective,” we succeed only in
accumulating useless facts, or we become the unconscious victims of our
wishes. If thinking didn’t serve desire, it would be the most useless
occupation in the world.
The only reason, of course, for casting suspicion upon the emotional
life is that it does so often falsify the world and build a fool’s
paradise in a human hell. But when you have faced this fully, there is
still no reason for attempting the vain effort of jumping out of our
human skins. The danger means simply that desire has to be subjected to
criticism. It is a difficult task. But it is one that we are capable of
beginning, for the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing
capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.
* * * * *
There have been a large number of very frank attempts to express the
vision of an ideal commonwealth. Plato, More, Bacon, Campanella,
Fourier, William Morris, Bellamy, H. G. Wells, are only a few among
many. From them come the obvious utopias, pictures of a better world
by gifted and dissatisfied men. They are strangely alike. Generally
the utopia is located in Peru, or a mythical island, or in the year
two thousand, or centuries back, or Nowhere. Life is fixed: the notion
of change is rare, for men do not easily associate perfection with
movement. Moreover, the citizens of these utopias are the disciplined
servants of the community. They are rigorously planned types with
sharply defined careers laid out for them from birth to death. A real
man would regard this ideal life as an unmitigated tyranny. But why are
the utopias tyrannical? I imagine it is because the dreamer’s notion of
perfection is a place where everything and everybody is the puppet of
his will. In a happy dream the dreamer is omnipotent: that is why it
is a happy dream. So utopias tend toward a scrupulous order, eating in
common mess halls, mating by order of the state, working as the servant
of the community. There is no democracy in a utopia,--no willingness
to allow intractable human beings the pleasure of going to the devil
in their own way. Even in the utopias which pretend to be democratic,
that is, where the citizens vote, the assumption always exists that the
citizens vote as the dreamer would have them vote. He simply calls his
will the will of the people.
Now these qualities, so obvious in the utopias, can be detected in
all sorts of thinking which would be horrified at the word utopian.
Most economics is about life either on Robinson Crusoe’s island, or at
least in some imaginary and ideally simplified nation. Few economists
can remember that their reasoning is built upon an unreal picture of
man and industry. By the time the details are worked out, economists
have the greatest difficulty in recalling the fact that they have been
talking about an imaginary world, a world which pleases their fancy
because it yields to their logic.
Classical economics is related to the utopias in that it deals with
some place, not England and not the United States, where motives are
utterly simple, and rigorously automatic. The imaginary world of the
economist is not, however, a generous fantasy of a fine life. It is
a crass abstraction, industrialism idealized until it is no longer
industrialism.
The bureaucratic dreams of reformers often bear a striking resemblance
to the honest fantasies of the Utopians. What we are coming to
call “State Socialism” is in fact an attempt to impose a benevolent
governing class on humanity. Oh, for wise and powerful officials to
bring order out of chaos, end the “muddle,” and make men clean, sober
and civic-minded. There is no real understanding of democracy in the
State Socialist, for he doesn’t attempt to build with the assent and
voluntary coöperation of men and women. But he avoids the laborious and
disheartening method of popular education, and takes satisfaction in
devising a ruling class, inspired by him, as a short-cut to perfection.
But let no one suppose that the “revolutionist” who denounces State
Socialism is thereby free from the utopian habit of mind. He may scorn
the brutal fictions of the economist or the depressing benevolence of
the bureaucrat, only to imagine a world more unreal than either. I have
before me a syndicalist utopia written by two of the most prominent
leaders in France. It is a picture of the Revolution which is going
to happen. The working men of France do just what the syndicalist
dream says they should do. Suddenly, when the crash comes, there is
an exhibition of skill in organizing; there rises to the surface a
coöperative power epoch-making in the history of the race. Millions of
men who fight and curse each other every day, their interests divided
by trade and locality, suddenly become unanimous and efficient. Why?
Because the authors of the book would like it so, because they have
imagined that their will had become the will of the people. They have
treated French working men as the puppets of their fancy.
And yet, as Oscar Wilde said, no map of the world is worth a glance
that hasn’t Utopia on it. Our business is not to lay aside the dream,
but to make it plausible. We have to aim at visions of the possible
by subjecting fancy to criticism. The usual thing to do is to follow
fiction unreservedly: that produces the castle in Spain and news from
nowhere. Or to deny fancy, and suppress it: that means that the
thinker becomes the victim of his prejudice, the unconscious slave of
his desires. The third course is to drag dreams out into the light of
day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to
possibilities. They should not run wild. They cannot be discarded. So
they must be disciplined. For modern civilization demands something
greater than the fantasies of a child or the close observation of
patient investigators, something greater that is born of their union:
it calls for a dream that suffuses the actual with a sense of the
possible.
This is the creative imagination, and to it we owe all attempts to
bridge the gap between what we wish and what we have. Romanticism can
falter: “it would be lovely, if----”; Philistia can answer: “what is,
is”; but the disciplined imagination alone can say, “I will.” Mere
fantasy gives up the struggle with actual affairs in order to find a
temporary home in the warmth of memory and the fervor of impossible
hopes. So in the intimacies of his own life each man confesses by his
dreams that he and his world are at odds: that his desires overflow
experience and ask for more than they can ever have. If he remains
there, he may build splendid utopias, and shirk the effort to realize
them; he is the eternal Peer Gynt, hero of his own epic, dawdler
and coward in the world. He is uncompromising in his dreams, and
acquiescent in his deeds. At the other pole is the philistine with his
smug sense of the comfort of life, pledged to his routine, convinced
that change is over, satisfied that he and his are the pinnacles
of creation. Nothing is possible for him, because nothing more is
desirable: the long travail of creation is done, and there he is. To
all wild dreams he presents a shrewd and well-seasoned knowledge of
genuine affairs. Vision beats in vain against his solid world.
In the creative imagination no relevant fact is shirked; yet over all
the things that are there hovers a feeling for what they might be. A
sharp and clear sense of existence is shot through with the light
of its possibilities. Each fact is a place where the roads fork.
Each event is a vista. Each moment is a choice. To the man who lives
without question from day to day, life is just one thing after another;
to the mere dreamer it is harsh and unyielding. But to the creative
imagination fact is plastic, and ready to be moulded by him who
understands it.
That, I believe, is the spirit of invention: around each observation
there gathers an aura of conjectures. The scientific discoverer can
penetrate the crevices of fact with moving guesses; each experiment
is suspended in pregnant hypotheses. It is the spirit of the working
artist, embodied in the fine myth that the block of marble imprisoned a
statue which the sculptor released. To the artist his material is not
dead clay or a silent palette, but a living substance clamoring for its
form. It is the dilettante who could do a fine work if it weren’t for
the hardness of the stone. It is the esthete who can do everything but
write his poems. It is the amateur who complains about the conflict
between matter and spirit. Not the producing artist: his medium is a
friendly thing, the very substance of his dream. It is the spirit of
education: not to produce a row of respectable automata, but to draw
out of each child the promise that is in it.
It is the spirit of valuable statecraft: the genius among politicians
is he who can deal in his own time with the social forces that lead
to a better one. He does not ask for a world of angels before he
can begin. He does not think his duty in life is merely to keep old
institutions in good repair. He grasps the facts of his age, sees
in the confusion of events currents like the union, the trust, the
coöperative,--suffuses them with their promise, and directs them into
the structure of the future.
It is the spirit of all fine living: to live ready, to lighten
experience by a knowledge of its alternatives, to let no fact be
opaque, but to make what happens transparent with the choices it
offers.
To escape from barren routine and vain fantasy in order to leaven
reality with its possibilities: this must be the endless effort of a
democratic people. To stand-pat on whatever happens to exist is to put
yourself at the mercy of all the blind mutterings and brute forces that
move beneath the surface of events. The labor movement, the women’s
awakening, industry on a national scale, will work themselves out to
distorted and wasted ends, if they come merely as blind pushes against
invincible ignorance. But if they are left to themselves, if the
labor movement becomes the plaything of its own visions, if it is not
welded and disciplined to the other interests of civilization, then
its wonderful possibilities will be frittered away. And likewise, so
long as the large organization of business is in the hands of economic
adventurers or attacked by its defeated competitors, there is no chance
to make of it what it could be.
The method of a self-governing people is to meet every issue with an
affirmative proposal which draws its strength from some latent promise.
Thus the real remedy for violence in industrial disputes is to give
labor power that brings responsibility. The remedy for commercialism
is collective organization in which the profiteer has given way to the
industrial statesman. The incentive to efficiency is not alone love of
competent work but a desire to get greater social values out of human
life. The way out of corrupt and inept politics is to use the political
state for interesting and important purposes. The unrest of women
cannot be met by a few negative freedoms: only the finding of careers
and the creation of positive functions can make liberty valuable. In
the drift of our emotional life, the genuine hope is to substitute for
terror and weakness, a frank and open worldliness, a love of mortal
things in the discipline of science.
These are not idle dreams: they are, it seems to me, concrete
possibilities of the actual world in which we live. I have tried
in this book to suggest a few of them, to make clearer to myself
by illustrations, the attitude of mind with which we can begin to
approach our strangely complex world. It lacks precision, it lacks
the definiteness of a panacea, and all of us rebel against that. But
mastery in our world cannot mean any single, neat, and absolute line
of procedure. There is something multitudinous about the very notion
of democracy, something that offends our inherited intellectual
prejudices. This book would have a more dramatic climax if I could say
that mastery consisted in some one thing: say in a big union of the
working class, or the nationalization of all business. But it isn’t
possible to say that because there are too many factors which compete
for a place, too many forces that disturb a simple formula. Mastery,
whether we like it or not, is an immense collaboration, in which all
the promises of to-day will have their vote.
Our business as critics is to make those promises evident, to give
to the men who embody them a consciousness of them, to show how they
clash with facts, to bathe them in suggestion. In that atmosphere we
can go about organizing the new structure of society, building up
producers’ and consumers’ controls, laying down plans for wise uses of
our natural resources, working wherever we happen to be, or wherever
our abilities call us, on the substitution of design for accident,
human purposes for brute destiny. It is not easy, nor as yet a normal
attitude toward life. The sustained effort it requires is so great that
few can maintain it for any length of time. Anyone who has tried will
report that no intellectual discipline is comparable in the severity
of its demands: from the weariness it engenders men fall either into
sheer speculation or mechanical repetition. How often does a book
begin truly, and turn off exhausted into a conventional ending. You
can almost see the point where the author gave up his struggle, and
called in the claptrap of a happy accident. How often does a reformer
begin with penetration, entangle himself in officialdom, and end in
excuses for uninspired deeds. Who has not wept over the critical paper
which started off so bravely, handling each event with freshness and
skill, only to become cluttered in its own successes and redundant with
stale virtues. Everyone has met the man who approached life eagerly
and tapered off to a middle age where the effort is over, his opinions
formed, his habits immutable, with nothing to do but live in the house
he has built, and sip what he has brewed.
Effort wells up, beats bravely against reality, and in weariness
simmers down into routine or fantasy. No doubt much of this is due to
physiological causes, some of which lie beyond our present control. And
yet in large measure the explanation lies elsewhere. There are fine
maturities to give our pessimism the lie. This abandonment of effort is
due, I imagine, to the fact that the conscious mastery of experience
is, comparatively speaking, a new turn in human culture. The old
absolutisms of caste and church and state made more modest demands than
democracy does: life was settled and fantasy was organized into ritual
and riveted by authority. But the modern world swings wide and loose,
it has thrown men upon their own responsibility. And for that gigantic
task they lack experience, they are fettered and bound and finally
broken by ancient terrors that huddle about them. Think of the enormous
effort that goes into mere rebellion, think of the struggle that young
men and women go through in what they call a fight for independence,
independence which is nothing but an opportunity to begin. They have to
break with habits rooted in the animal loyalties of their childhood,
and the rupture has consequences greater than most people realize.
The scars are very deep, even the most successful rebel is somewhat
crippled. No wonder then that those who win freedom are often unable to
use it; no wonder that liberty brings its despair.
There are people who think that rebellion is an inevitable
accompaniment of progress. I don’t see why it should be. If it is
possible to destroy, as I think we are doing, the very basis of
authority, then change becomes a matter of invention and deliberate
experiment. No doubt there is a long road to travel before we attain
such a civilization. But it seems to me that we have every right to
look forward to it--to a time when childhood will cease to be assaulted
by bogeys, when eagerness for life will cease to be a sin. There is no
more reason why everyone should go through the rebellions of our time
than that everyone should have to start a suffrage movement to secure
his vote.
To idealize rebellion is simply to make a virtue out of necessity.
It shows more clearly than anything else that the sheer struggle for
freedom is an exhausting thing, so exhausting that the people who lead
it are often unable to appreciate its uses. But just as the men who
founded democracy were more concerned with the evils of the kingly
system than they were with the possibilities of self-government, so it
is with working men and women, and with all those who are in revolt
against the subtle tyrannies of the school and the home and the creed.
Only with difficulty does the affirmative vision emerge.
Each of us contributes to it what he can in the intervals of his battle
with surviving absolutisms. The vision is clearer to-day than it was to
the rebels of the nineteenth century. We are more used to freedom than
they were. But in comparison with what we need our vision is murky,
fragmentary, and distorted. We have dared to look upon life naturally,
we have exorcised many bogeys and laid many superstitions, we have felt
reality bend to our purposes. We gather assurance from these hints.
FOOTNOTES
[1] From _Cleveland Press_, Dec. 5, 1913. Quoted _The Public_, Dec. 26,
1913.
[2] See The Great Society, by Graham Wallas, for a psychological
analysis of this change of social scale. I had the privilege of reading
Mr. Wallas’s book in manuscript while I was revising this one. My
obligations go far deeper than that, however, for they extend back to
the spring of 1910, when Mr. Wallas came from England to lecture at
Harvard. In A Preface to Politics I tried to express my sense of the
way in which Graham Wallas marks a turning point in the history of
political thinking.
[3] Hearings--62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1911-12.
[4] _N. Y. Times Annalist_, Jan. 12, 1914.
[5] See “Boycotts and the Labor Struggle,” by Harry W. Laidler. John
Lane Co.
[6] J. Russell Smith, Industrial and Commercial Geography, p. 398.
[7] See Human Nature in Politics by Graham Wallas, p. 161.
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