The Reign of Gilt
Date: 2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918

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Title: The Reign of Gilt

Author: David Graham Phillips

Release date: January 27, 2021 [eBook #64402]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GILT ***

THE REIGN OF GILT

THE
REIGN OF GILT

BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

New York
JAMES POTT & CO.
1905

Copyright, 1905, by James Pott & Co.

ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON

First Impression, September, 1905

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I—PLUTOCRACY
CHAPTER | | PAGE
I | WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED | 1
II | THE MANIA FOR GILT | 20
III | PLUTOCRACY AT HOME | 32
IV | YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS | 50
V | CASTE-COMPELLERS | 72
VI | PAUPER-MAKING | 91
VII | THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE | 105
VIII | AND EUROPE LAUGHS | 122
PART II—DEMOCRACY
IX | “WE, THE PEOPLE” | 141
X | THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY | 159
XI | DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO | 183
XII | A NATION OF DREAMERS | 202
XIII | NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE | 210
XIV | THE INEVITABLE IDEAL | 226
XV | OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD | 239
XVI | THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN | 253
XVII | AS TO SUCCESS | 274
XVIII | THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW | 288

PART I.—PLUTOCRACY

CHAPTER I
WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED

The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and their associates. He has made some brief excursions, but his social relations, his intimacies have been altogether with what Parton calls “the triumphant classes.” He knows the plutocracy; his diocese lies in its stronghold, includes many of its most conspicuous and aggressive leaders both in making and spending money. There can be no question of his qualification to speak authoritatively of it, of its mode of living and thinking. He has said:

“Hear a group of young girls whose fresh youth one would think ought, in the matter of their most tender and sacred affection, to be as free from sordid instinct as from the taint of a godless cynicism. You will find that they have their price, and are not to be had without it any more than a Circassian slave in the market of Bagdad.”

Again:

“If the first comers to these shores were to come back to-day and see the houses, the dress and the manners of their descendants, they would think themselves in London in the time of Charles, or in Versailles in the time of the Louises.”

When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings. And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts, without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training, the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks.

Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this wild, despairing cry:

“The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his shrine is in almost every household in the republic!”

Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might well feel that it is all over with the republic—that we Americans have bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom.

But——

It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or mechanics that Aristocracy is the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread ignorance, and Democracy the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread intelligence.

An intelligent few may be, as in Russia to-day, crushed down by an unintelligent mass wielded by a tyrant or group of tyrants. An unintelligent mass may for a time get, as in modern England, some measure of liberty through the mutual jealousies of intelligent upper classes warring one with another for supremacy. But let intelligence be diffused, let the sluices be opened so that it flows through the social soil in every direction and the tendency toward Democracy becomes irresistible. Monarchs may plot. Venerable and long-venerated institutions of princely and priestly and property caste and privilege may thunder, “Thus far and no farther!” Schools and colleges may give an education of half-truths and prejudices. Philosophers may deplore and warn, may project subtle and alluring schemes for maintaining or rehabilitating the old tyrannies in a new form. New conditions may produce new and subtle tyrannies that seem stronger than the old. All in vain. As well might a concourse of parliaments and tongues resolve that the heat of the sun be reduced one-half.

In face of any and all obstacles, in face even of the determination of a whole people, confused by false education, refusing to be free and rallying to the defense of some beloved tradition of caste, Democracy marches on hardly more hindered than an epidemic by the incantations of a “medicine man.”

Inertia is characteristic of the great mass of human beings, whatever their stage of development. And if the combat against the instinctive, all but universal reluctance to change had no stronger weapons than the tongues and pens of “reformers,” men would still be huddled in caves, gnawing bones. It is by no effort of its own that a race or a nation moves. It is in obedience to conditions that cannot be resisted and that now gently and now rudely compel man to readjust himself or to perish.

Democracy does not appreciably advance by the energy and enthusiasm of those who believe in it any more than it greatly lags because of the machinations of those who secretly or openly oppose it. Energy and enthusiasm may hasten its formal recognition, its formal embodiment in written laws. On the other hand, adroitness may obtain a lease of formal existence for the outgrown institutions. But in neither case is the great essential fact of the progress of Democracy altered. This progress depends upon the diffusion of intelligence; and intelligence is not a matter of individual choice or even of formal education. If the eyes and the ears are open, if the mental faculties are normal, then wherever intelligence is diffusing, there the mind must be drinking it in. A sponge thrown into the water must become saturated. When intelligence permeates the masses, then out of the action and reaction of the common and the conflicting interests of an ever-increasing multitude of intelligent men there must begin to issue a democratic compromise self-government.

Thus Democracy is not a “cult” to rise and rage and perish. It is not a theory that may some day be discovered false. It is not a plant to be carefully watched and watered lest peradventure it die. It is a condition, an environment, an atmosphere. A force as irresistible as that which keeps the stars a-swinging is behind it. The story of history, rightly written, would be the story of the march of Democracy, now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated there, now sweeping along upon the surface, again flowing for centuries underground, but always in action, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There never has been any more danger of its defeat than there has been danger that the human brain would be smoothed of its thought-bearing convolutions and set in retreat through the stages of evolution back to protoplasm.

Until this last half-century it was extremely difficult to study the operations of any great world-principle. But discovery and invention have now given us sight far more penetrating than that of the fabled giant who could see the grass grow. The difficulty now is to avoid seeing and knowing. And to shut out all but some relatively unimportant phenomenon—suddenly and suspiciously acquired wealth here, a corrupt and extravagant or degraded public administration there, a strike or a riot or a momentary moral convulsion yonder—and from it to predict the approach of chaos with tyranny upon its back, is as childish as the fantastic alarms of a tribe of savages during an eclipse or a thunder storm.

That any in America should thus shut the eyes, say “It is night,” and grope and tremble, is more discreditable than a similar folly among Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. Democracy has been our familiar from the very beginning, and self-government and the absence of rule are as old as our oldest settlements.

Those miserable first settlers, with minds as small and mean as their cabins, had no conception either of freedom or self-government. The tyrannies theological and tyrannies political which they set up to make life as hateful as it was squalid show that they had brought their European ideas with them. But fate was against them. They were of about the same low social rank. They were poor—and poverty is as potent a leveller as death itself. They were isolated. They had to shift each man for himself. So, deprived of rulers and forced to be free, since none cared to bind them, they began to govern each man himself. And they took the material tools which the civilization then current in Europe forced into their hands and, to save themselves from starvation, they set about the conquest of the land, not for a State as they imagined, but for themselves and their children.

Freedom is not the American’s because constitutions or statutes assert it. The constitutions, the statutes are merely written records of a truth no more dependent upon them than the proportions in which elements combine are dependent upon the text-books of chemistry. Besides, constitutions and laws avail only through their interpreters. And interpretation varies with the honesty or open-mindedness of official interpreters, with the spirit of the time, with the caprice of the moment even—a popular outburst, an impulse of bad courage in the public administrations, a greedy fear or desire in some powerful class. Legal enactments affect the surface of a society more or less and for periods of varying brevity; but the society itself is formed by conditions over which man has no greater control than he has over his heart-action. Those conditions constitute what the religious call “God in history” and the unreligious call fate or destiny or natural evolution.

America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and libraries are open—because intelligence is diffused and is ever more widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives; truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the law of gravitation can be suspended.

The European, or the American returning from a visit to Europe, is always disagreeably impressed by the evidences of haste, of imperfection in detail, by “the ragged ends sticking out.” But after a moment’s consideration of the reasons for this slovenliness wise criticism is disarmed. In the busiest hundred years the world has ever seen the Americans have had to shape out of a trackless wilderness a complete civilization containing as many as possible of the good ideas of the world’s past and having also all the latest improvements. There has been no time to “gather up loose ends.” The filling in of gaps, the replacing of makeshifts with permanent structures, the finishing and the polishing, have been perforce left to posterity. And, thanks to the passing and the present generations, posterity will have the leisure and the resources, and also the finer qualifications, necessary to that part of the task of civilization-building.

The shortcomings of to-day, as nationally characteristic as our energy and our mental alertness, are most obvious, of course, in the public administration—disagreeable in the national administration, painful in the state administration, shocking in the municipal administration. Because of these spectacles of sloth, incompetence and corruption in public officials, it is charged by many persons of reputation as “publicists” that Democracy is a breeder of public corruption. The truth is just the reverse. Democracy drags public corruption out of its mole-tunnels where it undermines society, drags it into the full light of day, draws its deadly fangs that fasten in fundamental human rights, cuts its fatal claws that sink deep into the throat of freedom. One sees and hears more of public corruption in a Democracy than in a State. An organism that is expelling disease at its surface looks worse than one which is hiding and fostering disease in its vitals.

Corruption is no offspring of Democracy. It is co-existent with human passions and weaknesses. Society is but a conglomerate of individuals; the whole, with all the strength of all the parts, has also all their weakness. In a State the public administration is the parlor; in a Democracy it is the servants’ hall. Public corruption in a State means that the head of the house is corrupt; public corruption in a Democracy means that the servants need attention.

Our serious public corruption—national, State and municipal—is of a kind unknown to the people of two generations ago. About the middle of the last century science developed to the point at which it was able to give man weapons adequate to the thorough conquest of nature and of natural difficulties. The American people at once seized these most timely tools and began the rapid conquest of their vast, undeveloped heritage. Forty years ago this was a sturdy but dull and monotonous agricultural nation. It was hindered in intercourse with the rest of civilization by the wide ocean, across which passage was slow, painful, dangerous. It had a sparse, scattered population leading a severe and sodden rural or semi-rural life. There were no cities in the modern sense, practically no railroads, few and wretched wagon roads, few factories, no great distributing agencies, no telegraphs. Each section was shut off from, was ignorant and suspicious of, the others. Opportunities for advancement, for individual elevation, did not, as now, press upon even the incompetent and unworthy through very profusion, but were rare, uncertain and narrow.

From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the America of to-day—a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended by ourselves. In every essential of life—in education, in comfort, in refinement—there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to opportunity.

As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes, is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else, where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by their neighbors, their masters.

Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral machine—one that would permit a people to register their will quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the haste that makes right action an accident.

In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the mediocres who would best fill public office—which in a Democracy should be obedient and never initiatory—have been impressed by high pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply. Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days—faster than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or so—at most.

Meanwhile let us not forget:—

First—That while we ought to be, and are, concerned about the purity and efficiency of our public administrations, our vital interest is in the projects and acts of the industrial leaders who here ignore, there cajole or bully, the public administration, now use and now defy it.

Second—That the new form of public corruption is an incident—melancholy, deplorable, dreadful, but still only a necessary incident—in that swift yet permanent betterment of man’s condition which practically began in the childhood of men still young.

Third—That while purchasers of inequality and of privilege to extort may evade the laws of the statute books, they cannot evade that law of Democracy which compels them to assist in raising the consuming and producing capacities of the people, the standards of enlightenment, of comfort, of refinement, of civilized desire—of intelligence! The plutocrats themselves are, in the quaint irony of fate, by no means the least efficient of our manufacturers of democrats.

It is not rational, it is distinctly irrational, to assert that moral or mental or physical betterment can tend to disaster, that the growth of intelligence may make men seek to tear down and tear up the fabric of civilization. It is true that the people—not here only, but throughout civilization and wherever civilization touches—are growing more restless, ever less content, ever more inquisitive, ever less reverential to tradition and authority. But are not these the very qualities which, working in the minds of the few in the past, led the human race up from the caves? Newspapers, libraries, schools do not make Huns and Vandals. On the contrary, they tame and eradicate that savagery which is the largest part of the estate we have inherited from our ancestors; on the contrary, they destroy the Huns and Vandals of inequality and privilege who would wrest from man his heritage under Intelligence and Democracy.

As for our own people, whose fate has been forecast in so many jeremiads, how would any man or body of men set about subjecting millions upon millions who are not merely educated but are also intelligent? The world has heretofore offered no opportunity for the trial of any such experiment in enslavement. The experiment if tried must be, indeed, original in conception and in execution. Is there hazard in the prophecy that no man now on earth will live to see it tried? Is there hazard even in the prophecy that it never will be tried? To assume that such an experiment could have any measure of success is to become involved in contradictions and absurdities. Make out the perils that beset our Democratic path as formidable as you please, and still it is less contradictory and absurd to assume that we shall triumph over them.

How will we do it? It is not given to man to foresee even one minute of his own future. But, since triumph we must, rest assured that triumph we shall. If you wish to make a shrewd guess as to the how of it, watch the motions of that infant of yesterday, Science. Already Science has given to us all a thousand things that not the richest of our grandparents could afford, nor the most powerful command. Beyond question it will presently unlock the secrets of the composition of matter and show us how every object that now enters into private wealth or is rationally sought by human desire can be obtained so easily by a little effort on the part of any human being that a man would as soon think of devoting himself to bottling sunshine as to storing up what is now called wealth. Less than two human generations of scientific activity, and already what ominous groanings and crackings in the last remaining of the artificial barriers that have so long dammed up the riches of the earth as wealth to be withheld or doled out by the few. Science is the emancipator, the deliverer, the mighty equalizer and leveler—equalizing and leveling up. Not down, but up, always up. Not by making the rich poor, but by making the poor rich. Not by making the wise foolish, but by making the foolish wise. Not by enfeebling the powerful, but by making powerful the feeble.

For signs of the world’s to-morrow, look not in the programs of political parties, not in the plottings of princes or plutocrats, but in the crucible of the chemist.

We have reminded ourselves of the solid ground upon which rests our faith in ourselves as a democratic people with a democratic future. We can therefore proceed, with fairly tranquil minds, to view some of the “perils” to the republic. And of these the greatest, the one that includes them all, is the plutocracy, which fills so many of our thinkers with grim forebodings. Instead of lying awake o’ nights, worrying about it, let us go boldly and democratically forth in the broad day and gaze straight at it in all its grisly vulgarity.

CHAPTER II
THE MANIA FOR GILT

You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley.

Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara.

The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect working of the law of combination which steam and electricity established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities. First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business, the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now; the rest must soon come.

The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide—from Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief. There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly.

A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels, apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings, from two to six millions.

And the whole city—business quarters and industrial, rich quarters and poor—is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes.

Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels.

As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers. To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of luxury—enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers. Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred thousand for a string of pearls—these are prices which salesmen will give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale.

Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a country place in summer?

The explanation is—the multi-millionaire.

There are in New York City to-day upward of a thousand fortunes of two or more millions. About one-fourth of these are of more than ten millions. There are no less than forty-eight fortunes of more than forty millions, about twenty of these being more than seventy-five millions, and half a dozen of them between seventy-five millions and the mountainous aggregations of the Oil King—three-quarters of a billion, with an income beyond forty-five millions a year.

There is no way of estimating the number of fortunes of from three-quarters of a million to two millions. The income of a million dollars, safely invested, is about forty thousand a year. Many New York men—several thousands—have from their profession or their business annual incomes, available for living expenses, of forty thousand or thereabouts, yet their holdings of property are small. But they belong in the millionaire class because they spend money like the millionaires and are of the most strenuous part of the plutocracy.

It is the multi-millionaires who set and force the pace—the families with incomes of more than a quarter of a million a year. “A man with a hundred thousand a year,” said the late Pierre Lorillard, with humorous seriousness, “is in the unhappy position where he can see what a good time he could have if he only had the money.” And he added that easy circumstances meant “a thousand dollars a day—and expenses.”

Properly and comfortably to live in the style which New York most envies and admires and encourages, a family should have an income of three-quarters of a million at least. But by economy and abstention from too great self-indulgence, and by Spartan resistance to many fascinating temptations, they may keep up the appearances of a very high degree of luxury on a quarter of a million a year. Of course, they cannot have very many or very grand houses; they must not think of racing stables; they would do well to keep out of yachts; they must expect to be frequently and far outshone in jewels and in entertainments; they must keep down their largess, their benevolences. But they can have a small house in town, one or two more in the country, can entertain creditably if they do not entertain too often, and can live—if they are prudent—free from the harassments of money cares.

The quickest way to get at the reason for this curious state of affairs, that may seem to many a flamboyant jest rather than conservatively presented reality, is to look at the life of the typical New York multi-millionaire of the extravagant class. There are multi-millionaires, scores of them, who do not belong in this extravagant class; but there are not so many outside of it now as there were five years ago.

Our up-to-date, luxury-hunting, luxury-teaching Mr. Multi-Millionaire has a fortune which is estimated at thirty millions, but is ten millions more or less in the widest fluctuations of the stock market. His income is about a million and a half a year, but he usually spends three-quarters of a million, and relies upon speculation to put him in funds for extraordinary expenditures, such as a new house, a large gift to education or charity, a large purchase of pictures or jewels.

As human beings compare themselves only with those in better circumstances, he counts himself poor rather than rich—his fellow-citizens, the Oil King, and the Copper King, and the Sugar King, and the Steel King, and the Telegraph King, and the Tobacco King, and the Real Estate King are what he calls rich. He thinks himself unlucky rather than lucky; he avoids intimacy with men of smaller fortunes and no fortunes unless he has known them long, because he suspects that he is usually sought with a view to exploitation—and he is not far from right. He thinks he is opposed to ostentation, severely criticises his richer neighbors and loudly applauds frugality.

He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard; a daughter nine years old.

They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences.

First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until the first of October, and when the various members of the family make flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season. They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings.

Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the Adirondacks—the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have a place in the Berkshire Hills—but they do not go there now and they are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an ocean greyhound—last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded his father to start a racing stable—a small one with fifteen or twenty thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand dollars a year—he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries, fifteen to twenty thousand a year.

Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means.

For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!

There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards—house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts—are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up.

In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view.

CHAPTER III
PLUTOCRACY AT HOME

Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street—the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York.

The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar set of tapestries for the dining-room which is on its way from Europe. The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million; the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall, fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it is amazing how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture.

As you look round these show rooms—the vast entrance-hall, the enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished reception-rooms—you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You are in a true palace—the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation. But others have supplied the active, the creative brains.

You go up the grand stairway, and at the turn pause to look down at the magnificent rug which almost covers the floor of the entrance-hall, up at the splendid painting which adorns the ceiling. The owner—you know him well—tells you that each cost twenty-five thousand dollars.

And then he takes you into the wife’s living-rooms. She is out of town.

Madame lives in five great rooms—a sitting-room, a dressing-room, a bedroom, a room where her clothes in use—quantities of dresses, hats, wraps, boots, shoes, slippers, drawers full of the finest underclothing—are kept, and a bathroom. She is very crowded, she will tell you. For instance, where is her secretary to sit and work when she wishes to use her sitting-room for a private talk with her son or daughter, or some intimate friend?

You look round these rooms and again you note the absence of individual taste. Madame is always on the wing; she has no time to impress herself on her immediate surroundings. But a very capable artist has been at work and has not neglected the opportunities which his freedom in the matter of money opened to him. He has created several marvelous color schemes through harmonious shadings in rugs, upholstery, the brocade coverings of the walls, the curtains, the woodwork and the ceilings. You are not surprised that a hundred thousand dollars went in making suitable surroundings for a lady of fashion and fortune. You know that there are several dozen suites more expensive than this within gun-shot, and scores almost as expensive within a radius of half a mile.

If she were at home there would be on that dressing-table five or six thousand dollars in gold articles: brushes, combs, hand-mirrors—each gold and rock-crystal hand-mirror cost seven hundred and fifty dollars—bottles, button-hooks, and so forth, and so forth. If she were here, there would be in that safe at least fifty thousand dollars in jewelry—a small part of what she has, the rest being in the safe-deposit vaults.

The two marvels of this suite of hers are the bed and bath-tub. The bed is on a raised platform in a sort of alcove. The canopy and curtains are of a wonderful shade of violet silk. The counter-pane and roll-cover are of costly lace. The head-board and foot-board are two splendid paintings—one of sleep, the other of awakening. You think nine thousand dollars was cheap for this bed, even without canopy, lace and other fineries.

The bath-tub is cut from a solid block of white marble and is sunk in the marble floor of her huge bathroom. It is a small swimming-pool, and its plumbing is silver, plated with gold. On the floor of this room at the step down into the tub there is a great white bear-skin, and there is another in front of the beautiful little dressing-table. Three palms rise from the floor and tower—real trees—toward the lofty ceiling.

Going on through the palace you discover that it is arranged in suites—somewhat like a very handsome and exclusive private hotel. And then you learn that here is not one establishment, but seven, each separate and distinct. Our multi-millionaire’s family have outgrown family life and are living upon the most aristocratic European plan.

In a smaller, more plainly furnished suite of rooms than those occupied by his wife, lives the husband. In a third suite lives the grown son; in a fourth the grown daughter; in a fifth and sixth, these the smallest, live the young son and the young daughter. The seventh establishment consists of forty-two personal assistants and servants.

Each member of the family has his or her own sitting-room and there receives callers from within or without the family—except that the daughter receives men callers in the smallest of the three reception-rooms on the ground floor. Each has his or her own personal attendants; each lives his or her separate social life. They rarely meet at breakfast—it is more comfortable to breakfast in one’s sitting-room; they rarely meet at luncheon—luncheon is the favorite time for going to one’s intimates; they rarely meet at dinner—one or more are sure to be dining out or the mother is giving a dinner for married people.

It is with eyes on this lofty height that the New York family, just emerging from obscure poverty, with five or six thousand a year, anxiously ask themselves: “Now, can we at last afford a man to go to the door and wait on the table?”

For the man-servant is the beginning of fashion, and its height can be measured—as certainly as in any other way—by the number of men-servants and the splendor of their liveries.

Of course, our family of pacemakers have an “adequate” supply of secretaries, tutors, governesses, valets, maids; and the housekeeper has her staff, the chef his, the butler his, the head coachman his, the captain of the yacht his. Then there are caretakers, gardeners and farmers, the racing-stable staff, various and numerous occasional employees. At the request of Mr. Multi-Millionaire, his private secretary recently drew up a list of all persons in the family’s service. It contained—with the yacht out of commission and the Newport place not yet opened—seventy-nine names.

Mr. Multi-Millionaire, becoming interested in statistics, went on to have his secretary take a census of the horses and carriages owned by the family. Of horses there were sixty-four, excluding the seventeen thoroughbreds in the racing stable at Saratoga, but including the hunters and the polo ponies. The little girl had the fewest. Poor child! She had only a pair of ponies and a saddle horse, and she complained that her sister was always loaning the hack to some friend whom she wished to have riding with her. The grown son had the most—thirteen; he must hunt and he must coach and he must play polo, or try to. The father himself was almost as badly off as his little daughter—he had only four.

Of vehicles there were at the town stables a landau, two large victorias and a small one, two broughams, a hansom; an omnibus, seating six; four automobiles, a tandem cart, a pony cart. At the several country places—a coach, a drag, a surrey, a victoria phaeton, two dos-à-dos, two T-carts, four runabouts, three buggies, two breaking carts, making a total of thirty-one.

The secretary remarked that these vehicles, assembled and properly distanced, would, with their animals, form a procession about three-quarters of a mile long. He then tried to read Mr. Multi-Millionaire some statistics of harness, saddles, and so forth, but was forbidden.

In further pursuit of this statistical mania, Mr. Multi-Millionaire discovered that his family and their friends—and the servants—had drunk under his various roofs during the past year nearly two thousand quarts of red wine, about one thousand quarts of champagne, one hundred and fifty quarts of white wine, one hundred and fifty quarts of whiskey, one thousand eight hundred quarts of mineral water, and an amazing amount of brandy, chartreuse, and so forth. The family’s total bills for drink, food, cigars, and cigarettes had been of such a size that they represented an expenditure of about three hundred and seventy dollars a day—about one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a year. His wife became very angry when he showed her these last figures. She told him that he was meddling in her business and that she didn’t purpose to spend her whole life in watching servants.

Our multi-millionaire did not make his fortune; he inherited it. But he has been very shrewd in managing it, for all his extravagance. Though he is cautious about expenses in one way, he shows by the allowances he makes to the various members of his family that he believes in carrying out to the uttermost the idea that his family must live in state. His wife has a million in her own name, but he makes her an allowance of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain herself and their households. The grown son has had an allowance of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when he marries it will be trebled—perhaps quadrupled. This is large for persons of their modest fortune, but many fathers of smaller means are doing as much for their children, and our multi-millionaire will not see his children suffer. His grown daughter has an allowance of fifteen thousand dollars—more than she needs, as she has only to buy her clothes and pay her small expenses out of it. The boy in college has five thousand dollars a year; he is always in debt, but his mother helps him. The youngest child has ten dollars a week—her clothes are bought for her, and she can always get money from her father or mother when she wishes to make handsome presents.

The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door. She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in the country. She is a woman with ideas—ideas for new and not noisy or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money recklessly, but she gets what she wants.

She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more and more—the fight for prolonging youth.

You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices—the New York women who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality, except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own, kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth and healthily pale—it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish—her masseuse could tell you how that is done. She lives, eats, exercises, with the greatest regularity. And she eats little and drinks less.

On dress she spends about fifty-five thousand dollars a year. You will not see her many times in the same hat or dress; and she has a passion for real lace underclothing and for those stockings which seem to have been woven on fairy looms of some substance so unsubstantial that only fairies could handle it. She bought twelve thousand dollars’ worth of underclothing when she was in Paris last spring. Her bills at the dressmaker’s of the Rue de la Paix were twenty-seven thousand dollars, and at the milliner’s twenty-four hundred dollars. She has about five thousand dollars invested in parasols. She has sixty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of wraps—sables, chinchillas and ermine cannot be got for small sums. She has many evening dresses that cost from eight hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars each. She has few dresses that cost as little as one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The average price for her hats would be, perhaps, fifty dollars. She had one with fur on it last winter that cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars.

The chief reason for her large expenditure for clothes is that now-a-days every detail of each costume must be in harmony. She must have slippers, stockings, skirt, dress, hat, parasol, all to match or in perfect harmony. For she is one of half a dozen New York women who are famous for style, and having established this reputation she must live up to it. When she ceases to fight for youth—which will be in about ten years—she will probably cut her expenditures for dress in half. By that time extravagance will have so far advanced that her successor will spend seventy-five thousand dollars or more on dress. The last season has seen a three-league advance. It is now the fashion to wear for a drive down the Avenue those delicate shades which are ruined so quickly. Next season the color scheme of the Avenue will be still more gorgeous and varied—and prodigiously more expensive.

But it is her mode of keeping house and entertaining that makes the thousands and tens of thousands fly. Her establishments are maintained like so many luxurious hotel restaurants. Though her housekeeper is a capable person and she herself studies her accounts closely, it is impossible to be ready at all times to house and feed an indefinite number of people of exacting taste without spending great sums of money. It costs to be able to say to the butler at the last moment: “There will be ten for luncheon, instead of six,” or “There will be twelve for dinner, instead of four,” or “There will be four for dinner, not eight.”

Our Mrs. Multi-Millionaire lives no better in respect of her table than scores of people in her set and around it. She pays her chef one hundred dollars a month and her butler seventy-five dollars a month, and so do they. She has no better supplies on hand than have they. Her bills at the shops where they sell things out of season—peaches at four dollars apiece, strawberries at fifty cents apiece, and peas at a dollar a small measure—show no different kinds of items from theirs. They, too, have Sèvres plates at five hundred dollars the dozen. They, too, have fruit plates and finger-bowls of gold plated on silver that cost twelve hundred dollars the dozen. They, too, have solid-gold after-dinner coffee cups at two thousand dollars the dozen, and solid-gold spoons at four hundred dollars the dozen. The difference between the dinners of those of her fortune and the dinners of those of fewer millions lies in quantity, not quality. Where they would have to make an effort in arranging an unusual dinner and could not have more than a dozen at table, her establishment and many more establishments like hers would easily and without effort expand to entertain, in a fashion once called royal, two or three scores of guests.

The main and very conspicuous characteristic of this typical leader in New York’s extravagance is, naturally, restlessness. Like the other women of her set, like their imitators, down and down through the strata of New York’s wealth-scaled society, she wanders nervously about, spending money, inventing new ways of spending it, all because she is in search of something, she knows not what, that ever eludes her. And this restlessness, this nervousness, this hysteria, possesses the women and the men alike. Does it come uptown with the men from Wall street? Does it go downtown from the women and the fever of Fifth avenue? It is impossible to say. We only know that it possesses both and that it influences their every relation of life, public and private.

A fashionable woman sails for Europe—more than five thousand dollars’ worth of flowers, jewels, books, things to eat and drink, go to the steamer on sailing day from her friends. A young couple are married—their intimates and relatives give them three-quarters of a million in wedding gifts. A brother meets his sister on her way downstairs on the morning of her birthday—“Here is a little gift for you,” he says, pausing just long enough to hand her a paper. It makes her the owner of a million in gilt-edged securities. A husband comes home from the office—“I’ve put through my deal,” he says. “You can have your new house, but I won’t stand for more than a million and a half.” A father calls his son into his study and says, “You will be twenty-one to-morrow. I fix your allowance at seventy-five thousand dollars a year.” A doctor goes to a banker to get a small subscription for a new hospital—“Why not build a new hospital?” asks the banker. “I’ll give a million. If that’s not enough I’ll give two.”

It is amazing how many great and beautiful palaces of a kind such as is occupied by our multi-millionaire are being added yearly to New York’s fashionable quarter. And there is not a single palace in New York that is comfortable. No way has yet been devised for making them otherwise than chilly and draughty. The human animal is too small for such huge surroundings; and there are not enough competent servants or even competent available housekeepers to make the domestic machinery run smoothly.

The new millionaires slip into New York, into their new palaces, attracting little attention. Men with a scant million or two are coming all the time unobserved. If it were not necessity that drove them here, many of them would doubtless become angry at their insignificance and would go where less money gives distinction. But the rapid concentration of the directing forces of the business of the country in Manhattan Island compels them to yield to the entreaties of their wives and daughters and remain.

Scores of these palace owners have or seem to have no way of getting acquainted with anybody whatsoever. There are millionaires’ families that stare drearily out of the windows, bored to death in their isolation, and wishing they were back in the Western town where they used to have lots of fun. There are others who give entertainments in the vast rooms of their palaces at which you will find their clerks, a few nondescripts male and female, and no others—these standing or strolling awkwardly about, trying to forget that they are miserable in reflecting on the cost of the pictures and the decorations.

In the surroundings above outlined, how could anyone, whether newly rich or long rich, lead other than a sordid life? Money is there necessarily the basis of all action, the determiner of the complexion of every thought.

To the narrow vision of the palace dweller and of those who look only at palace dwellers, America seems like a greedy, ill-mannered child released upon a candy shop. In the wide, the true aspect it seems a man, intelligently developing himself, fevered by a sense of the shortness of life and the vastness of its opportunities.

In the one aspect it suggests an express rushing along, with the engineer mad and the passengers drunk. In the other aspect it suggests its own miraculous sky-scrapers, rising swift as an exhalation, high as the clouds, yet securely founded upon the rock.

CHAPTER IV
YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS

The typical young men of the America of fashion and high finance, created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes—the born successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the candidates for success. It is hardly necessary to say that in this connection success always means the accumulation of riches enough to enable one to make a stir even among the very rich.

If the young man is a born success, all that is left for him to achieve is to devise some plan for making a stir—the simplest way being to marry some woman with a talent for doing original and striking things. No matter how great his income, if he is not to suffer the fate of being an obscure follower, a merely rich person, suspected of stinginess, stupidity and vulgarity to boot, he must do something out of the ordinary—assemble an astonishing establishment, have the finest pictures, give the finest dinners and dances, run the fastest horses or the most demoniac automobile, give large sums on some original plan to education and philanthropy.

The chances are that the born success will marry in his own set—that is, the daughter or the heiress of some rich man. This will be due in large part to deliberation; also, neither is likely to know well many people who are not rich or of the rich. If he is the eldest son, the probabilities, the increasing probabilities are that he will inherit the bulk of the fortune, no matter how many brothers and sisters he may have. Some one in the next generation must maintain the family magnificence. Naturally, therefore, an unwritten law of primogeniture is rapidly growing in force and effect.

And this custom, combined with the rapidity with which great wealth piles up in America for him who has great commercial skill, insures us a future of ever more dazzling splendor, of luxury and extravagance—an immediate future; we will not here speculate as to that future which is more remote, but not less certain.

A short time ago a young man—a “born success”—went to a beautiful country house near New York to make a Saturday-to-Monday visit. He brought with him two huge trunks. These were taken to the almost magnificent suite of rooms which had been assigned to him. His valet unlocked the trunks and summoned the chambermaid. The two servants stripped from the bed the sheets and pillow-cases and covers; then from the trunks they took the young man’s own wonderful bed-clothing, woven especially for him by the best looms in Europe. These creations were put on the bed in place of the silk and fine linen which the owner of the country house, a very rich man, regarded as fit for a king, but which this young man thought far too coarse for contact with his delicate skin.

The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young friend.

This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation of plutocrats—the generation that has about the same knowledge of life as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present. Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,” taking at random some one of them as a type—one we will call, for convenience, Jones.

His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent, incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a “cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then business cares had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died; but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse, very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked. There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and sculptors and poets, that he was living both within and without a sort of tone-poem.

When he came into his own and descended to Wall street, he was gratified but not surprised to learn that Wall street entertained his own exalted opinion of himself. And when he heard on every side that, in addition to being such an exquisite as a Lucullus or a Louis XIV would have copied, he was the greatest financier that ever lived, a boy-wonder at high finance, a greater than his father, the brain of a Nathan Rothschild in the body of a young Apollo, he accepted it all as the matter-of-course. Like so many of our very rich, he had an economical streak in him—but this was a profound secret, hardly known even to himself. So, he readily fell in with Wall street’s pleasant way of saving its own money and living off the money of other people. He plunged into the wildest extravagances, imitating and striving to outdo the young scions of plutocracy with whom he associated uptown. And like them, he made the people of whose trust funds his wealth gave him control, pay the bills. It is vulgar to pay one’s own bills, but there is no objection to their being paid out of another’s pocket. It saves one from the degradation of counting the cost, of thinking about prices and limits of incomes and such low things.

No sooner was he fairly launched than a half dozen of the great plutocrats, with wild shouts of adulation, proclaimed him their leader, put him in a commanding position in all their big swindling schemes called “finance” in Wall street. “You’re it, my lad,” they cried. “We take a back seat. Go up front where you belong. We’ll do whatever you say.”

Is it strange that the young man went about as if he were Mercury of the winged feet? Is it strange that he got into the habit of greeting his fellow-men with that gracious sweetness which kings alone have—and they only on the stage or in novels? And when it is added that uptown the married women flattered him, all the girls languished upon him, everybody pronounced him a devil of a fellow, a heart-breaker, a real, twenty-four carat, all-wool “cuss,” is it not wonderful that he did not go quite mad and dress in purple and wear laces and a sword?

Indeed, he did have those moments of absolute mental aberration, and had to go to or give fancy balls to hide his lunacy from the world. At those balls he always dressed in some ancient kingly costume; and so evident was it that he thought himself indeed a king, holding a grand levee, that a smirk followed in his wake as he stepped grandly about—a smirk that burst into a titter as soon as he was out of ear-shot. Yet really he was not the least bit more ridiculous than the other sons and daughters of plutocracy, all dressed up as kings and queens and nobles and grandees, and wondering if the imaginary were not the real and their moments in ordinary clothes a nightmare.

On and on he went, madder and madder, so crazy about himself that even his plutocratic “lieutenants,” who were using him as a stool-pigeon, could hardly keep their faces straight. At last he got to the stage at which the old kings of France got just before the Revolution—the mental state superinduced by beginning their education by setting in their copy-books as a writing model, “Kings may do whatever they please.” He never had had any sense of trusteeship; he had been flattered into believing that the railway or manufactory in which he owned a large amount of stock was his very own, that wages and salaries paid and dividends declared were his royal and gracious largess. But he at first had a dim sense that this great truth must not be publicly aired, that it was prudent to let the common people believe they had some share in the enterprise. Now, however, this dim respect for, or, rather, tolerance of, a popular delusion vanished. With rolling eyes and haughty nose and lips and high-stepping legs he advanced boldly and publicly into his kingdom. A Russian grand-duke said of the Russian people, “These fleas imagine they are the dog.” Young Jones said in effect the same thing of the depositors and stockholders in “my” enterprises, and showed publicly that he thought it.

Great excitement. His plutocrat “lieutenants,” seeing that their graft through this joyous young ass was imperiled, tried to quiet him. Failing there, they tried to cajole, then to cow the insurgent “fleas.” But all in vain. The ears of Jones, attuned only to adulatory sounds, were assailed by such shuddering rudenesses as “Petty larceny thief! Jackass! Swindler! Puller-in for the big gamblers! Crazy numskull!”

Frightful, wasn’t it? Not that he was in the least disturbed in his own exalted opinion of himself. An angel come from heaven direct would have moved him only to light, incredulous laughter by telling him the plain truth about himself. Still, the clamor was unpleasant; the open sneers, the sly stabs. And, above all, the ingratitude! The ingratitude of his associates in “society” who had got so much expensive entertainment and so much inspiration from him. The ingratitude of the people, his vassals, whom he paid salaries and wages and dividends, whom he permitted to deposit in his banks and to invest in his enterprises!

His soul is brave, as becomes the soul porphyrogenetic. But, as it is also a sensitive soul, how it is wrung!

The trouble with our young Jones is that he was premature—not in thought, but in showing his thoughts. Only premature. The madness that ravaged him is in the plutocratic air. Many eyes are rolling, many fingers are twitching in the premonitory symptoms of the malady. A few years at our plutocracy’s present rate of progress, and Jones will be recognized as a martyr. “Jones was born a little too soon. Jones came to a climax a little before the season,” the dandies will say.

June is the time for roses. Jones came in April. Poor Jones! Poor April rose!

Such is the mode of the “born success”; now for the young man who is born with brains and appetites and ambitions only. He is determined to achieve a plutocratic success; looks about him for the road that leads to palaces, equipages, yachts—all that gives one title to a seat at the table of honor at this banquet of extravagant luxury. He sees at once that to become a multi-millionaire he must use his brains to force or to cajole the multi-millionaires to make him one of them.

He must pattern after those who are far on the way to achieving his kind of success: this corporation lawyer earning his hundred thousand or more a year as the legal servant of rich men; that railway president with his fifty thousand a year and perquisites, earned as the commercial servant of rich men; that manager getting a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand as a seeker of safe investments for surplus millions of income—again a servant of rich men; that bank president with salary and opportunities together netting him upward of two hundred thousand a year—again a servant of the rich; that broker who put by half a million last year as a result of his skill and assiduity in the service of rich operators; that doctor who made seventy-five thousand in fees and two hundred thousand in Wall Street last year on “tips” from grateful patients—again the rewards of service to the rich.

Our young candidate for success has brains to sell; he wants customers with money. He hopes ultimately to sell these brains at a very high price; he wants customers with lots of money, millions of money, in which he may presently share largely. He must ingratiate himself with the rich; must go where they are to be found, not only in business hours, but also in hours of relaxation. He must not only work hard; he must also play hard and high—must lead the life of the rich as far as possible. His air, his dress, his style of living, all must be such that he will be regarded as rich and progressive. To drudge and to economize and to keep away from the extravagance downtown and up will mean a small success, or at best one that will not lead to the lofty height of fashion and social position upon which he has fixed his eyes.

He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex which swallows up all weaklings not secured by great wealth. But let us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry. He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains. The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken.

In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious, measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of thousands.

Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he would be too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and settle down—he has found New York drearily cold and lonely.

In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club—indeed, he has resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country—a commuter’s cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight—for the present.

But, on the other hand, perhaps his discovery of his insignificance does not discourage him, but only serves to rouse him to greater efforts. His close inspection of the palaces and performances of the fashionable and extravagant rich has fired his imagination and energy. In that case he does not marry. “I am too poor,” he says, as he looks at his paltry income of five thousand a year and thinks on the humble ménage it would maintain, and remembers that his poorest married acquaintances up in the Fifth avenue or Lake Drive district have fifteen thousand a year and cannot afford to entertain or to keep a carriage, and are always fretting about money. He considers what a “decent” hat or dress for a woman costs, and—well, his tailor’s bill was seven hundred dollars last year and he has almost no clothes. He remembers his bills for the few small and very modest dinners he gave—a week’s earnings gone in a few minutes and the dinner a poor affair beside the poorest he has had at the houses of his rich acquaintances. To console himself for his heroic sacrifice of sentiment to ambition, he takes a somewhat better apartment for his bachelor self in a more fashionable apartment house—his rent is twelve hundred a year. He works hard downtown; he continues to work hard uptown. He works as cleverly in the one quarter as in the other. He is always seen with rich people; he belongs to fashionable clubs; he dines in palaces; he goes for Saturday-to-Monday visits at great, extravagantly maintained country houses; he is seen in boxes at the opera, at the horse show; he expands his tastes and his expenditures with his rapidly expanding income. His “fixed charges” are now fifteen thousand a year—very moderate for a man of his associations.

In addition to these absolute necessities he spends about fifteen thousand more upon presents and entertaining. Half a dozen men living in the apartment house he lives in spend twice as much as he does and do not consider themselves, and are not considered, either extravagant or dissipated.

He is making a great deal of money, but he feels—and is—poor. However, he is sustained and soothed by the certainty of riches immediately ahead. He has been spending, but it has been in the nature of an investment—a most judicious investment from the standpoint of his purposes. And presently his cleverness and audacity and “large ideas” have their reward; and then he marries.

She has tastes which are exactly his. She is willing to marry him because she has not made the success she and her mother dreamed of and strove for. She has some money—their joint income, while not imposing as New York incomes go, is still large enough to enable them to make “a decent start in life,” as their “set” interprets life.

Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little” apartment—the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings, their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great state—North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport. They have children.

No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are dressed in a manner that makes plain mothers blink and stare. There are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls extravagantly—at least not yet. They speak French and German as fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have everything for mind and body—except the direct constant care of their mother. They have everything—that money can buy.

Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city woman of extravagant ideas—is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and luxury-crazy and society-mad.

In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular among the extravagant in New York—dogs are less expensive, less troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable. The extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint, made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the “family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and money. It was Swift—was it not?—who first called attention to the fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.

Our young climber is busy all day downtown—busy making money. His wife is busy uptown—busy spending the money he makes, or as much of it as she can threaten or wheedle away from him. She falls into a set of young married women with husbands and tastes like hers. They, like their husbands, think only of wealth and extravagance. And while they wait for their dreams to come true they invest every cent they can lay their hands upon in an imitative vain show.

Our young man’s wife reads the fashionable intelligence with her coffee. She presently goes forth as fashionably dressed as if their income were three or four times what it is. She walks in fashionable streets or sits in some fashionable restaurant, there to view and study and envy the fashionable women she reads about. She “shops” in the fashionable millinery and dressmaking establishments—not to buy, but to steal hints for the use of her own cheaper milliner and dressmaker in getting together her imitation costumes. She strives to model her person, her dress, her walk, her conduct, her conversation upon the conception of what is fashionable in the multi-millionaire’s set.

As our young man has the genius for money-getting, he gradually becomes rich. As his wealth grows he and his wife “drop” the “friends” of less income, gather about them “friends” of their own fortune, and reach out for “friends” who have fortunes greater than their own. And at last, perhaps by way of a season in London under the guidance of some impecunious woman of title, they arrive at the bliss of being able to tour the multi-millionaire’s circuit in good company all the way. And a crowd gapes at their palace doors and windows whenever they “entertain.”

Those city crowds that pause to gape whenever more than one carriage halts before a palace!

Fifteen years ago the most extravagant millionaire in New York—a great financier—spent upon his domestic establishment, everything included, eighty thousand a year. Very few people of his set spent half as much, and the most of them spent less than twenty-five thousand. To-day, for the fashionable extravagant set, eighty thousand a year would not be far from the average expenditure, taking rich and “poor” together. When that financier’s family were the leaders, the principal entertainments in fashionable society were modest affairs—though they were not then regarded as economical—and were given by association. To-day every palace has its great dining-hall and its huge ballroom. And the very rich who have not palaces give their big entertainments individually in hotels and restaurants, hiring a large part of the building for the exclusive use of their guests, and spending thirty or forty thousand dollars or more—in not a few instances far more—upon each entertainment.

To-morrow—

In this early twentieth century—which bids fair to be known as America’s century—New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures, statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces, wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It has already won a place in the line of world-capitals back and back through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached their climax.

CHAPTER V
CASTE-COMPELLERS

It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down, and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he—or she, for it is more often she—can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and approving.

No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy, and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers. These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law, but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.

In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants are imported. It is the natural instinct of small people, suddenly elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement, off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those humble but mighty causes that really shape human destiny. They find in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.

When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their fellow-countrymen—even from those willing to go into domestic service—began to import servants. “The English servants are so much better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his master’s place. Whoever seeks to lower the master in the social scale seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy—does it not lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level; does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for foreigners, but not for an Englishman.

Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles a household staff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors. And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred” hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house, when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring. He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and “my lady”—and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity. And from striving to seem a truly “my lord” and a truly “my lady” before the “well-bred” butler and coachman and their henchmen, the man and the woman pass on naturally and by imperceptible stages to making the same ludicrous struggle in all seriousness before their associates, all of whom are doing precisely the same silly thing from precisely the same silly cause.

There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader of fashion, very “classy” indeed, most glib on the subject of the “traditions of people of our station.” Her father was an excellent peddler, her mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to “help out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so long as her sensible father and mother were alive and until the craze for English households arose. She fell in line. But the haughty servants were most trying at first. For instance, she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the butler once; his face told her what a hideous “break” she had made. She tried to conquer this low taste—never did weak woman fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. She was not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to add one low common habit to another until she was leading a double life. It had its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But before she had gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid caught her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in private, as well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”

This is no isolated case. For bread and molasses substitute any plain, natural human habit not tolerated in England, and you have a story in outline that would apply to hundreds. How contemptuously our fashionables would deny if accused! How indignantly the younger generations who have never known what it was to be free from the English strait-jacket would protest against such coarse insinuations about our aristocracy. But the laughable truth remains unshaken—and also the truth that our aristocracy is wofully servant-pecked.

Fully to realize what a tremendous pressure this servile aristocracy entrenched in the privacy of the home can exert, let us glance at the composition of a fashionable household in America to-day. Take a family of some aspiring money-lender or stock swindler or franchise grabber who has got together in one way and another—principally another—a fortune of a dozen millions or so. There are himself, his wife with the longing to be “in it” or to keep “in it” gnawing at her, the grown son and the grown daughter. Papa is willing to have the family show off, but he is not quite ready to go the limit. So the establishment is what other fashionable people call modest, and what his wife and two children tell him is “mean.” Here is the schedule:

General Staff—Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler, formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.

Housekeeper’s Staff—Two English parlor maids from the best English houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress, who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authority on “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.

Butler’s Staff—Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants, not at all times immaculate.

Coachman’s Staff—Four English grooms.

Chauffeur’s Staff—One assistant, learning the profession.

Chef’s Staff—An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids or “scullions.”

Personal Servants—Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class men-servants (English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish); laundress to the servants (English).

Quite a staff—and it does not include Madame’s private secretary, an American, a “gentlewoman,” thoroughly converted to the English system, or Mademoiselle’s visiting governess, a product of ten years’ training in a New York private school for the “young ladies of the upper class,” or extra servants of all kinds that are constantly coming and going. The total monthly pay-roll is never below one thousand seven hundred dollars; often, in the height of the winter season in New York or of the summer season at Newport, it climbs up to two thousand dollars. And, putting the feeding of all these people at twenty dollars apiece a month, which is exceedingly, ridiculously low, the board-bill would be more than eight hundred dollars a month. Then, naturally, all of them are as careless and as wasteful as they dare to be, and, wherever possible, corrupt in the taking of commissions from the “tradespeople.” This means a squandering of more than their wages and board together. But it is indeed a most “modest” establishment—there are at least a thousand in this country far more imposing. Why, our hero has not even provided servants for the servants of his servants! And, as everybody knows, that is always done in a really bang-up, swell, first-class establishment. Also, his liveries, although what the “tradespeople” would call elegant, are not nearly so sumptuous as those of the neighboring establishments.

But, dissatisfied though the servants are, they do their best to keep up appearances and they fight strenuously for the caste system. They are, roughly speaking, divided into five ranks. At the top stand the private secretary, the visiting governess, and the housekeeper. They are almost “gentlefolk”; in fact, they are gentlefolk in abeyance, as it were, like cadets of a royal house which has been kicked out by its unfeeling subjects. Next come butler and coachman and chef. Each admits the right of the other two to high rank, but each feels toward the others as they fancy a marquis must feel toward an earl. Below these high haughtinesses is the main body of servants, with the lowest rank made up of stablemen, scullions, servants’ servants. Each servant fiercely insists upon his own station, and still more fiercely insists upon the lower station of those whom the code of caste has assigned there. And all the servants insist upon the aristocratic principle being enforced from top to bottom of the household. The “master” and his wife, the boy and the girl, know that if they for an instant drop the pose they will be the butt of ridicule and contempt in the servants’ hall.

The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any other—for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,” “exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and “exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them.

Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas—they are the real item.

English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.

The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.

How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers, superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on, who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhood of the imported aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.

True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble. They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouth and futile clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes begin to recognize themselves, and us!”

But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince—that the prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming peasantry—a vastly different matter.

The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must remain inferiors—until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own snob graduates of snob colleges with yearnings after the “cultured and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly democratic.

And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains.

CHAPTER VI
PAUPER-MAKING

There is a story of a rich woman—an Austrian, perhaps—who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day.

“Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.”

She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.”

The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to privation. The fact is the reverse—at least so far as America is concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats—not unnaturally, since their only title to distinction is their wealth, and a man cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere, therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand is creating supply.

The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously, because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively, though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to caution them is to irritate them.

Thus pauperization is a vast and thriving industry. It is said, and there is no reason to doubt it, that there are several hundred families on Manhattan Island—enough to populate a small city—that have lived well for years wholly upon charity, no member of them ever doing any work beyond writing begging letters or patrolling begging routes. In addition there are thousands of families supported in large part by relief got from rich men and rich women. And the same state of affairs is found wherever the very rich, living exclusive and aloof lives, have built their palaces.

To play Lord or Lady Bountiful is such a self-gratifying part. It is the traditional, the conventional part of the very rich toward the very poor. Beggars are so voluble in thanks. It sounds so well to talk of “my worthy poor,” of what “I am doing for charity.” So many hours that would otherwise be boresome can be filled with receiving and patronizing cringing, slathering paupers or with nosing about tenements, receiving on every floor noisy showers of blessings in exchange for less than the price of a supper after the theatre.

The whole business lessens the vanity-disturbing doubts that sometimes will arise even among the very rich as to the validity of the distinctions in this Democracy between “upper class” and “lower classes.” In some cases the motive is higher. In many cases there is an admixture of the higher motive. But the persistence of the very rich in face of the plain showings of the harm they do makes it impossible entirely to acquit large numbers of them.

The pauperization plants of plutocracy fall into three classes—the public, the semi-public and the private.

The politicians have expanded, where they have not out and out established, the public plants. Instead of making the people realize the truth—that these plants are their property, paid for out of their wages and giving service to them not as charity, but as their hard-earned, paid-for right, the politicians turn them into favor-distributing centres, centres for the distribution of alms in exchange for political power. The semi-public plants for the manufacture of paupers are the gifts of very rich men, usually men who made their own money; after the first generation the very rich do not as a rule go in for large public gifts. It is never profitable or just to examine deep into motives; sufficient to say that, with a few exceptions, these semi-public philanthropic institutions for giving something in exchange for nothing are avoided by all but such of the poor as don’t mind thinking themselves paupers or being looked on and treated as paupers.

Finally, there are the private pauperization plants. From them might be excepted those of the rich men and the rich women who have gone into the relief business in a systematic way and operate through thoroughly organized, carefully and competently conducted bureaus. Their theory of helping is not exactly consistent with the old American idea of “root hog or die,” but neither is it wholly exploitation of their own personal vanity without any regard to the merits of applicants. They give relief, but they try to make sure that relief is, according to their very liberal notion of necessity, needed.

Probably all but a very few of the families that are famous throughout the country for wealth have organizations of this kind. But there are upward of ten thousand millionaires concentrated in a few cities, several hundred of them multi-millionaires. The overwhelming majority of these go in for philanthropy, not on the carefully organized system, but more or less haphazard giving, with never thorough investigation, often with no investigation whatever.

It seems impossible to make people in the habit of keeping themselves clean believe that dirt is not necessarily or even frequently a proof positive of poverty overwhelmed by adversity against which it has made an honest struggle. And the rich people who like the “Bountiful” pose refuse to believe that almost all honest destitution is relieved by its neighbors and relatives, that nine out of ten cases of destitution are fraudulent, that all the street beggars are liars, that no one need go hungry or shelterless or cold if he will apply to the public or semi-public institutions ready to relieve. So, we have Lord and Lady Bountiful relieving grown people of the necessity of “hustling,” and, worst of all, encouraging them to bring up their children as paupers and beggars.

So scandalous has this industry of pauper-making become that in every city’s highways there are now children openly begging, telling their whining lies of various more or less ingenious kinds, pretending to sell newspapers or pencils or shoe-strings to give a color of respectability to their shamelessness, or, rather, to the shamelessness of their parents.

The passing generation—the rustling, hustling, money-grabbing generation—is usually rather shrewd in its philanthropies, as well as generous. The “old man” was a car-driver, or a brakeman, or a plow-boy, or a peasant’s son. He has poverty’s sympathy with poverty, but also poverty’s suspicion of the cause of poverty. Thus, our cities have got and are getting libraries, hospitals, free dispensaries, free technical schools of various kinds, model tenements, and the like. Millions on millions are given annually by “self-made” men, most of it as wisely as giving can be.

But shrewd as these men are, they often fail to see the difference between the sympathetic, unselfish, man-to-man individual help they as poor boys got from people of their own kind in better circumstances, and this general, unequal, pitying, condescending charity which gives indiscriminatingly something that is of value only to the self-respecting, and too often takes away in exchange all, or nearly all, self-respect.

Still, though these “self-made” men give and give largely and with many mistakes, they have the fear of pauper-making ever in mind. And when they give to individuals they try to be doubly careful.

In the second generation—what used to be but is no longer the spendthrift generation—the very rich retrench in the matter of large benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the pauper-plant in full blast.

Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives large numbers of begging letters—from beggars in Maine and in Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears as the letters are read and the amazing, even pathetic, simplicity of the writers stands out.

Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by a secretary—or by some local agent of a corporation in which the recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an extremely potent force in the plutocracy.

But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers are noted, the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the activities of so many “workers.”

The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize.

Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness, increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich men eager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge, is often pinched. He hates to give—he may find that his giving has compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards, to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust, noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed.

Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for regret?

Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They were young; they were poor; they were obscure; they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail. They longed—these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans—to penetrate to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret—the mystery of the origin of life.

Fifteen summers of this pursuit, free from self-seeking or sordidness or jealousy, free from fame’s flatteries, and the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole became famous wherever the human intellect is respected. Its Knights of Science have not reached their goal—their Holy Grail. But under the inspiration of the triple vow of Science for her Knights—poverty, self-immolation and obedience to truth—they have had adventures and have made discoveries so strange, so passing strange, so wonderful, that all Americans are intensely proud of this American institution, at once so small and so majestically great.

Then came the proposal to endow this little laboratory with part of the Carnegie millions and to erect it into a rich and aristocratic palace of science. At first glance the proposal seemed as admirable as the purpose that prompted it. And yet——

This is a day when the numerous newcomers among our multi-millionaires are so pouring out the millions that it looks as if presently the necessity for struggle, the incentive to struggle, in the development of brain power, would be almost wholly removed. In the progress of the race, wealth in possession has played a very small part—has more often interfered to blight than to bless. Wealth possessed means ease and power without effort, and a sense that the goal has been reached. It means the mind at rest, tending to sloth and slumber, with life’s greatest fears and greatest incentives removed. Above all, it means an atmosphere of self-complacency and satiety and languor that insensibly relaxes the strongest fibre.

Carnegie millions may help to keep a-burning the light in that plain little temple of science at Woods Hole—may, if judiciously used. But not if they stifle the splendid, self-sacrificing, self-unconscious enthusiasm which set that light a-blazing. The lesson is wider than the instance—far wider. It was wealth and patronage that rotted the splendid intellect of Greece; wealth again, and patronage, that brought the Renaissance to an abrupt, inglorious end. And how much the English intellect in its long period of most brilliant achievement owed to the contempt of the English dominant classes—that of birth and that of commerce—for scientists, writers and “those kinds of cattle!”

CHAPTER VII
THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE

We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital as well—in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity.

Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the Government said:

“My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary —— yesterday. She did not come home until long after she was expected, and her mother asked her what was the matter.

“‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘Secretary ——’s daughter was there, and none of us could go until she left, and we thought she never would go.’ And I find that precedent is carried out in the strictest possible way all through Washington society in all its sets, down to the very children.”

If there are any persons in official life in Washington who do not attach importance to precedence, do not resent being seated out of rank at table, or being in all other ways given their exact official amount of deference, those persons keep extremely quiet. In Washington one ceases to be surprised at hearing men of national reputation complaining fiercely because they have been subjected to some trivial slight in this matter of precedence. It irritates a Cabinet officer to be put a shade out of his rank just as much as it irritates a Congressman from nowhere or a Government clerk.

Precedence is killing Washington as a place of residence for sensible people. It is destroying its chief charm. If one thinks of going there to live it is because he expects to meet in the easy circumstance of social intercourse those who are interesting or amusing or curious. That sort of social intercourse is becoming practically impossible. No one giving any sort of entertainment, however informal, dares to arrange his or her guests according to congeniality. The same people must always be put next each other. The same man must take the same woman in to dinner. The same youth must dance with the same girl. And as official life expands the blight of precedence spreads.

It is difficult for an outsider to listen without laughing or showing irritation as the Washingtonians discuss precedence and relate incidents of national and international catastrophes almost brought about by violation of it. But as some of the persons who most strenuously insist upon it are otherwise high above the human average, it would be well, before utterly condemning the Washingtonians, to reflect whether the craze for precedence is not a universal human weakness, latent—happily latent—in most of us because it has no chance to show itself.

There is a certain officer who, in the official lists, is called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds. In fact he is “Lord Great Chamberlain” to the President. Perhaps there was once a Lord Great Chamberlain who was merely Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds at the lower end of Pennsylvania avenue. But that was a long time ago.

For many years the Major of Engineers assigned to that title with the rank and pay of Colonel has been actually the chief officer of the President’s court, the manager of what might be called his public household. Whenever the President entertains on a grand scale he is obviously in command, directing the ceremonials, superintending the evolutions of his staff of dancing and small-talk army men, overseeing the assiduities of the court retinue of servants. When a new ambassador or other eminent personage, domestic or foreign, arrives, he is the functionary who puts on a gorgeous uniform, drives in state in the President’s carriage to the visitor’s lodgings, escorts him to the President, introduces him, takes him away and escorts him back to his lodgings. Also, he in large measure directs the expenditures from the White House privy purse.

The Constitution and the Statute Book make no provision for a Lord Great Chamberlain. But constitutions and institutions are vastly different. Part of the President’s time is given to matters contained or supposed to be contained in the written laws, the larger part to matters set down in the unwritten laws and nowhere else. When we broke away from Europe and European political and social ideas, we did not get rid of those customs for high executive officers which had been established among us by royal colonial governors, although they were simple compared with the growing dimensions of our present-day ceremonial.

Thus the unwritten laws say that the President must have a court like a king or other royal reigning person. It must be disguised and modified, but it must be “the real thing” in its essence. A court involves a place to hold it, officers to conduct it, an etiquette to guide it, and money to keep it going. The written laws provide for a Presidential residence—they permit the President to sit rent-free. That provision readily stretches to cover a place to hold the court.

Again, the written laws permit the President to detach certain public officers for rather indefinite purposes. There you have a Lord Great Chamberlain and a Lord High Steward, and so forth, provided with comparative ease.

As for etiquette, that part of the unwritten law need not be reconciled to written law, because etiquette costs nothing but headaches and heart-burnings—and the only reason for attempting to reconcile written law and unwritten is, of course, the matter of money expense. Finally, the written laws provide, or can be stretched to provide, the money for all the bigger items of court expenses—furnishings and repairs and alterations, linen, china, flowers, cooks, scullions, butlers, coachmen, footmen, door-openers and door-closers, card-carriers, light, heat, everything except what is eaten and drunk. As yet no way has been found to stretch the written law or the good nature of Congress to cover the court appetite. It must be appeased out of the President’s salary.

The most important, though by no means the most expensive, item in the court budget charged against the public, is the Lord Great Chamberlain who conducts the court and executes, either directly or indirectly, all that pertains to the social side of life at the White House. He is always an officer of engineers. He must be a person of knowledge, of tact, of good appearance.

Lord Great Chamberlain has ever been a distinguished office. It was never so distinguished as now. And, unless there is some sort of extraordinary convulsion and revulsion, it is destined to become almost eminent. For the White House has entered a new and dazzling period of social splendor which may presently make it as little different from the residence of a monarch as is the Elysée Palace, where lives the President of France’s imperial Democracy.

The newly evolved notion of the Presidential office is that it is the centre of political, intellectual and sociological authority and also of social honor. Not only must the democratic—or plutocratic—overlord, anointed with the new kind of divine oil, be the embodiment and exponent of the popular will; he must also be the source of honor, the recognizer of merit.

Does one sing well? Does one paint well? Does one write well? Does one lead in education or literature or law or sociology or finance or commerce or trade—or fashion? Is one in the forefront in any line of activity not definitely declared criminal? Then the President of the American people must entertain him, must take his hand in that hand which is a sort of composite of eighty million right hands of fellowship. The approving accents of that voice which is now conceived to be the composite of eighty million approving voices must tickle his ravished ears; he must, at the Presidential board, eat and drink the composite hospitalities of the eighty millions’ dinner or luncheon tables.

In a real plain-as-an-old-coat Democracy the President would be a business person only, keeping his official life and his social life separate and distinct. The one would be public, the other private. He would have no more to do privately with those with whom he is officially brought into contact than would the head of a big business with his assistants, employés and customers. Social life is in a democratic society altogether of and by the family; and theoretically the President’s wife and children, the wives and children of the other public officials, are left in private life when the man of the family takes office. Practically, however, they are all elected, and if the written law provides no honors for wife and children and other relatives of the successful candidate, unwritten law must be created to repair the grave, the intolerable omission.

Hence the elaborate, the complex, the awe-inspiring system of precedence. Every one from the President and his family and their remotest connection visiting Washington, down through all the branches of official life to grand-niece of the scrubwoman who sees to the basement steps of the smallest public building, has his or her exactly defined and jealously guarded station in the social hierarchy.

Naturally, the most interesting part of the imposing structure that descends tier on tier from the august and exalted Chief Magistrate, is the court—the President, his Cabinet (Cabinet “ministers,” to give them the fanciful title they love best), the ambassadors and ministers and staffs of the various embassies and legations, the families of all these, and this means the White House and the Lord Great Chamberlain—the White House, the stage; the Lord Great Chamberlain, the stage manager.

The White House was always inadequate—it would have been inadequate only for carrying out the purely democratic idea of the Presidential office, the idea set forth in the written laws. For the splendid, imperial, democratic concept of the plutocracy, the White House was ridiculous. Many a previous President and his wife, conscious of the social possibilities of the Presidential office, and yearning to develop them, have sighed over and moaned over and hinted about the petty proportions of the “Executive Mansion.” But political timidity restrained them from insisting upon expansion and elaboration. Mr. Roosevelt, confident that the people understood and approved him, and full of enthusiasm for his exalted concept of a new Presidency to suit a new era of the republic, boldly ventured where other Presidents had shrunk back. He demanded adequate quarters for the imperial-democratic court. The result is a new White House, a fit theatre for plutocratic social activities, a fit field for the operations of an energetic and sympathetic Lord Great Chamberlain.

The present President entertains, not occasionally but constantly, not exclusively but as democratically as an emperor, not meagrely but lavishly, not a score of guests, but hundreds and thousands. He has a multitude of guests to lunch, a multitude to dine, a multitude to hear music or to take part in various kinds of “drawing-rooms” and levees, a multitude to stay the night under his roof—not a multitude all at one time, but a multitude in the aggregate. Rich and poor, snob and democrat, plutocrat and proletarian, black and white, American and foreigner, Maine woods guide, Western scout, fashionable and frowzy—all equally welcome, all equal at his court. Morgan and Jacob Riis, Countess de Castellane and Booker Washington, Wild Bill and Bishop Potter, Duse and Rough Rider Rob, Alfred Henry Lewis and a New York cotillon leader.

Not long ago when some one said in his hearing, “There’s no first-class hotel in Washington,” he replied, “You forget the White House.” He has made it indeed a national hotel, or rather a great national assembling place. And he is ever unsatisfied, ever reaching out for more “doers,” for more and more people of interest or importance. He wishes all people of mark to bask in the Presidential sunshine, to give him the benefit of their intellect or character, or whatever they may have that is worth seeing or hearing. For he wishes to receive as well as to give. And he is determined that his court shall be entirely and completely representative. The world has seen nothing like it in recent centuries; the Emperor of Germany, broad though his sympathies are, is a snob in comparison. For a parallel we must go back to the courts of the emperor-presidents of Rome, in the days when Rome thought itself a republic. And the exigencies of plutocratic politics and the new social conditions have combined to attract the leaders of plutocracy’s fashion in plutocracy’s capitals, New York and Chicago, to favor Washington more and more each winter with their presence and their patronage.

The new White House, which is thus in a fair way to become the social centre of the republic, is in one sense the first step toward an entirely new Washington. In every street at all fit for Presidential purposes great houses are going up for the leisurely rich, and smaller but attractive houses for the leisurely well-to-do. It is obvious to the most casual observer that to-morrow will see a brilliant and numerous society seated at Washington, a society devoted to luxury and entertaining and revolving round the President, and dazzling and dominating the servants of the people. Of all the bribes, which is so seductive, so insidiously corrupting as the social bribe?

At the Congressional Library are exhibited models of the Washington the public administration purposes to build, has already begun to build. It will be a city of magnificent boulevards and parks and drives, and public buildings and national monuments. It will be probably the most splendid and most beautiful city in the world. It will probably be the one great city on earth where all who are not servants and tradespeople think and talk chiefly politics, literature, art, science—when they are not talking gossip and envying each other’s rank or looks or clothes or establishments.

The made-over White House, astounding though it is as a sudden development, is but the crude inaugural of this Washington of to-morrow. But it is a beginning—a most audacious move on the part of one of the most audacious men who ever rose to first place in the republic. It is indeed audacious to be a democratic President with the ceremonial of a king—“a ceremonial more rigid than that of the court of the Czar,” according to the wife of one of the ambassadors.

The White House demand upon Congress for running expenses has leaped from the former twenty-five thousand dollars to sixty thousand dollars. As the President’s salary is just under a thousand dollars a week, and as he evidently believes the people expect the President to spend his salary upon the embellishment of the position, it appears that the new White House, the new court, is now on the average costing in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars a week, half from the pocket of the people, the other half from the President’s private pocket.

As the heavy expense is crowded into five months of the year—December to April, inclusive—the probabilities are that the new White House is costing during the season not far from three thousand dollars a week. This means that the new departure has certainly doubled, and perhaps trebled, the cost of the White House court, for most Presidents have contributed about half their salary toward holding court and have called on Congress for a supplementary appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

A few years ago such imposing figures as these would have caused a great outcry. In every part of the land, in city as well as country, hands would have been thrown up, and “we, the people,” would have ejaculated: “Three thousand dollars a week! Mercy on us! The fellow must be crazy. What are we coming to?”

But we think in large sums these days, and the establishments of our multi-millionaires have accustomed us to big expenditures for what were less than half a generation ago universally regarded as prodigalities. Scores of millionaires spend several times two thousand dollars a week in “maintaining their dignity.” There were some faint, shamefaced mutterings in Congress against the alterations in the White House and the lively leap of the public share in the expenses. But these mutterings died away instead of growing stronger, and the project for raising the Presidential salary to one hundred thousand dollars a year has all but passed Congress.

In the competition of display, of “splurge,” shall “we, the people” be distanced by private persons? Is not “blowing it in” the great test of dignity and worth, the test established by our most “successful” citizens? Yet a few years and the President will be getting one hundred thousand dollars in salary and will think himself moderate in calling upon the nation for twice sixty thousand a year to be spent in maintaining the Presidential dignity. Less than that will seem shabby in the new Washington under the spell of the new concept of the Presidency as a social font. Simplicity and quiet as a measure of dignity will belong to the past. It still remains true, as when Burke said it, that “the public is poor.” True, the nation has riches, but only a few have wealth. True, wages have not actually increased over what they were thirty years ago. True, the incomes of the great mass of Americans are just about where they used to be; true, taxation is to them still a burden, and “making the ends meet” is still an anxious problem. But our plutocrats and the representatives of kings and other tax-eaters and people-plunderers must feel at home when they honor our White House with their presence.

There is not the slightest surface indication that the Lord Great Chamberlain will preside over a diminished office. Public business in the narrow, strictly legal, old-fashioned democratic sense has now for the first time wholly withdrawn from the White House and is seated in what is derisively and not inaptly called the “Executive Hen-coop”—a temporary office building near by. The White House has been definitely and apparently permanently transformed into a place devoted to that part of the Presidential office which is not recognized in written law and which has hitherto been kept in the background.

And so rapidly is the White House developing that no one need be astonished if it almost immediately becomes the social Mecca of the whole American people. Any one who has studied the effect of social life upon political life, of social customs upon politics, will appreciate that that transformation might be of profound and far-reaching importance. It might be significant of a new kind of republic, of a fallen Democracy on this American continent. It might well mean that the dream of all aggressive, self-aggrandizing office-holders had at last been realized; that for the people-ruled public administration contemplated by the fathers and embodied in the Constitution had been substituted a real, a people-ruling government.

For, more powerful than any written laws, are the unwritten laws that bind men in the slowly, noiselessly forged chains of Habit.

And what a busy, big man the Lord Great Chamberlain would be then!

But he would still be called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, and the Most Puissant Over-lord of the Imperial Plutocracy would still be called President of the United States. And so nobody would in the least mind. If the waffle is named “Hot Waffle,” only a carping, croaking pessimist notes that it is stone cold.

Such are the surface indications. But surface indications are not infallible; they have been known to be unimportant and wholly misleading.

CHAPTER VIII
AND EUROPE LAUGHS

An attaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The room was filled with English and Americans. Almost all the English were men and women of title or rank, or both. Almost all the Americans were well known both at home and abroad because of their wealth, their fondness for display, and their intimacies and relationships by marriage with the aristocratic caste of Europe.

“You Americans are popular here,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” assented the American.

“And on the Continent also,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” replied the American. “How the German Emperor does love us—he is almost as enthusiastic about us as is King Edward.”

“You are popular,” went on the diplomat, “and very unpopular. You were never so popular nor so unpopular.”

“You mean we are unpopular because of the American trade invasion?”

“Not at all. That is a trifling matter. It concerns only the politicians and a few manufacturers and the farmers, and does not concern them very deeply. No—let me explain. Formerly we—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the upper classes of Europe, those which still rule, despite all this talk about the progress of Democracy—formerly we feared you; we pretended to despise you, but in fact we were afraid. You were the great experiment in Democracy, that is, in anarchy—in the rule of the masses, the mob. Your success meant serious trouble for us, if not the handwriting on the wall, because our masses were always thinking of you.”

Here the diplomat smiled peculiarly and glanced round the room.

“Now all that has been changed,” he went on. “Europe and America are better acquainted. We no longer fear you. Why should we?”

And again he paused to let his glance travel round the room, finally to rest with good-humored satire upon the American’s face.

“Yes—we understand you better. Our fears have been proved groundless, our suspicions have been justified. Your new path, after making a wide bend, has returned into the old historic highway of caste. And so our upper class, which hated you, now—well, it neither loves nor admires you, but it honors and courts you. It laughs a little at your pretensions to birth. But it respects the solid foundation of your aristocracy—wealth. For, no matter what we may pretend, not blood, but money, wealth, is the essence of aristocracy. As for our masses, that once looked up to you as their ideal——” He shrugged his shoulders.

“They no longer look up to us?”

“They look down upon you. They see that you, too, have your dominating class just as they have. And they prefer their own kind of upper class as less sordid, less vulgar, the embodiment of a more inspiring ideal. So long as they knew you only by report they believed in you; and that belief still makes them restless under us. But now that they have seen you, now that you are constantly in evidence, they see that their hopes—at least so far as they were based upon you—were a foolish dream. They prefer their own princes to ‘bosses’ and upstart newly-rich.”

“But suppose these Americans whom you see over here and whom you read most about are not representative?”

The diplomat smiled. “I have heard that before,” said he. “But, my dear friend, they are representative. Your country has changed and you do not realize it. You are deceived, not we. You are like the Romans who thought they had a republic when, in fact, the republic had been dead five hundred years. Think a moment. What sort of men did you formerly send to us as diplomats? And what sort of men do you send now? What has become of the old horror of court dress and rank and precedence which they used to exhibit? You cannot deny that your diplomats are representative. And are they not of the same class as these ladies and gentlemen about us here, so obviously delighted with themselves and their aristocratic company, with themselves because of their company?”

There is much truth in the diplomat’s comments on the state of European public sentiment toward America. And the change is, as he said, due to better acquaintance. Europe thinks it has discovered that as soon as an American rises in prosperity above the mass of his fellow-citizens, he enters an actual ruling class that dictates and disdains the laws, uses them for enriching himself and for exploiting the mass of his fellow-countrymen. Europe thinks that as soon as he reaches this stage he turns his eyes longingly toward the Old World monarchies and begins to plan to become as nearly like the aristocrats as possible. He may not flaunt his power—he must respect republican forms. But he may, and does, flaunt his wealth. And in Europe he can get open recognition of his superior rank when such recognition as it gets at home is indirect and more or less secret.

Thousands of Americans live in Europe. Every considerable city on the Continent has its American colony, and year by year these colonies grow apace. Americans—chiefly the women—have intermarried everywhere into the European nobility. Nearly all these expatriated Americans are people of means; many of them are rich. They lead lives of industrious idleness. Many of them frankly express their contempt for the country from which they draw their incomes, the country but for which they would be miserable peasants, sweating for the amusement of some European land-holder.

It is fortunate that their dislike of their native land has been strong enough to take them away and to keep them away; it is a pity that the migrating impulse does not seize upon more of their kind. The world has room for idlers—it has room for all sorts of people. But America has no room for them. That great workshop wants no idlers obstructing the aisles and hindering the toilers at their tasks. That would be a sorry day for us when our rapidly growing leisure class should “civilize” and “refine” America into an agreeable place of residence for “ladies” and “gentlemen” of the European pattern.

These Americans who have “outgrown” their country serve to confirm Europe in the suspicions raised by the news that has reached it of stupendous aristocratic changes in the American people, of rotten political machines ruled by the rich, of toll-gates set up on every highway of American trade and commerce for the tax-gatherers of plutocracy, of a people fatuously imagining that it is free because it can go to the polls and freely choose which of two sets of candidates shielded by the plutocracy shall make and execute the laws. This brings up the whole subject of our relations with “abroad”—and the social and political meaning and tendency of those relations.

A few years ago Paris was the paradise of Americans, especially of the Americans of wealth. It is so no longer. It is now for them a mere stopping-place for buying clothes—a pause en route to the true, fashionable, American Mecca, London. A few years ago Americans, except those of the ordinary sight-seeing, mind-improving kind, loathed London. They knew few people there—and, like Vienna, London is an impossible place for the stranger in search of amusement; if he does not know natives, is not invited to their houses, a soundless desert is a cheerful, companionable place in comparison. Further, such English as the rich, fashionable, amusement-hunting American knew—that is, such Englishmen “of the right sort”—were about as friendly and sociable as they are to their servants. But that was before the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”

The change came with the British discovery that the American multi-millionaire and the American heiress were not, as had been supposed, rarities found only occasionally after long search through trackless and vast wildernesses of “unspeakable bounders,” but were deposited in “the States” in quantities, were easily accessible, were yearning for high society, for aristocracy, for titled friends, for titled alliances. This was tidings of great joy to the English aristocracy. For an aristocrat may not work; and no matter how heavily “endowed” a title may be, values will shrink as time passes—not to speak of those savage “death duties” which the rascally Liberals enacted to the infuriating of the upper classes, who yet dare not repeal them.

The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their “cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them.

To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper class is in England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses, including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms. They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken custom to bow before rank and title.

There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every upper-class family in England.

And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never now-a-days rusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water—are we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with our tempestuous German suitor—the motive of political, or, rather, industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people. For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.

Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures. The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to improve the relations between sundry European monarchies and the American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and plutocratic diplomats.

The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his daughter—again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of wealth—are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of the American brand of Democracy. For they—not unnaturally—wish to make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home, they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters and dollar-worshipers penetrate. The political bosses court them, give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace.

Thus the American fresh from America finds London—let us confine ourselves to the one capital as typical—a strange, humorous spectacle in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears. A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order in which there is no American Republic.

And we are only at the beginning. The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” between the English upper class and the American aspirants to be thought “upper class,” the dragging in of the rich American pilgrim out of the fog to the cheeriest corner of the English fire, these are matters of yesterday. And already Paris gets but a glance from the rich Americans, and the most foresighted of Paris shopkeepers are establishing London branches for the “Anglo-Saxon” American who no longer can spare the time from his or her English social duties to make the outfitting trip across the English Channel. To-morrow—The English hearth is large; there is room on it for every presentable or hope-inspiring American who can afford to cross the Atlantic; and the news of the jollity of the London season and of the round of English house parties is spreading in America and is attracting the pretentious society of all the large American cities. The “Alliance” is indeed booming.

It is not through English aversion to the Atlantic voyage that, though we are the sought, we go to the home of the seeker to be sought. The English upper classes would come to us if we insisted upon it, although the item of expense looks larger to them than to us. But we do not insist upon it. Our “leisure class” is made far more comfortable in England than it is at home. America has no such facilities as has England for amusing sheer idleness in ways that are not undisguisedly inane. Through several centuries, the filling in of the idle hours of professional idlers has been a study there; the houses, the streets, the theatres, the restaurants, the whole social system is adapted to it.

Further, the American can feel so “tall,” can believe so thoroughly in his own aristocracy and aloofness above the general run of mankind when there are three thousand miles of barren water between him in his grandeur and the shop where he worked as a “clark,” or the cabin where his father was born, or the back yard where his mother, in gingham, hung out the wash. Thus, the Americans in search of “the high life” for which they yearn prefer to go to it rather than to have it brought to them.

“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’ significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic classes, are becoming friendly to you, is that you are becoming like them. They concede something; but you—you concede your principles. They get something—cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m blest if I can see what you get.”

To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem preposterous—as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not, that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural leadership of the classes that have demonstrated their superiority by success.”

The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as a highly probable event?

The plutocracy itself shares in the delusion of so many of our “publicists.” “What shall we do with America?” it insolently says in effect.

A little patience; a little time for our eighty millions, surcharged with Democracy, to weigh and measure and judge. Be sure, the dog will not be wagged by the tail. And before many decades European caste will see such a handwriting upon the western sky as has not terrified it since our Declaration of Independence.

PART II.—DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER IX
“WE, THE PEOPLE”

It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth—not so much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which he is the appendage; one might with truth say, the victim—is not only the most conspicuous factor in American life to-day, but also one of the most potent factors. The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home—in its own homes—that is our “peril.”

A great monster indeed, fully up to the harrowing descriptions of our radical orators and writers. But why does the average, common-sense American refuse to be terrified? Because he does not see it? Hardly that. No; the real reason is that the American is fundamentally incapable of those caste and class feelings, without which a plutocracy can never hope to erect itself into an aristocracy, and therefore a real “peril.”

To see America—the America that was, and is, and shall be—we must leave the neighborhood of the palaces of the plutocracy with its servile parasites and imitators, its fawning menials and shopkeepers; we must also leave the neighboring slums, where the American is so sadly caricatured—not more sadly, in truth, than where the plutocracy flaunts. We must go to the smaller cities and the towns and villages and the farms, where in ten thousand homes a sane and sober life is led by a sane and sober people. And we find there no tendencies toward the development of caste, far-reaching though the poisonous influence of the plutocracy is.

For our hopeful, yes, convincing comparisons, we need not bring forward the early days of the republic, when the surviving silly old Colonial aristocracy was strong enough to restrict the suffrage, to enforce rigid class distinctions, to threaten us with an official aristocracy of “birth.” We only need compare forty years ago with to-day to see the substantial progress of true Democracy. Proportionately, are there not vastly fewer people to-day lacking that high sense of self-respect which caused so much open, profuse and shamefaced apologies for electing to the Presidency a man of such “low origin” as Lincoln? At the time of the Civil War, and even thereafter, the rich men in every community had great political influence simply because they were rich, and property, as property, claimed and was conceded a right to a more potent voice in the public affairs. Is it so to-day? Is not the property influence exercised only in secrecy and stealth? Is the rich man a favorite for elective office, or are the people, roused by the frequent coincidence of wealth and corruption, jealously suspicious of the rich man in politics?

Outside the umbra and penumbra of plutocracy we find the American with the inborn sense of equality, the American that rejoices in humble origin as proof of the personal worth of him who has risen. We are still a nation of working men and women, the sons and daughters of working people. And just as soon as one of us becomes ashamed of his birth or of his own past, becomes infected with the cheap and silly vulgarisms that Europe is always thrusting upon us, just so soon does he or she begin to fall behind in the procession. Influential relatives will not long save him or her, nor inherited property; misused opportunity to better education will only hasten the downfall.

Never was country made up of more kinds of people than the United States; but we have no classes. There is no condition to which one is born from which one may not escape. Class means such a condition. Now, were caste altogether a matter to be determined by the rich, by those “on top,” we might well tremble for the future of our social state. The rich of a thousand localities would not be slow to take advantage of the chance were it offered them. But fortunately caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.

However many Americans there may be who would like to look down, there are few, there are ever fewer, with the quaint fancy for looking up. It is true that in our so-called “foreign element” there seems to lie the possibility of a dangerous influence. This vast mass of foreigners, coming from lands where class distinctions are centuries old, is regarded with hope, consciously and unconsciously, by our plutocratic with caste aspirations. But let us recall the facts about that other flood of immigration, the Irish and the Germans who came in the middle part of the last century—proportionately a greater flood than the one which has been sweeping in upon us for the last twenty years. In the fifties of the last century, as to-day, it was confidently predicted that the downfall of Democracy had already begun. The slavocracy of the South struck hands with the then existing manufacturing plutocracy of the North, and the basis of the Northern plutocracy was the hordes of ignorant immigrants. What happened? The war? More than that. Democracy absorbed away the basis of the rising Northern aristocracy just as the war swept away the basis of slavocracy. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants became the most strenuous of Americans.

Our “foreign element” does not remain foreign. It comes here to become American, and it sets about the accomplishment of its purpose with an energy and a resolution that are unconquerable. When our plutocracy of to-day leans upon the “foreign element” it leans upon a breaking reed. And the more heavily it leans the worse will be the fall.

In manners more easily than any other way can we see Democracy in progress. There should be no confusing that respectful consideration for others, which in an honest way most of us have, with the European idea of deference. Whether at home or abroad, the big asset of the American is his lack of deference, his freedom from that which angered Walt Whitman into crying out haughtily:

“By heaven, there has been about enough of doffing and deprecating. I find no sweeter fat than that which clings to my own bones.”

Manners bespeak mental attitude; and mental attitude is the man. Americans should be careful how they permit themselves to trifle with their manners. We are hearing a great deal about “growing distinctions between class and mass” now-a-days. Many are “viewing with alarm” and “deeply deploring” such evidences of it as, to use the most often cited instance, the increasing tendency of well-to-do parents to send their children to private schools instead of, as formerly, to the public school.

The viewers with alarm seem to miss the point. It is not the “mass” that is going to suffer by this imported passion for exclusiveness; it is the “class.” The “class” cuts itself off from the “mass,” from the full, strong currents of democratic life which alone give vitality and endurance. The mass remains vital and energetic and progressive; the class withers and shrivels and sloughs away.

Nevertheless, the disposition on the part of some Americans to despise and forsake the splendid triumph-producing ideas of their country for the mean and petty, disaster and decay-producing ideas of the Old World, is a matter which should not be passed over without comment. Of necessity our snobs will be pushed aside and trampled in the resistless onrush of the Democratic idea. The nation would be feeble indeed if it could be halted or even slackened by such an obstacle. But the snobs ought to be noted and warned. Disobedience to the great laws which determine the evolution of mankind is important only to the disobedient individual. But it is part of our humanitarian duty as democrats to be patient with the ignorant, the weak and the erring, and to be helpful to them as far as we can. It is impossible for any one with the broad sympathies which Democracy engenders not to feel the impulses of pity when he sees fellow-beings, through vanity or ignorance, flinging themselves and their innocent young children across the very pathway of the mighty wave of Democracy.

A snob is a person who feels inferior and wants company in his misery, and longs for the consolation of finding those even lower than himself. Snobism should be exterminated, just as, more and more scientifically, bodily disease is being stamped out. The snob is the only one who wants class distinctions, or who can encourage their existence. It is the snob who returns from abroad deeply impressed by courtesies shown him over there in expectation of and in exchange for tips. He uses his first intake of native air to fall afoul of the native manners. And no doubt our manners do need improving. We have always been in a great hurry under press of work, and there is still a great deal more to do than our competent doers can find time for. But in polishing our manners we must be careful to use a sound brand of democratic polish, not the English brand so much admired by those who yearn for a deference from others which they would not when alone venture to show themselves.

Back of manners is instinct. Often a man’s lack of manners enables us to see whether his instincts are right or not. Aristocratic manners hide moral and mental defects, just as whiskers and clothes hide physical defects. What we ought to develop is sincere manners—not the bowings and scrapings of fear and cupidity and servility. Democratic manners!

Good manners among the various kinds of public and semi-public servants in England would not be considered good manners here. Without disputing the point with those admirers of the English servant, we must insist that it would be ridiculous for a self-respecting American citizen to grovel and scrape and look and act “humble.” We want no servility here, much as we would like to please those persons who constantly feel the need of assurances from others that they are as grand folks as they would like to think themselves.

Scraping and cringing, whether in a duke or in a domestic, are as bad manners for a human being as are arrogance and impertinence.

The grotesque nature of the snob complaints against the manners of our everyday people is striking when one recognizes a certain criticism that can justly be made against us. It is among so-called well-bred people, a certain brand of them, our snobs, that bad manners are most prevalent. For out of them is left that on which alone good manners can be built—the proud, erect, democratic spirit.

It is not difficult to have good manners in a graded social system. It is extremely difficult to have good manners in a Democracy. Any one can easily be a snob, a looker-up and a looker-down. But how very difficult it is to be a simple, unaffected man or woman, considerate, courteous, looking all other men and women straight in the eyes and saying: “You are certainly as good as I am. I hope I am as good as you are.”

“I am your equal” is at the basis of democratic bad manners. “You are my equal” is the basis of democratic good manners.

Again and again in fashionable society, frequently among those most prone to call their poorer countrymen and women ill-mannered, there are barbarities and repulsive lapses of good taste not merely tolerated, but approved as marks of fashion and refinement. For example: A rich woman gives a cotillon, provides many thousand dollars’ worth of handsome favors. You look about the ballroom—there sits a circle of girls, pretty and ugly and passable, attractive and unattractive. Some are loaded down with favors—you can hardly see their radiant faces for the mass of articles which testify to their popularity.

Others have only a few favors, and those of the poorest. Yet there they must sit, acting as foils for the pretty and lucky girls who are emphasizing their homeliness and bad luck. Their sufferings do not show in their faces—at least not very plainly. But they would not be human if they did not feel the pangs of humiliated and wounded vanity at this most conspicuous advertisement of their inferiority in charm.

Yet the cotillon is regarded as the very highest kind of refined social entertainment. And hostesses will beam upon this sorry scene with never a thought for the sufferings of their slighted and wounded girl guests. In a truly refined society would any one ever give any form of entertainment at which there would be frank discrimination among the guests?

Again, a woman gives a dinner. You go to her house and find her receiving in a magnificent dress and displaying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry. She is far and away the most gorgeously, the most expensively dressed person at her dinner. She outshines all her women guests. In a truly sensitively refined society would a hostess do this? Would she not rather dress simply, even plainly? Her dinner, and its service, should of course be the best she can provide—there she is honoring her guests. But in her own dress, in the one feature of her entertainment where invidious and humiliating comparisons could be instantly made, she would think not of gratifying her own vanity, but of putting her guests at their ease. And so she would save her best jewels and dresses for places other than her own house and eyes other than those of her own guests.

The kinds of grossly bad manners of which these are fair and familiar examples would not surprise us in Europe, where the education is narrow and souls are shaped in pettiness and vulgarity by class distinctions. But they would and do surprise us in America.

There is one trait in our national character that is a veritable Gibraltar against caste tendencies. It is that passion for up-to-dateness, which is so American, which is the cause of American progress, which is the secret of the ever rising plane of the comfort and intelligence of the American masses.

A European landowner or manufacturer, filled with the spirit of conservatism, the spirit of “good enough” and “it will do” and “don’t destroy old landmarks,” clings to musty and rusty antiquities, hampers himself and his associates and neighbors, drags and makes them drag at the wheels of advance. With the American, how quickly is the new building, the new machine, the new method already improved into antiquity! Away with it! Replace it by the latest and best. Better one big item in the profit and loss account than steadily decreasing profits and wages and products, and steadily increasing losses through the triumphs of competitors. The new, always the new! The new, always hopeful of the new! Give the new a trial! To-day must be better than yesterday; to-morrow will surely be better still. That is America.

And this same spirit wages incessant and successful war against caste. If the new man is the best man we put him to the front. Does our “irreverence” for things ancient sometimes offend a super-æsthetic few? It is a pity they are so enraptured by European picturesqueness of the antique that they fail to note the European peasant bending and groaning under the weight of the past. Does this disrespect for hampering tradition proclaim us “new”? That is well. When did youth become a calamity and a reproach? May we ever be “new,” looking at the problems of life with hopeful young eyes, confident that better, more beautiful things lie in the future than past suns ever shone upon.

There are two kinds of stability—the stability of the ship rotting at its wharf; the stability of the ship, strong and steady, on its way through the midst of the sea.

America is all for the latter. It abhors barnacles and rust. And it combats monopolistic tendencies most fiercely because, however adroitly disguised as “communities of interest,” they promote the stability of stagnation, blindfold the eager eyes of competition, bribe brain and muscle to sloth, hold up the heavy hands of sluggard and incompetent, and discourage individual ambition and hope. There should be no structure of any kind whatsoever, whether national or social, which, when it has clearly outlived its use, can be saved by sentiment or interest or bulwarks of brainless boodle-bags. And Democracy will have none such. Let those who tremble for our future be calmed. As for those who fancy they can in their own interest create such structures, let them read history and learn to laugh at their folly.

The principle applies to those less tangible but more insidious structures—those ideas that would give permanence or prominence to people because of what some one else has been, or what they have been in the past—structures existent only in the minds of comparatively few, gone daft in their love of European imitation. But we tear down too quickly for them. While the fine building of class distinctions is constructing, changes occur that knock out the foundation stones.

An old New York “aristocrat”—his grandfather came over in the steerage—glanced around the Metropolitan Opera House one night not long ago and said: “There are not a dozen families on the list of boxholders twenty years ago that are on that list to-day. All new people—and from heaven knows where.” Where were the new people from? Why, from whence this old “aristocrat’s” grandparents came, from where his grandchildren will be.

Whenever a fence is put up by any group of people around themselves one of two things happens. Either those inside grow terribly weary of their exclusiveness, and, finding that no particular benefit seems to be coming from it, voluntarily let down the fence; or the society-mad herd, seeing the fence, makes a rush for it to get in. A coarse rattling of hoofs and horns, a discovery of a loose paling, a crash, a mad scramble, and there are more inside than out.

Democracy is as much the law of our social order as gravitation is of our physical order. Those who don’t like it will, if they are wise, either leave the country or adjust themselves and their children to its conditions. For if they stay and bring up their children out of harmony with the existing and unalterable order, their children will be punished, even though they themselves, through obedience in their earlier lives, escape the worst consequences of their folly.

The part of the coming generation that is trained in Democracy is the part that will survive and prosper and progress. The part that is bred in exclusiveness and caste feeling is going to be bitterly discontented and deplorably unprogressive certainly, and in all probability, except in a few rare cases, downright unprosperous.

Why do not the plutocratic “exclusives” and aspirants to exclusiveness see these things and take warning? Because vanity is so much stronger in influence over the average human being than is reason. They pile up the millions, make safe investments, plot monopolies that will insure stability of property, and imagine that their family line will be secure. Then they educate their children to folly and superciliousness and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of high finance. Thus does Nature, abhorring permanence, craftily use them for their own undoing. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make drunk on the fumes of vanity.

The plutocracy and its imitators bring up their children in hot-houses. Some of the youngsters are ejected from the hot-house and exposed as soon as they are grown—or sooner; others remain in the hot-house and perhaps breed there. But the day of fate comes. The hot-house is emptied or destroyed.

Fortunately for the masses and their children, fortunately for the prosperity and progress of the race, few can build these hot-houses; only a few can dwell in them. And with the swift progress of Democracy in these modern days, this cruel, mocking favoritism swiftly decreases.

Manners there can be, but they must be democratic manners. Refinement, culture, there can be, but it must be democratic. Idealism there can be, but it must be true idealism, broad, deep and high, not a “class” matter, not a vanity, not a pretentious crushing down of millions to make luxurious holiday for a few.

The aristocratic idealisms in manners, education, politics, religion, mode of life, are fleeing like shades of night before the bright daylight of Democracy. Only ignorance could ever have thought them fair.

CHAPTER X
THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY

Ever since the first tall chimneys unfurled the sooty banners of the new, the industrial civilization, we have had the cry that the power machine is a monster whose reign means the debasement of the masses of mankind. And latterly, throughout the world, but most loudly in America, which has been foremost in promoting the new order, it has been charged that the men in control of the new order, the business men, are merciless and relentless; that in the struggle for markets and for profits they are trampling morality and all the other restraints and ideals. Now comes Thorstein Veblen, lately Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago, to formulate these charges upon a scientific basis. In his Theory of Business Enterprise he makes the following declarations of scientific principle:

First: That “the machine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose ends seem to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble and dignified in human intercourse and ideals”; that “in the nature of the case the cultural growth dominated by the machine industry is of a skeptical, matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, unmoral, unpatriotic, undevout”; that “the machine, their (the masses’) master, is no respecter of persons, and knows neither morality nor dignity, nor prescriptive right, divine or human.”

Second: That “the machine methods which are corrupting the hearts and manners of the workmen are profitable to the business man.”

Third: That “the economic welfare of the community at large is best secured by a facile and uninterrupted interplay of the various processes which make up the industrial system at large; but the pecuniary interests of the business men, in whose hands lies the discretion in the matter, are not necessarily best served by an unbroken maintenance of the industrial balance. Especially is this true as regards those greater business men whose interests are very extensive. Gain may come to them from a given disturbance of the system, whether the disturbance makes for heightened facility or for widespread hardship, very much as a speculator in grain futures may be either a bull or a bear.”

Fourth: That, these being the facts, there has arisen a “class of pecuniary experts” who “have an interest in making the disturbances of the system large and frequent”; that, under the new civilization, industry being carried on for business, and not business for the sake of industry, such disturbances are as a matter of fact both large and frequent, are incident to a merciless struggle among business men for the supremacy which monopoly alone gives; that, while the business man, in common with other men, is moved by humane ideals, “motives of this kind detract from business efficiency, and an undue yielding to them on the part of business men is to be deprecated as an infirmity”; that, while sentiment has a certain force “in restraint upon pecuniary advantage, not in abrogation of it,” the “code of business ethics consists, after all, of mitigations of the maxim, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware)”; that, “under the system of handicraft and neighborhood industry, the adage ‘Honesty is the best policy’ seems, on the whole, to have been accepted and to have been true. This adage has come down from the days before the machine’s régime and before modern business enterprise”; that, under modern circumstances of lack of personal contact between business man and customer, “business management has a chance to proceed on a temperate and sagacious calculation of profit and loss, untroubled by sentimental considerations of human kindness or irritation or of honesty.”

Professor Veblen’s ideas have been given in his own language so far as has been permitted by his passionate professorial predilection for polysyllables—or, has he used long words and involved phrases from the prudent motive of screening from “the vulgar” the ferocity of his attack upon business men, rather than from the reactionary motive of scholastic snobbery? However this may be, to close study he makes it clear enough that, according to his reading of political economy:

First: The machine is a monster.

Second: It is making monsters of men—brutal serfs of the masses; bandits, liars, thieves and cheats of the managers and directors.

A savage indictment that! A terrifying, topsy-turvying of the dearest beliefs and hopes of us who look upon steam and electricity as efficient agents of Democracy, the strong and inevitable unshacklers of the bodies and minds of mankind. But Professor Veblen has stated only the extreme of what is said without denial every day; he is simply the courageous spokesman of the majority of the classes who write and speak; he is putting into scientific formula the sneer of every snob who professes contempt of business and, indeed, of all other forms of modern democratic activity. His book, therefore, serves admirably as a provocation for presenting a few facts and suggestions on the other side.

Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our industrial civilization is degrading the masses into mere appurtenances of the machine, mere mechanical aids to the heaping up of vast profits in the treasuries of the few? Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our business men, whether great or small, whether captains of industry or sub-officers, are degenerating into dishonesty and the short-sighted selfishness of the slave-master?

A surface survey of our time reveals much that seems to compel a reluctant affirmative answer. To glance at a newspaper is to read of the cynical tyrannies of beef, oil, coal, iron, grain, railway magnates, who make their infamies nauseating by ardent professions of patriotism and piety. And from time to time the shameless adulterations of food and drink culminate in some sensational slaughter of people wholesale, suggesting vastly greater slaughters effected quietly from day to day.

And we see persons grown enormously rich upon stolen privileges of various kinds exhibiting themselves in luxurious ostentation, offering tempting rewards to sycophancy and pauperizing those fighting on the poverty line by supercilious gifts and condescensions. We see rascality rewarded with wealth and honors, success bought with self-sale. We see corruption, conspicuous and hideous, everywhere upon the surface of the social body. And we turn away heartsick, convinced that the Veblens have stated the truth with moderation.

But if we turn away to read history—not the fables and fancies, the poetical romances and romantic poems from which the Veblens draw their “facts,” but the true story of the mankind that was—if we read that painful recital, we turn again to the mankind of our day, and it is like a landscape from which the storms of winter are rolling away. The corruption which revolted us is still there, just as hideous as before; but we now see that it is the poison which was working in the veins and arteries of the patient and is now at the surface, on its way out of the body before the victorious legions of health.

Professor Veblen, and his like, are prone to use, in writing and speaking, words of many meanings; they unconsciously play upon these words, and so fall into grievous error. For instance, Professor Veblen talks of ours as a “machine” civilization—as if the machine were its new and characteristic factor, determining its form and its destiny. In fact, civilization from its very inception has been “machine-made.” It began when our remotest ancestor snatched the bough of a tree and decided thenceforth to walk erect, using the bough as staff and club—that is, as a machine. Every tool of every kind has been a machine; and the progress of the race has been determined by the number and efficiency of its machines, both those designed to compel peace and those designed to further the arts of peace. If you wish to measure the actual value of any civilization—value in producing healthy minds in healthy bodies—you need only inquire into the kind and number and efficiency of its machines. Why? Because the machine represents the effort of man to adjust himself to his environment, his environment to himself. It gives power to him, whoever he may be, that learns to use it; it leaves him who does not avail himself of its aid, whether through idleness or ignorance or intemperance or incapacity, about where he would have been—certainly no worse off than he would have been—had mankind remained in the helpless, machineless “state of nature.”

Evolution has so unevenly affected the human race that, fortunately for us in the foremost files of progress, we need not rely upon history and cautious conjecture for our encouraging and inspiring knowledge of the world of the past, which enables us to see how far and how high we have got, and that the journey is still swiftly, if steeply, upward. There is hardly a stage of human progress that is not now represented on the earth, inviting any man with a passion for the “glorious past,” to disillusionize himself and cheer his pessimism. And we are enabled easily to reconstruct any period of the past. Thus, we have visual confirmation of the truth about Athens which history can only suggest. We know that the Athens of Plato and Praxiteles was no more the true Athens than is the intellect and tradition of Booker Washington a true type of the intelligence and condition of the overwhelming mass of our eight million negroes. We come to understand what Athens’ twenty-five thousand free citizens and many hundred thousand slaves really meant; we penetrate into the profligacy of the Athenian rich, the degradation of the Athenian masses; we realize why Aristides was banished for being just and Alcibiades carried on the shoulders of the Athenian Democracy (!) because he was a degenerate and a debauchee. And so on through all the past.

In like manner, we need not rely upon the poets and poetical historians, as Professor Veblen apparently does, for knowledge of what the “handicraft” civilization meant. We can study it, as it survives practically unchanged in the miserable hovels of Bohemian and Italian and Spanish peasants, where men and beasts rot together in conditions of sanitation that would not long be tolerated in any place where the “machine civilization” has inaugurated its high and ever higher moral and physical standards. We need not go so far from home. To get a picture of a prosperous handicraft city of the middle ages, go to New York’s East Side, where are the fast disappearing sweatshops that were transplanted from “handicraft neighborhoods” of Europe. The poets have it otherwise; and so do those historians who like to paint alluring pictures for their readers—and hate to grub for facts. But there is the grisly truth. Contrast the average sweatshop with the average factory. No; contrast the best sweatshop with the worst factory.

Partly because some men are so much shrewder and more persistent and more far-sighted than the masses of their fellows, but chiefly because the mass of mankind has not been long enough emancipated by the power of the machine to learn how to work intelligently and efficiently, the power machine, become enormously beneficent through steam and electricity, has not yet done all, or even more than a very small part, of what it can do, and shall do, for mankind. But already—in less than ten decades, less than seven—what a forward stride! In place of a world where all but a handful toiled early and late—from dawn until far into the night—toiled that others might reap all and they only blows and the meagre bread of bitterness, we now have a world where millions upon millions are comfortable. And as for the masses and toilers still in the shackles of the old régime, are they not better off than they were under that régime where wages were alms, and alms of the scantiest; where the only lights in the black darkness of utter ignorance were the will-o’-the-wisps of Superstition, drawing man farther and farther into the morass of slavery to king and noble and priest?

In writing works on political economy, professors should not study the conditions of labor before steam and electricity in poems and romances and from orchestra stalls at productions of “Die Meistersinger.” There is not a serf toiling in the deepest depth of the most hell-like mine in Siberia, upon whose shoulders, and upon whose soul, the burden is not lighter for the modern expansion of the civilization of the machine.

The truth is, steam and electricity have made the human race suddenly and acutely self-conscious as a race for the first time in its existence. They have constructed a mighty mirror wherein humanity sees itself, with all its faults and follies, and diseases and deformities. And the sudden, unprecedented spectacle is so startling, is in such abhorrent contrast with poetical pictures of the past, painted in school and popular text-books, that men of defective perspective shrink, and shriek: “Mankind has become monstrous!” But not so. Man, rising, rising, rising through the ages, is not nearer to the dark and bloody and cruel place of his origin than to the promised land toward which his ideals are drawing him. His diseases and deformities are of the past; and virtues that were, up to a few decades ago, almost unattainable ideals, are now so nearly a part of his natural adornment that hope of the nearness of the luminous penumbra of the Golden Age seems not unjustified.

What our grandfathers regarded as the natural and just demands of employer upon employé are now regarded as rigorous and tyrannous exactions of a brute. And in trying still to continue such exactions men slink behind the lawyer-constructed shield of the corporation, that they may be easier in conscience by trying to believe they are not “personally” responsible.

This brings us, naturally, to the charges against business men.

Professor Veblen does not, in so many words, assert that there was a time when business men were in business with other motives—presumably idealistic—more potent than profits. But he forces his readers to infer that this was the case—and that lofty view is always taken by the assailants of our present civilization. That is, man used to be an altruistic animal; Democracy and the machine—for you will find that these assailants are always hitting at Democracy over the shoulders of the machine—have made him a selfish and cruel rascal.

False weights were found in the ruins of the oldest city that has yet been exhumed. And false weights will probably be consumed when the earth drops into the sun and the heavens are rolled together like a scroll. Ancient records and ancient statute books are full of evidence that every new plundering device—from capitalistic and labor monopolies, secret rebates and majority owners swindling minority owners, down to adulterations and crooked scales—was familiar to our ancestors of the plateau of Iran before the migrations. Vice is the old inhabitant; virtue is the newcomer, the immigrant, received with reluctance and compelled to fight for every inch of ground he gains. As for specific testimony as to past ages, we have the testimony of all the old writers that the mercantile classes, the business men, were “without honor,” mean of soul, oppressors of their employés, robbers of their customers. We happen to know, also, that as for the other classes—the proud kings and haughty nobles and the rest—they certainly had a very quaint interpretation of that word “honor” when a murderer, a tyrant, a gambler, a practitioner of every vice that rots its slave and ruins its victims could yet be a “gentleman of unsullied honor.” And we know, finally, that only with the rise of the business men to influence and authority did the standard of honor become what all the world now recognizes as “ideal.” The very Biblical phrases in which honesty is enjoined are altogether commercial, are the language of the business world, of business men.

There are two vital facts about our new industrial civilization which its critics neglect:

First—It has created an unprecedented and infinitely great number of opportunities to dishonesty of the kinds that are, to as yet but slightly enlightened human nature, potently tempting.

Second—It has created new conditions of the moral, as well as of the material, relations of man to the masses of his fellow-men which are as yet imperfectly understood and constitute a debatable ground for even the fairest and rigidest consciences. Men now see that large action of any kind involves large evil as well as large good; and the balance of right and wrong is not easy to adjust, except in the tranquil studies of critics and theorists.

To the first of these two facts may justly be attributed the unquestionably large amount of dishonesty—dishonesty clearly and generally recognized as such. To the second of these two facts is undoubtedly due the most of the wrong-doing by men who in their private relations are above reproach. These statements are not put forward to justify men for yielding to temptation to dishonesty and to justify men in acts, approval of which can be got from conscience by sophistry only, if at all. They are put forward simply to explain why it is that, when there are actually more honesty and conscientiousness, and they of a higher quality, than ever before in human history, there should be a seeming of more dishonesty and consciencelessness. Further in support of the same view, while wrongdoers of the past were hidden or veiled by the imperfect means of publicity, wrongdoers of to-day are at once searched out and pilloried by the press and by public opinion. Up to the middle of the last century men knew little of the large evil done them, and that little imperfectly; now, knowledge of individual acts of uprightness, once scattered everywhere by being immortalized in tradition, rhymed and prose, is lost in the vast revelations of huge and ancient wrongs persisting.

It is no new thing for a man to be admired and envied for wealth and station, regardless of how he got them. But it is a new thing in the world for the public conscience to be so sensitive that a man in possession of wealth or station, got not by outright and open robbery—methods not long ago regarded without grave disapproval—but by means that are questionable and suspicious merely, should be in an apologetic attitude, should feel called upon to defend himself and to give large sums in philanthropy in the effort to justify and to rehabilitate himself. Steam and electricity have given to man a sudden, vast power. It is not strange that he should commit errors and crimes in working out its unfamiliar possibilities. It is not strange that abuses, as old as the selfish struggle for existence, should succeed in adapting themselves to the new conditions, should contrive to persist. But is it not strange that professors of political economy, supposedly familiar with the truth about the past, should be so narrow and twisted in historic and psychological perspective as to misunderstand these simple phenomena? And what must we think of them if, in support of their pessimistic and unwarranted jeremiads, they conjure the fantastic and preposterous and long-exploded myth of humanity’s past Golden Age?

According to Professor Veblen, honesty is no longer the best policy. What an incredible misreading of the very sign-board of our time! Under the old régime of priest or soldier or prince, honesty was distinctly not the best policy. Strategy, dexterity, chicane, finesse, sophistry, cozening—these were the sure, the only ways to preferment. For, under those régimes preferment meant securing the right to live without work upon the toil of others. And, to confine ourselves to the mercantile classes, was not the successful business man he who got from prince or priest or tyrant the right to rob the people, he who got a monopoly or a license or a concession?

How is it under the new régime, the democratic, the “vulgarizing” régime of the business man? Our chief troubles come from survivals into the present of the tenacious roots of the past’s methods to success, come from the persistence of the idea that by wit and not by wisdom and justice does the truly strong man truly prevail. But slowly—and surely!—the “vulgar” régime is enforcing the laws and sanctions of “vulgar” morality. Even our robber barons demand honesty, strict honesty, among themselves in their conspiracies to monopolize to their own profit the benefits intended for all. When they violate the law of honesty, they do it in secrecy and make haste to deny their crime and to return to their allegiance to the law. Honesty is the very ground upon which a commercial civilization must rest. That our business men are, as a class, and with rare exceptions, honest, keeping their bargains, giving and receiving the value agreed upon, is proved beyond question by the fact that we as a nation prosper, that our abject poverty is almost confined to newly arrived immigrants and to our only recently emancipated negroes.

Where a prince is armed with power arbitrarily to suspend the natural laws governing the intercourse of human beings, lies and dishonesty may, for a time, prosper; but not where the sole basis of intercourse is the voluntary belief of men in each other’s integrity. And more than ninety per cent. of our business is done upon credit! Under the old order, the very laws and customs, the very morality taught by the church, was grounded upon the justice of the unjust distribution of the products of labor; under the new régime, under “business enterprise,” law and custom and religion teach only value for value received.

Professor Veblen does well to criticise the misguided attempts of philanthropy and so-called charity to restore the old relations of superior and inferior. But his criticism that they are insufficient and not in keeping with the “machine civilization’s” merciless demand for economic efficiency does not go far enough. They are also unnecessary, and in large measure productive of greater ills—of pauperism and dependence—than those they seek to mitigate. The ills are not machine-created. They are inherent in the imperfect nature of man. They will tend wholly to disappear only when the machine’s “merciless” demand for efficiency is rigidly enforced. For, what is that “merciless” demand? What does the machine say to man? It says, “Work is not a curse, but a blessing. In a leisure class the only culture is of the germs of profligacy, superciliousness, snobbery and decay. All men must work, and must learn to work well. All men must serve that they may pay for service rendered. And where that order prevails, to the worker will come the full reward for his work. I, the machine, will make your burden into a blessing, your toil into labor, the noble, the dignified, the producer of civilization and self-respect. I will widen your horizon until you see that all men are brothers, brothers in the business of, by business enterprise, increasing and creating wants, and of, by business enterprise, satisfying them. I will give you ideals that are true and just—not loyalty to idle, thieving prince, not slavery to irrational superstition, not bondage to bloody soldier-tyrant, but intelligent loyalty to truth and justice and progress. I will make you master of nature and of yourself, servant of the true religion and the true morality.”

Until now has been reserved the inquiry into how it happens that these critics of industrialism fall into their fatal errors. That inquiry will not long detain us. Professor Veblen naïvely gives himself and his fellow-critics away. He confesses why he hates the régime of the business man, what he means when he calls the machine industry “materialistic, unmoral, undevout.” “Business life,” he says, “does not further the growth of manners and breeding, pride of caste, punctilios of honor or even religious fervor.” And he finds his hope for the future in militarism and imperialism—which he, by the way, unjustly charges to the business men instead of to the politicians pandering to the still lively passions of man’s inheritance from the past when all the world was militaristic and imperialistic. “There can be no serious question,” says he, “but that a consistent return to the ancient virtues of allegiance, piety, servility, graded dignity, class prerogatives, and prescriptive authority would greatly conduce to popular content and to the facile management of affairs.” Nor does he conceal under the ponderous sarcasm lurking in that statement the truth of his own fixed belief in at least a measure of those “ancient virtues.” For his whole book, and the speeches and writings of practically all the critics of industrialism, show that these critics abhor the new virtues as “materialistic.”

The motive in the mind of each critic is a little different from that of his fellow-critics. One wishes college professors and the like to be in control; another is for the supremacy of birth; another for the supremacy of culture, whatever that may mean. Another wants the preacher back at the helm, with mankind an open-mouthed, uncritical congregation. Each wants the particular class or condition to which he himself has the good fortune to belong, to have the chief say in affairs. But all agree in denouncing the business man who is actually in control—and will remain there. They profess to despise money, yet they hate him for his profits. They profess to prefer the intellectual and moral dividends which their own intellectual and moral enterprises declare; yet their dainty fingers twitch for the material dividends which his material enterprises naturally declare. They would deny him the gains which are the only—and, as they loudly profess, the poor enough—rewards for wasting his life upon the gross and sordid things.

The business man—and that means the worker, the “toiler”—is in control, is there to stay, because the human animal is so constituted that its material affairs—proper food, proper clothing, proper shelter—must always be primal. Not of the highest importance, but of the first importance. And if those material matters are well attended to—as they will be when the worker’s instinct pervades the whole race—the spiritual matters, the growth of body and soul, must inevitably prosper. The worker, the worker’s instinct, provides the right soil for a soul to grow in—a real soil, full of the natural and nourishing substances, not a fanciful, unsubstantial soil of false ideals, fraudulent culture and barren fiddle-faddle of closet theorizings.

For proof that the business instinct will provide the right soil we need only point to our own country as it is. In America, the great business nation of the nations, there lives a race of idealists, eighty millions earnest, dominated by the instincts for self-help and helpfulness to others, afire with the passion for improvement, for education, for knowledge of all kinds and from any and all sources.

The world has wandered in the swamps of vain and sentimental imaginings long enough. By all means, let us have it established on the firm ground and in the straight, upward roads of science and business. The sun shines upon those roads by day, the moon and the stars light them by night; the flowers bloom beside them—and within reach of the humblest wayfarer.

This gospel will not be attractive to poseurs and to the lazy and the incompetent. But it is gospel, the gospel of Democracy, America’s gospel. In the cargo of merchandise, Enlightenment and Democracy always travel as stowaway missionaries; when the cargo is landed, they go ashore and begin to preach.

CHAPTER XI
DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO

Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst of international curiosity as that about the real America, as distinguished from the America created in the minds of Europeans by our multi-millionaires, since it became not merely agricultural but also an industrial world-factor, inevitably dominant in an era whose civilization is the first based upon peace and indissolubly wedded to peaceful arts. Europe has not been satisfied with inspecting what comes to her. Such specimens only whetted her curiosity to an edge as fine as that which cut the home ties of adventurous spirits when Columbus exhibited his Indians and his gold at the court of his patrons.

The Europeans, and the Asiatics, too, hastened to dispatch to us all manner of commissioners, semi-official and private, from princes of reigning houses to delegates from labor unions. And each of these spies—of the splendid modern kind—has been charged to seek and find and forthwith bring home an answer to the all-important question: “How do they do it?”

And these gentlemen have peeked and poked and peered in the friendliest, most flattering way imaginable. They have examined palace and tenement and cottage, and their tenants. They have eaten and drunk of all the products of the land, and have listened to speeches numerous and have read newspapers numberless. They have watched wheels go round in factories—and in heads as well. They have heard those who say “the captains of industry did it,” those who say “it was done in spite of the captains of industry and the high financiers.” And after tasting and seeing and smelling and touching and hearing, from Maine to the Golden Gate, these envoys have gone back, and with one accord have replied:

“They do it by education.”

From the end of the Civil War—an interruption of our progress to rid ourselves of a drag upon it—we have been educating as we never did before, as no other people ever did or now does. Immigrants have poured in; our great “infant industry” which protectionist and free trader alike believe in protecting and fostering, has been exceedingly expansive. And we have put home and foreign product into the great educational plant—from half to two-thirds of all between five years old and twenty going through school and academy and college. The average annual number who now receive formal education is one-fifth of our total population. And more than a million of our young men and women—one in every ten of both sexes of the higher education age, one in every six young men of that age—are annually in the universities, colleges, academies, business and professional schools. Not enough, not nearly enough; but in hopeful proportion to what used to be.

“I think, therefore I am,” runs the Descartes formula. We teach our youth to think in order that they may really be—be individual, be proud and self-respecting and self-reliant, be free with the freedom no government or law can give or secure, or take away. In the educational institutions this impulse gets form and direction that it may develop efficient manhood. And against the thinking toiler all the forces of ignorance and passion and wasteful luxury, of base and foolish political, social, industrial ideas, cannot prevail.

The first free school opened on these shores was in New York City on Manhattan Island. Of all the settlers who came to America the Dutch alone understood and believed in the free public school, offering free education not as alms but as a right. They had had it at home. They established it here, and set the example which was followed by the other colonists, first of all by those New Englanders who had lived in the Holland that fought Alva and Philip, and had there absorbed some democratic ideas. Holland was the godmother of modern Democracy, was the nursery of the modern public school.

These words are from the pen of John of Nassau, the oldest brother of that friend of civil and religious liberty, William the Silent:

“Soldiers and patriots thus educated (in free schools) are better than all armies, arsenals, armories, munitions, alliances and treaties that can be had or imagined in the world.”

Those words, written three hundred years ago by a man who had devoted his life to the study of the rights and wrongs of the common man, sum up the whole story. How his eloquent common sense contrasts with the shrieking of those little Americans who think that a cannon shot can penetrate further than a noble idea! How this old friend of freedom rebukes the puny, alleged statesmen who fancy that the manhood of this republic was developed on the battlefields, instead of realizing that military prowess is only one matter-of-course evidence of its existence! Enlightenment and Democracy make men who live for their country—and that is the new force in the world.

Let the people who fear for the future of the democratic spirit of this people look upon the spectacle of our free schools, those millions of young heads bent over books, those millions of young brains learning to think, to reason, learning to use mind and body in the service of civilization, real civilization. Enlightenment has won all the victories of the republic in the past. Its eternal warfare upon ignorance and incompetence, upon craft of plutocrat and craft of demagogue, and plausible idealism of reactionary, is the safeguard of the republic’s future. And one of the great agents of enlightenment, of Democracy—not the only great agent, not the greatest agent—is formal education in school, academy and college.

And more important even than the formal education of the boys is the formal education of the girls. The other means to enlightenment are more accessible to the men—indeed, they compel the men to become less ignorant and less prejudiced in spite of themselves. But to reach the women, the formal education is almost indispensable, for their ignorance and their prejudice are more sheltered, less open to the light of Democracy that floods the arenas and the market places.

And educated, enlightened, democratic women are of the highest importance to America, whose mission seems to be to lead the world in the march upward to that Arcady where every human unit shall have the chance to count as one.

Our extensive and our expanding system of higher education of women is often bitterly assailed by educated men, by educators. Bourbonism, especially when bulwarked by vanity, does not yield easily. And it will be many a day before death reaps the last man with the passion for looking down on his fellow-creatures. To avoid useless dispute, admit that woman should look up to man. Still there remains unimpaired the truth that woman’s two highest functions are to be the companion of man and the mother of men. The profitable companion for an educated man must be an educated woman—educated not merely for man’s “hours of ease,” nor for his happily infrequent hours “when pain and anguish rack the brow,” but also for the hours of development and endeavor.

So long as so-called education consisted in a little Latin and less Greek, forgotten as speedily as the business of life could crowd it from the mind, higher education was as unimportant to women as—well, as it was to man. But now that education consists in teaching not how the Greeks and Romans lived, but how “you and I” must live to-day and to-morrow, the gap between the man who has had the higher education and the woman who has not had it and has not supplied the deficiency, is wide indeed and will grow wider. If as much attention were given to the relations between men and women from five years after marriage on to the end as is given to their relations during the purely sentimental and transitory mating season this difference would appear in its true importance.

The same point of view applies to woman as a mother. So long as the training of children centred around the slipper and the switch, an ignorant mother was not at a great disadvantage—the best educated mothers knew little. But now-a-days the child of the highly educated mother has an enormous advantage, other things being equal, because such a mother applies science to the conduct of her home as her husband applies it to the conduct of his profession or business.

No education in the mother will compensate for lack of character. Character without education is infinitely better than education without character. But character plus education is the true ideal—and it is attainable.

If we are speedily to enter more fully into the rich promised land which Democracy opens to us, we must have not only the man who knows but the woman who knows. After all, is not our ultimate excuse for being alive that we are the parents of the next generation? And there the woman, with practically absolute control over the next generation at its vital, formative age, has the better of the man. If anything, does she not need the higher education more than does the man?

Education for the men; education for the women. But it must be enlightened and enlightening education.

Our national ideal is not a powerful state, famed and feared for bluster and appetite, not a people welded by unthinking passion for military glory into an instrument to the greed and vanity of the few; but manhood and womanhood, a citizenship ever wiser and stronger and more civilized, with ever more and more individual units that cannot be controlled in the mass—the democratic man and the democratic woman—alert, enlightened, self-reliant, free.

Now, there can be no difference of opinion as to the way to this ideal, the way to make the individual capable to work out his own salvation without hindrance from the aggressiveness of his neighbor or neighbors, without hindrance from the prejudices begotten in and of the darkness of his own ignorance.

Against all these foes, those without, those within, there is just one effective weapon—education.

It is impossible for an ignorant man to be free. No matter what constitutions you establish, no matter what laws you pass, no matter how assiduously you safeguard individual rights and liberties, the ignorant man will still be a slave. He rejoices in his chains, his prejudices and his superstitions. He clings to them. He beats off those who seek to deliver. He welcomes those who seek to bind. He shouts for chains, he votes for chains—chains for himself, chains for others. If he is ever in the right it is because he is mistaken. And you may be certain that a demagogue or other slave-hunter will soon recapture him and restore him to his beloved bondage of error.

This is why the man who aspires to freedom instinctively reaches for the weapon of education. This is why the American people always have had as their dominant passion the passion for education. This is why on the frontier the schoolhouse is finished before the home is furnished; why the washerwoman and the drayman toil to keep their children in school and to send at least one son to college; why our self-made men pour out their wealth in educational endowments; why there are all these colossal public appropriations for schools, academies, colleges, universities.

What is an ignorant man?

Of course there are the illiterates and the almost illiterate. But, numerous though they are, they do not count for much in this republic. They do not decide elections. They do not select candidates. They do not propose and compel legislation. The so-called ignorant vote is not a national or a local peril. It is not a national, rarely even a local factor.

The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance. Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools. Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from experience, knowledge from travel.

No, education—democratic education—is not knowledge. It is not even experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with both.

What, then, is ignorance?

All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason, cannot think for himself?

What does it mean to think for one’s self?

Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises. That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject the false.

A Democracy must breed citizens who think for themselves. Without them it cannot live. With them it cannot die. Hence it follows that in a Democracy education means to cultivate the ability to think for one’s self. Democracy means the right of private judgment. Education in and for a Democracy means development of the capacity to form private judgment.

So far as the Democracy is concerned, so far as the equable distribution of rights and liberties is concerned, no education that does not increase reasonableness is of the slightest value.

The education that has for its chief aims, its only real aims, culture, refinement, knowledge, learning, may be useful to an aristocracy like Great Britain, to an empire like Germany, to an autocracy like Russia. But it is not only not helpful to but actually hostile to democratic ideas and ideals. It breeds contempt on the one hand, fear and suspicion and hate on the other—the few looking down upon the many, the many looking up at the few. It makes the powerful supercilious. It makes the weak, whether educated or uneducated, helpless. It fills the brain; it does not necessarily strengthen the brain. It gives a man something; it does not compel him to make something of himself.

The truth about democratic education is indirectly recognized in practice more and more as science and its rigidly logical methods have grown in educational importance. All our modern systems of education are based perforce, rather than by design, in part upon teaching the brain to reason. But do we realize fully as yet that for us, for our democratic purposes of self-development and self-government, teaching the brain to think is not only the whole foundation of education, but also the sustaining part of the superstructure?

Take up any one of the great newspapers of the country, the great reflectors of the public mind and heart and taste. A few minutes’ searching among the advertisements will discover columns on columns of notices of astrologers and palmists and clairvoyants, of mediums and crystal gazers and cure-all doctors with their cure-all medicines. To whom do these dealers in the secrets of life and death, the future and the beyond, appeal for their comfortable incomes? To those who cannot read? Manifestly not. To the people in the humbler walks of life? Certainly not. No, they are inviting the educated classes to call—merchants and bankers and artisans, their wives and their daughters, the “well-to-do,” the reading public, the “substantial,” the part of the people which is commonly called “the backbone of the republic.”

Go on to the news columns. You find some account of the doings of a band of thieves who have got possession of some department or departments of the city or state government, and have substituted for the statute law the law of loot. Who turned over the keys to them? The illiterate, the dishonest, the criminal? Not at all. Look at the primary rolls of the organization whom these wretches disgrace, and you find a thoroughly respectable, in the main intelligent, certainly honest, body of voters. By no stretch of the meaning could you call them uneducated in the sense in which that term is commonly used.

In the very next column, perhaps, you read how a statesman of pious mien and impressive manner has been assuring his fellow-countrymen that they have a commission from the Almighty (which he begs leave to execute) calling them from their peaceful and orderly occupations and sending them forth to slaughter certain other men of whom they had not heard until a few months ago, to seize persons and property and to administer upon them arbitrarily. And who cheered wildly as these tidings of morality and civilization were proclaiming? Illiterates? Certainly not; but educated men, many of them highly educated, men who would hardly characterize such performances in private life as “manifest destiny” and “plain duty.”

A few columns further on and you read how one is wailing like a lost soul over heaps of scrap metal and rags and waste paper, because he cannot get permission to work them over into money and so make us all millionaires. And who is he? A college graduate. And who are his supporters? Millions who have gone to school and take in the newspapers and magazines.

These few illustrations of the reign of illogic are cited from the multitude available with a double purpose. In the first place, they faintly suggest to what an extent the citizen of a Democracy is prey to charlatanism. In countries with other forms of government—in monarchies and the like—a few charlatans are licensed and erected into respectability and power, and given the range of the people, while all others are rigidly repressed. In a Democracy any charlatan may license himself. The people are prey to every and any form of charlatanism, fraudulent or both. They must protect themselves, or they will not be protected at all. And right education is the only means.

The second point made obvious by these examples of superstition theological, superstition medical, superstition political, is that our education in the past must have been defective and must still be so. It has been seeking, it now seeks, as its chief object, to impart knowledge, not to cultivate the art of using knowledge, the art of thinking correctly.

The ideal has been an education that is reminiscent and is only incidentally constructive. The democratic ideal is the education that is constructive and only incidentally reminiscent.

There is only one way to this true education. Just as a child is taught to walk, to ride, to swim, just as it is taught to read, to write, to cipher, with just as much care, with just as much patience, with just as much deliberateness of purpose, must it be taught to reason.

This is not in advocacy of courses in formal logic. Those courses do not teach men to think. They teach men what certain other men have thought about the processes of thinking. And too often they teach it in such a way as to discourage the exercise of the reasoning faculty. No; the education that will soundly educate must make of every kind of lesson a lesson in logic, an incessant pointing out of reasons, reasons, reasons why certain facts are so, certain allegations false; an incessant demand that reasons, reasons, reasons be given—always reasons. The interrogation point should be the symbol over the door of every school, high and low, as the indication of what is going on within.

The average child starts in life with a question mark at the tip of every sense. Why does this inquisitiveness gradually disappear or become perverted into curiosity about trivialities? Why does going to school become a burden? Why are so many classes at college listless and inattentive? Why does the light, the frivolous, the thoughtless attract and hold, while that which is in reality far more interesting wearies and repels? Is it not because this reasoning faculty is allowed to grow up “any which way,” and is discouraged or suppressed wherever memory or some other form of some one’s else ideas can be substituted? Is it not because to reason comes to seem a burden, a bore, a pain? Would that be so if education were rightly based, rightly built?

We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed, become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction.

Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition. Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom, to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy?

In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans.

CHAPTER XII
A NATION OF DREAMERS

Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and public.

Some of us have no means of getting good mental food, and would not know what to select and what to reject if we had. Others, and these are the overwhelming majority, have no power to discriminate between the true and the false, the rational and the irrational, between that which strengthens the powers of the mind and that which weakens or perverts them. We take in cheap or worthless mental food just as we put cheap or worthless stuff into our stomachs. We take in that which is easy and pleasant to the taste—that is, we patronize the intellectual pastry cooks and confectioners too liberally. Or, we go to the purveyors of the strong waters of passion and prejudice, and under the influence of such whiskies and brandies imagine ourselves beings of extraordinary and fine mentality.

There is as much, indeed, there is greater, cause for alarm over the gastronomic than over the mental follies. But neither kind is evidence that we are on the down grade. We are more alert and wiser all the time in matters of physical health, despite our own appetites and foolish inclinations and lazy disinclinations, despite the pretentious ignorance of the medical profession and the shrewd chicanery of the quacks. In the same manner we are more and more alive to the importance of mental health, of the well-fed, well-exercised brain; and this improvement goes steadily forward, despite the harmful effects of alleged literature and drama, despite the pretentious ignorance of our regularly constituted teachers, despite the energetic educational quackeries of false learning, false culture and false taste. Intelligence will spread; Democracy will compel.

A hundred years ago small indeed was the part of the human race that could be reached by an appeal to the reason. To-day in many parts of the civilized world advances begin to be made not alone by appeals to empty stomachs, by shouts about full and empty dinner pails, but by real intellectual force. There are even a few rare but highly significant instances of masses of men being induced to sacrifice a small immediate good to gain a remoter larger good. That is, the masses begin to show signs of that same intelligent foresight which created and maintained class rule in times past, which makes some successful far beyond their fellows. And those who are so greatly concerned by the vast concentration of machinery and capital in a few hands fail to give proper consideration to the two most important points, more important far than the evils of concentration of wealth and power:

First: Concentrations of capital are at the mercy of brains. They are impotent unless they are administered by brains, administered by a multitude of brains working intelligently and harmoniously for a common end.

Second: Their evil consequences result from lack of reasoning power, lack of far-sightedness, due to imperfect education in the managers; lack of knowledge how to protect their own interests on the part of the masses.

On one hand we see an enormous increase in the brain power of the people—a multitude able to think, eager to think, not to be prevented from thinking, where only two or three generations ago the thinking was done exclusively by the few. On the other hand we see the necessity for more thinking, for vigorous stirring-up of the minds of the masses, for more and more education. And, year by year, the stirring-up process increases. The evils of the present day are as old as the race, as old as ignorance, as old as human frailty. The good, the benefits, are new, entirely new.

The material and mental forces of modern civilization have already wrought wonders. Think of it! Less than a century and a half ago the world for the first time heard a plea for the freedom, the dignity, the individuality of man. To-day millions of minds have that gospel as their fundamental creed. And freedom of thought, freedom of action, is the realized ideal of many nations, the realizing ideal of almost all the others. Why should we fear that the idea of manhood will lose its charm; that the democratic ideal, which has real beauty, should prove less attractive than the old ideal of inequality and injustice and inhumanity, which is now seen to be in fact hideous? Why should we fear that as we grow in enlightenment, grow in capacity to think and act with freedom, we should care less and less about thinking and acting with freedom?

What will come out of this vast, unbarriered flood of sunshine of enlightenment, out of these concentrations social called cities, these concentrations industrial called combinations? Who can say? Who would care to destroy life’s chief interest, the veiled future, by foreseeing? One thing we can be assured of—it will not be tyranny. It could not be tyranny, because the light of intellect, of real intelligence, is now in millions of minds, is kindling in millions more.

Of the many misreadings of history perhaps the silliest is that which attributes to former times an idealism greater than that of our own day. And of the many misreadings of our own times certainly the silliest is that which attributes more idealism to such countries as Germany, Austria, and Italy than to these United States.

The Middle Ages are generally cited as the period of intensest and loftiest idealism. But looking past the artistic and literary few of those centuries, looking at nations and peoples, what do we see? Ignorance, squalor, inconceivable physical and mental and moral wretchedness; ferocious tyrannies worse almost than anarchy itself and constantly producing it; stolid and heartless indifference in almost all to the welfare of their fellow-beings; “Every man for himself” the universal cry. No wonder there was a passionate yearning for the life beyond the grave with its promise of escape from a world made hideous by “man’s inhumanity to man.” And in these modern countries where so-called idealism is rampant, we find false and oppressive social and industrial conditions in the ascendant, we find a deplorable incapacity for dealing with the problems of life or an ignorant insensibility to them.

If idealism means inanely beating the empty air, if it means the worship of the vague, the remote and the purely fanciful, then this age cannot be charged with idealism and our country must plead guilty to the charge of gross materialism; and for idealism we must look to seclusions and deserts, where a few surviving dirty and distracted hermits and yogis spend their time in fantastical imaginings. But if idealism means rational, realizable and realizing dreams of a to-morrow that shall be as much better than to-day as to-day is better than yesterday, then the world was never before so idealistic, and America is the chief prophet and chief apostle of idealism.

In this sense the Declaration of Independence is the most idealistic literary product of the human mind; the so-called idealism of superstition, of chivalry, of kingship and aristocracy, of the divinely appointed few taking care of the many, of “never mind this world; all will be righted in the next,” has the cheap, dull glitter of “fool’s gold” and paste diamonds. These fallacies were, and still are, poisonous, because of their interference with the growth of true idealism—the idealism of self-help and helping others to help themselves. And to show them up and then to show them down and out—especially down and out of our colleges and universities—we need another Cervantes and a revised and enlarged Don Quixote.

Never before was the true ideal, humanity, clear and universal. “Light from the East” was the old proverb; the new proverb is “Light from the West!” For ours is the dawn-land of the Golden Age. We are a nation, a race of idealists, of dreamers. Even our plutocrats, with their Americanism submerged and all but suffocated in their wealth, still dream fitfully of justice and equality and universal enlightenment and the brotherhood of man.

We are a nation of dreamers who make their dreams come true!

CHAPTER XIII
NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE

It is reasonable, and not unkind, to assume that the time will come when we shall no longer have John D. Rockefeller with us. He may not die; as a vindication and a reward he may be honored with the unique distinction of Enoch and Elijah. But, whether by the vulgar route or in fiery chariot with angel escort, go he will, and his son will reign in his stead. The word reign is here used in the metaphoric sense in which it is almost always used now-a-days. For, the son of Rockefeller will not be free literally to reign. He will be hedged about with a thousand and one restraints. His acts will be the result not of his own intellect and will, but of his training, his tradition, his environment. He will be little of the autocrat, a great deal of the agent and servant. But, suppose that he would be really free, really self-owned, really capable of the mastership of his vast inheritance, instead of its slave, doing its bidding, acting always as a son of John D. Rockefeller and a member of the class multi-millionaire. Suppose this possible. What could he do with his nearly a thousand millions, for the most part so massed that they control many of the great vital industries of the country? Imbued with a deep sense of trusteeship to humanity instead of to the quaint Rockefeller god, and endowed with the intelligence to act upon that sense, what could he do to make the world the better for his sojourn in it? What would be his opportunities?

Of course, in the reality his opportunities will be small indeed. His limitations, through heredity, education and environment, are too narrow. But under our fanciful, even fantastic, “if,” there must be surely some way for a rich man to serve his fellow-men and demonstrate high qualities of mind and heart other than by these commonplace, more or less “cheap and nasty” schemes of so-called philanthropy. To all men in the past, and to the small man still—that is, to any man incapable of grasping the splendid and lofty idealism of Democracy—there could be nothing more captivating than playing the rôle of my Lord Bountiful. Not merely the paying of one’s just debts, not merely the doing of the commands of one’s own self-respect, but graciously condescending to part with one’s wealth for the gratification of one’s vanity and for the development of deference and humility in the recipients of the bounty. Philanthropy as it is practiced is more often than not a vice both in its origin and in its results. So, we will not make our imaginary young Rockefeller a philanthropist. We will not subject him to the temptation to make of himself a supercilious Pharisee and to make of others paupers and parasites and courtiers.

He is free; he is young; he is fearless. He is absolute master of his colossal inheritance. He looks up at the vast structure his father built. He reads upon it the motto his father placed there—“I am a clamorer for dividends.” His face sobers as he reads, and out of his mind go his half-formed projects to endow missions and colleges and hospitals and libraries. “Perhaps I have not so much to give as I thought,” he says to himself. “I must first see. What are the sources of my income? Am I stealing from anybody? Should I be giving away that which is not rightfully mine to give?”

And as a preliminary move he tears down the offensive “I am a clamorer for dividends,” and puts in its stead “I am a clamorer for justice.”

“Let us first be just,” he says. “Perhaps we shall not be able to be generous. Perhaps we shall even, hat in hand, and upon our knees, be compelled to crave the generous forgiveness of our fellow-men.” All this time he has been standing at the rear or business end of the paternal structure. He now goes round to the front or philanthropic side of it. He closes the doors there with a sign, “Philanthropy suspended during the taking of the inventory.”

And so we find our ideal young Rockefeller, his ears shut against the importunities of paupers and panderers and parasites, plunging deep and resolutely into the details of business—of the several vast enterprises which he, by inheritance, owns or controls. And soon all his father’s old friends, with the approval of all the leading men in finance and industry, are discussing whether a commission ought not to be obtained, and cannot be obtained, to inquire into the sanity of the young man. Not dividends, but honesty and justice! Why, the young fellow’s brain is turned! Denouncing business methods approved by the best lawyers at the bar, sanctified by the use of the greatest captains of industry? Insisting that commodities should be sold at only a fair profit over and above the cost of production? Dismissing men skilled in legal and business chicane? Insisting that no man in his employ shall have less than a decent living wage? Calling for the reorganization of great properties, not to increase but to decrease the bonds and stocks on whose interest and dividends a hundred of our best people are able to lead lives of elegant leisure and look down with amused pity on those who have to toil? There is no escape from the conclusion that the young man is mad, mad as a hatter, mad as a March hare.

If he had established soup kitchens to tempt the hard-working to knock off and join the army of lusty beggars, if he had given millions to enable missionaries to live at ease while they gratified their abnormal passion for meddling in other people’s business, if he had subsidized faculties to teach only “safe and sane” doctrines, if he had set aside vast corruption funds for debauching legislatures to suffer the people to be despoiled, if he had poured rivers of water into the stocks and bonds of his enterprises, had cut down wages and raised prices, if he had built himself half a dozen palaces, and conducted himself like a monkey that has been given a red cap and a pink jacket—why, that would have been sane, eminently sane. But honesty and justice! And in his own affairs! A real, practical application! Hear the shouts of derisive laughter. See the winks, the tongues in derisive cheeks. “The man’s mad! The man’s mad!” cries a generation tainted with the coarse ideals of riches, show and condescension.

But let us suppose that he is not strait-jacketed by his friends nor daunted by the hoots of the crowd. Let us suppose that he remains at large and has his way. And then, let us look at his first great “philanthropy.”

At first glance there seems nothing to look at, no important change. The same old machinery of these several huge Rockefeller industries of manufacture, trade and transportation seems to be moving on in much the same old way. The only obvious change is in the fortune and the income of the young iconoclast and his fellow-stockholders. There is seen an enormous shrinkage—enough to have endowed hundreds of colleges, enough to have made millions of paupers. The difference between the old order and the new is chiefly in moral tone. An honest man and a criminal go through precisely the same routine each day—dressing, eating, talking, sleeping. The abysmal difference between the two is invisible to human eyes.

Nor does the example of the new order seem to amount to much. Such doings are too expensive. Charity, donations, subscriptions, cost far less, do not interfere with dividends and interest, and bring returns in public applause. Why be honest and just when nobody else is—when nobody appreciates it—when the very victims of the system of dishonesty and injustice have less respect for you? Why refrain from “respectable” robbery when indulging in it gives power and prestige?

But the young iconoclast is not discouraged. He keeps hammering away—establishing the new order where he has control, making a fierce and incessant and public fight for it in those corporations in which he is a director sitting for a minority interest. And gradually the fury of the “respectable” rises against him. He has outraged the great “respectable” lawyers, who fatten on fraud and crime; he has inflamed the stockholders and bondholders, great and small, who find their incomes cut down; he has exasperated all who, but for the pickings and stealings under the old system, would have to work instead of idling about, pitying and patronizing workers. He has stirred to awful fury the whole capitalistic class, the honest ones no less than the dishonest; for the honest capitalist, while he looks askance at his dishonest fellow-member of the capitalistic solidarity, yet regards him as a wronged brother whenever any one by criticising him seems to be criticising capitalism. And these cyclonic ragings against the young man slowly rouse the masses of the people, slowly waken the slumbering moral sense of a society that has yielded to the seductions of the practical maxim, “Put money in thy purse.” And he is greatly cheered by the swelling, stentorian applause of the people.

He has cut down his income to less than one-twentieth what it was; but still a vast sum, far more than he can possibly spend, pours in upon him and demands investment. Further, many of the enterprises in which he is a large but not a controlling factor are of so suspicious a character, are so dependent for success upon roguery, that he feels he cannot continue in them. To abandon his holdings would be merely to add to the incomes of the rascals; he sensibly, but not without qualms, sells out at as large a price as he can get. Looking for new investments, he goes into the most crowded and squalid section of each of the cities and large towns in which he has interests—into those sections where the workers associated with his various enterprises are congregated. He buys up whole blocks and sections of unsanitary tenements. He tears them down and builds in place of them houses fit for human habitation. And he adjusts the scale of rents there, not on the familiar principle of robbing the poor because it is so easy to do, but on the same principles that he would apply to business property of the kinds used by people whose necessities are not so great that they are helpless before the robber. He is content with a decent profit; he takes no blood-money. He is a business-like, human landlord, not a bloody bandit, not a “clamorer for dividends.”

In each of these neighborhoods he establishes a huge department store in which he sells everything; and he gives value, not sham and shoddy. These stores make a specialty of food. They sell only wholesome food—and they can easily afford to sell it at the same prices which the former purveyors to these poor got for vile, poisonous, rotten meat and vegetables. Then he buys up the street-car lines in his neighborhoods as far as he can, and establishes two-cent fares. He realizes the importance of the item of car-fare to the poor, the wickedness of stock and bond watering to keep up the cruelest of all taxes.

And now he is in hot water! He has alienated a large and influential section of every one of the grand divisions of respectable society. He has against him, and purple with rage at the very mention of his name, all the men and all the women and all the families that directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, live by exploiting the poor. Right and left he has cut into or cut entirely away incomes, sources of vast profit, those infamous yet “respectable” capitalizations of the industry of picking the pockets in the tattered dress of the working girl, in the ragged overalls of the laborer! What an uproar from all that is articulate! They cry in the newspapers that he is worse than his father, that he is impoverishing the “best citizens,” et cetera. They scream that he is doing it, is using the almost infinite power of his father’s massed millions, with an ulterior motive—solely to increase his income.

As a matter of fact, his income has begun to increase. In a few years, the practice of honesty and justice on a scale that makes it impossible for the dishonest and the unjust to crush him, results in his having a vaster fortune than ever. Everything he touches turns to gold. In his main enterprise, the policy of low prices, honest wares and high wages causes business to flow in and to more than make up for the old profits lost by the abolition of the short-sighted tyrannies and monopolistic, pound-foolish, penny-wise policies. His tenements pay; his department stores can’t take care of the business offered; his street-car lines are crowded. The old business principle, time-honored, was: “Raise prices as the demand increases.” He acts on the new, the scientific business principle: “Lower prices as demand increases. Don’t kill that which you have been striving to create. Foster demand.”

At first he was called a “well-meaning but wildly mistaken philanthropist.” Now he is called a shrewder business man than his father. Like his father, he is hated and envied by all the rich-but-not-so-rich. And, sad yet amusing to relate, he is profoundly suspected by those whom he is striving to benefit. Such few friends as he has left bring this to his attention. “What’s the use?” they say. “Look at the ingrates. If you had stolen ten millions from them and given back a hundred thousand in charity they would have cheered you to the echo. You pamper them, and they turn on you. If there was to be a revolution to-morrow your head would be the first to go off.”

What does the young man reply? He might invite them to note the fact that he is making more money than his father did and is at least escaping the odium of being regarded as a hypocrite. But he does not. He is a peculiar young man. He simply smiles. “I am in business to please one customer first of all,” says he. “That customer is myself. What does it matter to me what other people think of me? I don’t have to live with them. But I do have to live with myself.”

And he orders further reductions of prices, and further increases of wages, buys more street-car lines, builds more tenements, opens a half dozen other big stores. To supply these stores with meat, eggs, butter, vegetables, et cetera, he starts in the neighborhood of each of his cities and towns huge farms, to which he sends boys and girls as apprentices to learn the farming business. And he engages to set up in the farming business each boy or girl who works well. Those who cannot be got in love with farming are to have first call on the lower positions in his various manufacturing and distributing enterprises.

He has now been twenty years at this business of applying old moral principles and policies to the vast modern opportunities for concentration and combination. Twenty years of hard work, and he is a happy, hated man of fifty and odd. He is richer than his father ever dreamed of being. Wonder of wonders, he at last has begun to drive the crooks and the rascals out of big business. There is just one competition in which a crook cannot survive—the competition with intelligent honesty. It is a competition which had never been tried until the coming of our fanciful, fantastic scion of Standard Oil, black sheep in the capitalistic fold. The crooked little farmer or merchant cannot survive against the straight little farmer or merchant. The crooked big “captain of industry” found that he couldn’t survive against our Rockefeller, inheriting his father’s business ability with his father’s wealth, but not inheriting his father’s convention-calloused moral sense.

It is not until our young man is well on toward sixty that there begins to be any real appreciation of philanthropy by making money instead of by giving it away. The laughter at honesty and justice, in business as well as in personal relations, in practice as well as in theory, on week-days as well as on Sunday, toward the helpless and obscure and unknown as well as toward the powerful and “respectable,” gradually dies away before his ocular demonstration of its sound practical wisdom. And his activities have been an enormous educational factor, giving men that practical enlightenment which the school of life alone can give, but which, under the old system, it so rarely did give. His high wages have raised the general wage market. His tenements and dwelling houses have raised the standard of housekeeping. His department stores have raised the standard of food and clothing. And when the material foundations of life rose, the moral and æsthetic structure superimposed upon them of necessity rose also. To raise a house, raise its foundations; don’t try to separate it from them.

As the laughter at iconoclastic business ceased, laughter at philanthropy burst out. The rich rascals, the smug feeders of their own vanity, the coy contributors to the conscience fund, who came in superciliousness and condescension with their pharisaical offerings, were greeted with hoots and jeers. Our young man of many millions, dauntless through all those trying years, had taught the people to look at the true inwardness of things. “Go back to your business,” they would shout at each of these astonished almsgivers. “Go back, and take with you this pittance of your filchings from your workmen and your customers. You are the real object of pity and charity. Look at the tainted sources of your income! Repent, reform, give us our rights, our just dues. Don’t pose as a philanthropist when you are giving away our money—and only a meagre part of the vast sums you have taken from us. Give justice. Generosity will take care of itself!”

And in those days our young iconoclast came into his own, so everybody said. But when his friends, wholly changed in their opinion now, approached him with enthusiastic flattery, he smiled his old peculiar smile. “I came into my own, years ago,” said he. “I came into it on the day I tore down the motto ‘I am a clamorer for dividends’ and set up ‘I am a clamorer for justice’, in its place.” And when he died he did not leave his vast fortune to his children to tempt them to forget his training and example and become soft, idle, foolish and unhappy. He left it to his enterprises, its income to be divided between those who made themselves most valuable and those who, having worked well, had earned the right to a peaceful old age.

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” sang the poet, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’” Not so. It is the vain might-have-been that gives birth to the bright shall-be!

CHAPTER XIV
THE INEVITABLE IDEAL

“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson. And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer—these ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the belief in the loftier basis for the ideal, to-day millions of us see that the laborer is the only good citizen, that his estate is the only estate of dignity. No people ever had such a conception of work as we have to-day. It is an evolution under Democracy. No previous nation could have understood it; our ancestors did not have it, for they were still influenced by caste ideas, hard and nobly though they strove to outgrow them. There are vestiges of the old ideas concerning work remaining. The class that does not work and the class that emulates it and envies it still look down on work, still hug the vulgar, ignorant fancy that work is a curse. But that is not important. Once more let us remind ourselves that caste is made not by him who looks down but by him who looks up. The vital fact is that the laborer is himself aware of his own sovereign dignity. And, excepting a few black sheep, the American flock still bears the ancestral markings; this is a nation of laborers. And the markings of which our ancestors tried hard, but with dubious success, not to be ashamed, have become the markings of honor—not to an occasional Jefferson, but to the overwhelming mass of our eighty millions.

This concept of labor is the first-fruit of Democracy and Enlightenment.

When sons of men of vast wealth go to work, there is much excitement among the idlers, rich and poor. The agitation shows how hard dies the theory that work is wholly a curse and, to a great extent, a degradation; that the only sensible, or noble even, ideal of life is to idle about; that there must be something of the freak in a human being who labors when he might sit at his ease amusing himself by counting the drops of sweat as they roll from the brows of his toiling fellow-men.

This is indeed the old, old theory. It has the sanction of many venerable authorities. But, like almost everything else that has come down to us from the ignorant far past, it will not stand examination.

There was a time when work undoubtedly was both a curse and a degradation. When the many labored under the lash that the few might reap, when the toilers got only the toil and the idlers got all the results, when the highest ideals of the human race were a full stomach and fine raiment and the gratification of other crude desires and appetites—then work was justly regarded as degrading drudgery. But not now, hard though laziness and cheap vanity strive to keep alive such fictitious distinctions as are given an air of actuality by phrases like “master and servant,” “employer and employé,” “capital and labor,” “gentleman,” “lady,” et cetera, et cetera. The truth of the dignity of labor, the dishonesty and degradation of every form of parasitism, however gaudily tricked out, appears despite the subtleties of snobism.

The political ideal of a barbarian is to rule others; the political ideal of a highly civilized man is to rule himself and let his fellow-men alone. The industrial ideal of a barbarian is to live in empty-headed and ambitionless idleness upon the labor of others. The industrial ideal of a civilized man is to work, and work incessantly in conditions that permit him to reap the full reward of his efforts and to make those efforts in the direction best suited to his capacities. And he has a deepening scorn of all the tricks by which some men live, taking all and giving nothing. Nor is his scorn the less when those tricks happen to be made “respectable” by law or by custom.

Is it any wonder that a man with the brain of an Æsop or an Epictetus should have revolted against compulsory labor that could much better have been performed by an ox or an ass? On the other hand, is it not amazing that any man with a thinking machine in his skull and vital force flowing along his nerves can be content to lead a life that would bore a grasshopper? The “curse and degradation” theory of work adapts itself to climates. Man began in the tropics, where idleness is least difficult; therefore for a long time absolute idleness was the ideal of this theory. But when man moved up into the colder parts of the earth, where to idle was to be physically miserable, the theory was slightly modified. The curse and the degradation of work were thought to lie in the doing of useful work. To tilt with iron-pointed sticks, to stab and jab and cut, to spend days and weeks chasing little foxes that could not even be eaten if by chance they were caught, to hit little balls with little sticks, to sit all night matching monotonous picture cards—all such “amusements,” the hardest kind of work, work at which the thinking part of any human being might well balk, were regarded as “worthy of a gentleman.” To plough, to sow, to reap, to manufacture something that might be used, to perform any kind of useful labor, mental or manual, was “low” and “menial.”

Toward the middle of the last century, with our growing wealth and the rise of a leisure class through false education, the Old World ideas found their way across the Atlantic. And in every community there began to be at least a few persons who took on the supercilious and contemptuous attitude toward work. Fortunately for the good sense and happiness of the American people, at about that time modern industrial conditions changed the whole system of getting and keeping prosperous.

In the old days, idle and brainless barbarians could hold on to and even add to their possessions—agricultural land. But in the new days of intense energy, of rapidly changing values, of trade, commerce, and competition, of rise in the price of labor and fall in the price of money, property is always growing wings that must be clipped daily and often hourly to keep it from taking flight. It is getting harder and harder to reap where one has not sown, to induce men to work without a proper return, or, after wealth has been acquired, to hold on to it without the use of brains and energy. And so, the old theory is dying out, chiefly for the usual reason for any human advancement—changed conditions compelling men to change their point of view.

The reason the rich men’s sons are going to work is that they, or at least their sagacious fathers, know that if they don’t work, the men who do work will get their wealth away from them. And this reason of necessity is going to bring about a revolution where all the shrieking of the reformers, all the logic of the moral philosophers, all the talk about the dignity of labor and “happiness only in hard work” make no headway worth the measuring. Maxims of good sense and good morals can’t be pounded or preached into poor short-sighted, irrational, shadow-chasing humanity. Nature and the laws of environment do not preach. They quietly but relentlessly compel. And sad wrecks they make of the pretensions and pomposities of the conceited human animal.

It is in vain that aristocracy-worshiping mothers of America dream of an Old World upper class for their sons and daughters. It is in vain that silly sociologists prattle about the necessity and the advantages of a “leisure class.” Modern environment says “Work; work hard! Be a somebody or I will make you a nobody!” And work we must. And presently we shall hear the last of the notions that idleness or useless employment is “noble” and “dignified” and “aristocratic.” And only in mad-houses will be found men and women who continue in their grown-up periods of life the pastimes of childhood—playing with blocks and soldiers and toy tools. What of the old notions of property rights and distribution of wealth will go by the board and what will remain, no one can foresee. Nor does it in the least matter, since we can be certain that no conditions will arise in which the idler will be more comfortable or the worker less comfortable than in the past or at present.

The change in the attitude toward work is coming from both sides of the world. The rich are more and more forced to work. The not-rich are demanding and compelling better opportunities to work. Look at our national life in the broad, and you see all elements concentrating on the democratic platform—Work! Beyond question the “workingman” is discontented. Nor will his discontent decrease. On the contrary, the more he has, the more he’ll want. His appetite will grow with what it feeds on. This Republic was started by just such men, was started for the purpose of creating ever more and more of them. The eagerness for better pay, for better treatment, for better surroundings, whether that eagerness be in the capitalist or in the street-cleaner, is proof that the Republic is still doing business at the old stand in the old way. And the more or less turbulent wrangling over the division of the rewards will never cease. If there were any signs of its ceasing or of its abating, then indeed might we justly despair of Democracy. Content means caste; discontent means Democracy.

Work is democratic, not because all kinds of men engage in it and so make it common, but because of its effect on the individual worker. Every impulse toward Democracy is fostered by it, just as every impulse toward caste is encouraged by leniency toward the idea of the value of a leisure class.

The sooner ambition is roused in every man, woman and child, the sooner they learn that by work alone can their ambitions be gratified, the sooner will an ideal democratic condition evolve. America is ahead of all the great nations in the race toward this ideal Democracy, because there is the nearest approach in America in every walk of life to a condition in which idlers are few and toilers many.

In a previous chapter the efforts of plutocratic philanthropists to relieve a certain part of each community from the “stern and cruel necessity to work” have been noted. But the pauper-making plutocrats and lords and ladies Bountiful are not the only missionaries of idleness and incompetence. Our legislatures, national, state, municipal, are voting large sums of money for free something or other for somebody or other, or for bolstering up some real or reputed neglected or defective class. And leading citizens, themselves toilers at businesses, trade and professions, are, through mistaken sentimentality, urging the legislatures to vote still larger sums for indiscriminate—necessarily indiscriminate—alms.

If Democracy were dependent upon conscious human effort, we should be moving rapidly and far from the old ideas of independence, of self-reliance, of individuality; we should be hastening toward a re-establishment of the aristocratic ideal of “molly-coddling,” of making the citizen a hot-house plant sheltered under government glass from the rude but invigorating forces of nature—but exposed to withering and denuding paternalism. Everybody who did not do for himself—whether because he would not or because he could not, we should not stop to ask—would be provided with education, ideas, food, clothing, shelter, amusements, baths, in short, everything but self-respect and the power to produce self-respecting progeny. And these things would be provided, not by private philanthropy, not by the rich giving of their surplus, but by taxation.

Taxation simply means taking from one part of the community, chiefly from the poor and those of moderate means, and giving to another part, after an army of officials have had their “rake-off” in salaries and perquisites. Taxation, therefore, means levying upon those who have little to spare; it means crippling those who are trying to fight the hard battle of life.

There is nothing democratic, nothing economically sound, in these alluring schemes for making men sleek and comfortable and wise by public bounty. They result in coddling incompetents, and in breaking down those who are now just able to get along and who need only the push of additional taxation to send them fairly over the precipice from self-reliance to dependence.

A wise man once said: “Most legislation consists of A and B getting together and deciding what C shall do for D.” We mustn’t forget C. He pays the bills. And his name is “the people.”

The work that saves is the work of a man, by himself, for himself, work chosen by him, mastered by him, work by which he is sometimes mastered. He must stand or fall on the results of his efforts. This is no programme for the timid or the halting, but it is the programme for all grades of intelligence and opportunity, each doing for himself just as well as he possibly can, under his circumstances.

Work—not as a means to leisure, but as in itself the aim and end. No thought of “retiring.” No thought of social distractions that breed only boredom, or of useless activities that dissipate manhood and womanhood. The main thought—work. Work is the ideal of the Republic. The central point in the Old World theory which our plutocracy would make our theory of life is that a man or woman ought to aspire not to be a worker, but a person of leisure, to become not a doer of useful things, but a doer of useless things. The central point of the democratic theory of life is just the reverse. It is the worker exalted, and his work also. Europe clings to precedent; America insists upon judgment. Europe tends to act as “father and grandfather did”; America has acted and should tend to act as the new situation, ever changing, may require at any given moment.

Europe, bound by precedents, by false ideals, by traditions of class distinctions and the nobility of idleness, simply cannot compete with us. For the cause of Democracy, for the uplifting of the common man, for the increase in the application of human energy to human needs, America’s competition with Europe is more helpful than centuries of theorizing and preaching and political maneuvering. The Great Republic is presenting to Europe the stern alternative: Democracy or Decay.

CHAPTER XV
OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD

The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all of them with no “capital”—except their muscles and the potentialities of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized. But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek and Syrian and Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices. They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the facts plead—the facts, as distinguished from prejudices.

What is our so-called foreign-population problem?

According to the latest census there were in the United States, of our 76,300,000 population, no less than 26,200,000 persons of foreign birth or parentage. Of these, ten and a half millions were born abroad, while 11,000,000 more were born in this country of parents who were foreign-born. Since 1880 and up to 1901 no less than 18,000,000 foreigners have come to us. That is to say, counting in arrivals and births since the taking of our latest census, and making due mortality allowance, we have to-day a population more than one-fourth of which was born abroad or is of foreign parentage.

The anti-immigration crusade based upon these figures insists that the foreigners come too fast for Americanism to digest and assimilate them, that they will undermine and destroy free institutions. Also, there is the cry that these recent comers are of peoples less desirable than those that used to send their millions to us. The newcomers are impossible in point of numbers, undesirable in point of quality.

As to numbers—Our first, and last previous, great flood of immigration was between 1840 and 1861. In those twenty years about 13,000,000 immigrants came. Our population in 1840 was 17,000,000. Thus, the immigration was about 80 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901, the immigration was about 18,000,000. Our population in 1880 was 50,000,000. Thus, the immigration was not much above 35 per cent. Clearly, the present “horde” is numerically not imposing or alarming in comparison with the foreign invasion of half a century ago. Our country is still sparsely inhabited; one-third of its area is still absolutely undeveloped. If half a century ago, with the then comparatively limited and crude means of transforming the foreigner into the American, thirteen million foreigners did not “swamp” seventeen million Americans, how can the present lesser immigration seriously or permanently hinder the alert, democratically militant America of to-day?

Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and 1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000—502,000. The rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to 2,050,000—850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States. The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it was during the preceding great immigration. Further, the charitable and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not from peoples given to excess in drink—and drunkenness is the chief cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism.

Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics.

“But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality? Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum of Ireland and Germany.” They were “incapable of receiving American ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!

But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective, a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are poor—and poor they are—then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard; and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home, toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the best possible Americans.

From poverty and experience of oppression comes the most militant Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples that built the splendid civilization of the past—the civilization around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth.

We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here:

In the Southern States, practically all the white males able to bear arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty years of age.

That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few; it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened by all kinds of diseases.

What is the connection between these facts and immigration? Look at the South, which sent all its manhood to camp and march and battle; at the South, into which almost no immigration has gone to make good the enormous losses. The trouble with the South to-day is not the destruction or abolition of property, not the failure of natural resources, but the depletion, the decay, the destruction of so large a part of the splendid stock that made the South great in ante-bellum days. Despite its abounding natural resources, despite the valiant efforts it has made and is making, the South advances slowly and with difficulty. And while the North had to make no such complete sacrifice to war, still even there, in the few places to which foreign immigration has not penetrated, the effects of the impairment of the sources of the best manhood are plainly visible. Not infrequently you find a Northern town with all the natural opportunities to progress, yet with retrogression and decay eating it away. What’s the matter? The war; the Civil War. The best young men, the most vigorous, the most enterprising, the most ambitious, went to the war. Many of them came back; but they had left at the war their best—their health, their energy. And the present generation shows it, suffers for it.

It is indeed inspiring to see young men eager to die gloriously for their country. We also need young men eager to live gloriously for their country. And war, the arch-enemy of progress, the great trickster of man through his finest instincts, how many of those who would have lived most gloriously for their country has it cost us!

Do we not owe to the “hordes” from Europe, to immigration, the good fortune that our nation has pushed on apparently almost unaffected in its manhood by the great calamity of ’61-’64? Is it unwarranted to suggest that but for these inpourings of vigor and vitality, the losses in that frightful catastrophe might have all but cost us our national greatness, would certainly have set us back several generations?

As to the political effect of immigration: Among our cities the two most conspicuous examples of misgovernment are New York and Philadelphia. In each the dominant political machine is scandalously corrupt. But it is far more audacious, far more cynically and openly contemptuous of public opinion in Philadelphia than in New York. Philadelphia is an “American” city; New York is a “foreign” city. In Philadelphia the corruption seems almost hopeless; in New York the element to which every movement for betterment looks—not in vain—is the “foreign” element. The weakness of Tammany’s control over the masses of “German-Americans” and “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish Russian-Americans” is the chief reason why it does not feel easy and secure in the enjoyment of plunder. Cities where the “foreign vote” is preponderant may be corrupt; but so also are cities where the native American rules undisputed. Manifestly, the causes of political corruption are deeper than immigration, are not aggravated by it. And since our most hopeful States politically are for the most part those into which immigration from abroad has been pouring in a vast and steady stream for fifteen years, is there not sufficient ground for the confident assertion that the newcomer with his untainted passion for Democracy and his new-born hope of rising in the world is one of our tremendous political assets?

As to the industrial effect. The overwhelming mass are farmers or unskilled laborers. But the wages of unskilled labor cannot be much depressed. In all ages and in all countries the unskilled laborer has got just about enough to keep him alive—never much more, often a little less. In America, as a whole, the condition of unskilled labor to-day is better than it ever has been. The fact that we have so much rough work to do in developing our vast raw resources makes America the best market for unskilled labor the world has ever seen; and it will be many generations before that rough work is completed, so inadequate is our supply of unskilled labor in proportion to the demand. In the trades the competition of the immigrant has not lowered wages. There again we have more work to do than there are workers. The forces that have operated unfavorably upon wages are notoriously not forces of competition among wage-earners, but forces tending to abolish competition among employers for the services of the skilled laborer. And in combating these forces, is the immigrant a help or a hindrance? Does his vote go for tyranny or for freedom?

The disposition of prosperity to look down on poverty, to drift out of brotherly sympathy with it, to misunderstand it, is as old as property rights. The disposition of the so-called educated to look down on the less educated, to mistake knowledge for intellect, absurdly to exaggerate the practical and even the æsthetic value of “polite learning,” to under-estimate the all-round importance of that real education which is got only in the school of rude experience—this supercilious disposition is as old as human vanity. It insinuates itself into the sanest characters; it makes fools and incompetents and snobs of many promising young men. And these two errors—the one, through prosperity; the other, through false education—are responsible for the failure of such a large section of our “elegantly articulate” to appreciate that we are to-day getting from abroad the best in brain and in vitality that we have ever got.

What differentiates the immigrant from those he left behind him? Why, he had the enterprise, the courage to protest against the slavery in which militarism and despotism were enwrapping all. He left; he made the long and arduous journey into this remote and unknown land. He did not give up when conditions became too hard, did not sink into serfdom; he boldly made a hazard of new fortunes.

Away back in the centuries, Asia’s most vigorous fled from her into Europe—and Asia sank into the slough of despotism and Europe became great and strong, advancing in all the arts. Now-a-days—to-day no less than when Salem and Jamestown and New Amsterdam and New Orleans were founding—Europe is causing her best to fly to us. Her best, indeed! We must be American enough, democratic enough, to disregard the snob standards of our weak wanderers off after European caste and culture; we must look at men in the true American fashion—must look at men as men.

From the common people our Democracy—like all Democracy—sprang; by the common people is it nourished; by the common people will it prevail. And these newcomers are of the common people, the custodians of the highest ideals that irradiate the human imagination. Unimportant indeed is the traffic of individuals and ideas that goes first-class between America and Europe, in the comparison with the traffic that goes steerage.

CHAPTER XVI
THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN

The American woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in the imaginations of students of our life as ignorant of politics, interested only in her own sovereignty over the American man, or, rather, over his pocketbook, a snob and a climber and a worshiper of European aristocratic institutions; a poor housekeeper and a reluctant mother, and a very vampire for luxury and show, she hides her superficiality and cold-heartedness under a mask that is fair and fascinating. She is a born caste-worshiper, an instinctive hater of Democracy.

What truth, if any, is there in these hardy criticisms?

We have noted how, under the leadership and inspiration of the capital of plutocracy, New York, every city in the country is, with true American rapidity, developing its individual fashionable society. It is directed by the wives and daughters of rich men; it is, as we have seen, devoted chiefly to spending time and money in unproductive and more or less frivolous forms of self-amusement. The character of this “set” varies slightly for each locality—but only slightly. In the West the wealth-worship is franker; in the East more hypocritical, more beslimed and bemessed with cant about birth and culture. But whether Mammon is naked and unashamed or is draped and decorated, he is still Mammon. The monotonous sameness of the people comprising each division of the set, the sameness of their opportunities and aims, the world-neighborliness which railways and telegraph and printing press have brought about, prevent any notable differences. To dress, to talk, to eat, to drive, to entertain, to bring up one’s children, all in accord with the standards of “good form” established by the aristocratic societies of Europe; to spend each day in pleasures that permit one to shift most of the labor and all the thinking and providing to hirelings of divers degrees, from lawyers and industrial managers to secretaries, housekeepers, butlers, valets and maids; to live worthlessly without useful work—these are the aims, East, West, and South. And in rapidly increasing measure the aims are accomplished.

Universal freedom, universal opportunity, all but universal toil, have indeed very suddenly brought vast riches to America, vast wealth to a few. This sudden wealth, coming to a people whose characteristics are energy, restlessness and lightning-like adaptability, has all in a day relieved a relatively small but, in another aspect, very numerous and most influential part of each large community from the necessity to labor. Many, a great many, of these continue to strive to cherish the ideals of a life of useful labor, continue to strive to set a worthy example to their children and to their fellow-citizens—that is, to remain sane and American. But a great many others have eagerly adopted those alien ideals of the aristocracy of idleness and the vulgarity of toil which appeal so strongly to the vanity and other ancient weaknesses of the human animal the world over.

For this state of affairs women, imperfectly educated, wrongly, sillily educated, in fact, practically uneducated, are in the main responsible. Our women, like our men, inherit the American energy and restlessness. Where circumstances compel, they work in the home, the shop, the factory, the office, in the fine American way. But where circumstances do not compel they seek other outlets for their restless energy. And thus we find rich wives and daughters organizing elaborate establishments and fashionable sets and international circuits, and devoting themselves to erecting the life of frivolity and show into a career that will at once fill their idle hours, gratify their vanity, and give them the sense of doing something ambitious, of “getting on in the world.”

Among a people who have always yielded a commanding position to women, the power of this new American woman—attractive in dress and in surroundings, so often fascinating in personality, usually clever and so plausible that she deceives no one more completely than herself—could not but be enormous. Is it strange that she weakens the hold of the old ideals upon her husband and upon the men who are drawn to her attractive house? Is it strange that they persuade their consciences to let them neglect to-day’s duties while they help her amuse them and herself? Is it strange that she has sons and daughters devoted to her ideals? Is it strange that she gathers about her more and more backsliders from the democratic conception of life?

Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people. And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,” as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.

Such is the anti-democratic woman. But over against her set the American woman. The plutocratic American man, being gaudy and conspicuous, distracts attention from the democratic American man, who outnumbers and outvotes and out-influences him into insignificance, except as an awful warning against flying in the face of the world’s democratic destiny. The plutocratic American woman is even more conspicuous than the plutocratic American man. But contrast her with the rest of the women, especially with the women who go forth from the homes to work. Great as is the influence against Democracy exerted by the women of the leisure class, it is weak in comparison with that exerted for Democracy by the professional and business women of the United States.

Ten years ago about one-fifth of all the wage and salary earners in the United States were women and girls. When these figures were published there was a great outcry of wonder and alarm—wonder at the changed conditions, alarm lest those changed conditions might be permanent and the old-fashioned woman of the fireside and the stoveside and the cradleside might be passing away. To-day about one-third of all the women in the United States not on farms earn their own living outside their own homes, and these women constitute more than one-fourth of all the persons in the United States engaged in gainful occupations other than agriculture.

It is evident that the changed conditions are not passing, but permanent; that the “new woman” is the woman of the future. Yet we still hear the old order talked of as if it were not a departing order, and the new order criticised as if it were abnormal, a fad of a few “freak” women.

Obviously, this change is most intimately associated with Democracy. Democracy, work, women; women, work, Democracy. Did any of those ancient republics we hear so much about, those whose decline and fall Europe and our own pessimists say we must inevitably imitate, ever number among its inhabitants a company of women wage and salary earners such as has been so swiftly evolved in democratic, work-compelling, work-exalting America?

In face of this army of women who work outside the home, the theory still is that man bears the brunt of the battle for food, clothing and shelter, while woman is sheltered and comparatively at her ease. This theory never was sound. It never would have been accepted had writers and thinkers kept clearly before their minds the fact that the human race does not consist of a luxuriously comfortable class, but of vast masses of laborious millions. From time immemorial, among the masses of the people everywhere, the men and the women have worked equally for the support of the family. But latterly, under the pressure of modern conditions, which are forcing all into the general service of society, the women have been drawn from the obscure toil of occupations within and around the household; and also into the ranks of women toilers have gone hundreds of thousands of women from the classes which, until recently, did try to keep their women at home. Is it illogical to say that we may presently see practically all the capable members of our society, regardless of sex, self-supporting? And in such circumstances, would not the family relations, the relations of mother to father, and both to children, necessarily undergo a radical transformation?

To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and gunsmiths, women street-car drivers and conductors, women blacksmiths and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors—to take only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women. In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors, musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations, with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music, were once exclusively in the hands of men.

The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized every part of modern society—the amazing discoveries of science, creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national administration.

War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war. Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands, not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of the sun, comes Democracy.

This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was—perhaps through its freedom from war and war alarms—eagerest in seizing upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two sexes, has been most rapid.

Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were really all toilers—until recently almost all toilers at occupations close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era—the era of steam and electricity—developed with us, our women and our men naturally remained side by side.

Our government was founded in war. Its founders assumed, from the history of all other nations, that offense and defense were to be its main functions. And the barbaric theory is still ignorantly or carelessly assented to. This explains the lagging of the political rights of women behind their industrial and civil rights—or, rather, industrial and civil necessities; for no right has ever been, or probably ever will be, recognized until recognition becomes a necessity. The development with us of a class of women who are housekeepers only and are most of the time idle or half idle, is foreign to the spirit of our democratic era. That development cannot, therefore, long survive, any more than an equatorial plant can long survive in our zone. The new departures are in harmony with Democracy; they mean increased efficiency and usefulness of the human race; they must persist and expand and prevail.

To three causes we owe the American woman of the class that only pretends to contribute, or at best half-heartedly contributes, toward the support of our social system:

First, to the survival of the Old World, old era ideas of “woman’s sphere,” of the coarsening effect of labor upon her “finer nature,” of the “aristocratic flavor” and “high breeding” of uselessness and idleness.

Second, to the simpler tastes of our ancestors, and the comparative ease with which at an early period in our national life the labor of the men in the family could provide money enough to satisfy those tastes.

Third, to the very tardy development of the domestic laborers and providers that now relieve woman of the confining cares of household and nursery.

As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up—not only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in common sense—the women who insist most strenuously that child-bearing and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class, leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon the two ideas—work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent.

The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic forces. The old order, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned, will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved?

Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expand their already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in the world.

The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine.

It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by men, will go on apace. We may not like it; but we can no more stop it than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the use of steam and electricity.

The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the “exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do, in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste. And eventually they will be following her example. As the number of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases, the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will increase.

And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not down to, but up to a place beside the woman wage-earner, because they are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.

There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress, the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them democratic—all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminine is as eternal and immutable as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must, and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned woman—the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites and had to pander to them.

The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man. This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half her energy to another occupation, that of catching a husband? The delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon for another that is wholly different?

But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow twaddle about “woman and the home”—as if for centuries the mothers of the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer” or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives.

Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs, as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class, and looking at all over eight millions, you find that the American woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for all—freedom, intelligence, the joy of work.

CHAPTER XVII
AS TO SUCCESS

It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy. Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional monarchy and content—so runs the argument.

If this were true, we as Americans would say, “Happiness bought at the price of self-respect is far too dear. Heaven itself would be too dear at that price. And, however it may be with some Europeans, to an American the admission that he was not the equal of any man would be a degradation like that of the slave.” But it is not true that we are an unhappy people. Not to be sunk in a bucolic stupor like the peasants of Europe does not mean unhappiness. To know when one is uncomfortable, to think how to become less uncomfortable, to be alive, alert, aspiring, to love work as other people love play, to love progress as other people love stagnation—that does not mean unhappiness. There are other standards of happiness than the bucolic or than the self-complacence of the constricted devotees of caste. Indeed, we in America continue to doubt whether those states of mind are truly happy. Content may or may not mean happiness. It may be the calm, numb resignation of despair. It may be the fat, swine-like stupor of an established aristocracy. We have our own ideas of happiness—and it is interesting to note that these restless, forever unsatisfied longings of ours tend to long life.

We are not unhappy; but neither are we happy, nor likely to become so, until our corner of the world, at least, is in far better order than it is at present or likely to be soon.

There are two kinds of optimism. There is the optimism of retreat—the kind our critics set up as the harbinger of happiness. Our plutocrats preach this optimism, and those of our politicians who are fattening on the honors, salaries and spoils of office. “We are a great people,” they say. “Look at our national wealth. Look at our per capita circulation of money. Look at the totals of our production of everything for man and beast. Let us rejoice and do nothing to disturb our national prosperity. Let us stop thinking—or, rather, let the masses of the people give the plutocrats and the politicians in power a free hand to do the thinking and acting for the nation. Enough of this vulgar and irritating discontent! Enough of the coarse, low talk about wealth! Let us discuss art and literature and glory and grandeur!”

All this with the most serious face in the world. All this with perfect honesty and a heart full of patriotism!

The answer of the American people is cruel. “Rubbish!” they say. They are not optimists of retreat—for what but retreat is a progress that advances a class at the expense of the mass?

Theirs is the optimism of advance—the advance of all. “We are indeed great,” they reply to the optimists of retreat. “Let us be greater. What Democracy we have had has carried us far. Let us have more Democracy. The masses are better off than they used to be, thanks to the sweeping away of some of the obstacles of class and caste. Let us sweep away the rest of those obstacles. What we have is good. It is the promise of better. Let us see that that promise is redeemed!”

Happiness—in the customary, narrow sense—the sense put into the word by the long past with its reign of class and caste—that happiness we have not. But the joy of life—the vigorous, bounding hope that beats in the heart and throbs in the veins of the strong man growing in strength—that we have in ever fuller measure. Such happiness never has been in the past? Such happiness cannot be in a world of such abysmal natural inequalities? We deny it. We are here not to live by the past, by precedent, but to make a mockery of past and precedent. We are the children of Democracy, not the wards of aristocracy. We propose a wholly new world—and we are putting our proposals into effect. We have done well, though we have barely begun. We shall do better. Another century or so! We envy our grandchildren, not our grandfathers.

If happiness of the kind our ancestors of the world’s aristocratic days dreamed had been the objective of the human race, man would have retained his hairy coat, his taste for raw meat, his pleasure in cave-dwelling. Every once in awhile we see in America people whose object is happiness. Sooner or later they arrive at the bottom. Sometimes they are happy there. But, happy or not, they are not to be envied or imitated. The dominant note of the real slums is happiness. Don’t be deceived by the squalor and rags into thinking it misery. The unhappy slum-dwellers do not remain, but restlessly and resolutely fight against the bestial stupor, fight their way back to the light and the joy of life.

The joy of life is the exaltation that comes through a sense of a life lived to the very limit of its possibilities; a life of self-development, self-expansion, self-devotion to the emancipation of man. Whoever you are, this joy of life can be yours. Money has nothing to do with it, either in aiding or retarding. Money cannot buy the essentials—health and love. It cannot avert the essential evils—illness, bereavement. The world keeps finding this out from generation to generation—and forgetting as soon as it rediscovers. Solomon mentioned the matter many centuries ago, when he wrote:

“I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees; I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces;....

“Then I looked on all these works that my hands had wrought and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”

Our rich men are largely responsible for the misconception that the American people have no ideal higher than that of money-making. The following remarks once made by a rich philanthropist are interesting because they are typical of the thought of a great number of persons who speak in public to-day:

“In contributing to the education of the suffrage the rich are but building for their own protection. If they neglect so to build, barbarism, anarchy, plunder will be the inevitable result. If the spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger, then the Twentieth Century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in history.”

Is all this true? Does the future of civilization depend upon the generosity of rich men? If the rich men do not awaken as a class and give more largely to the uplifting of their fellow-men, shall we have a carnival of barbarism, anarchy and plunder?

The speaker and his kind of social students mean well. They are right in arousing the rich to a deeper sense of duty to mankind. But they think so intently upon their pet theory that they lose their point of view. They exaggerate to hysteria the importance of the rich. They are infected with the dollar-worshiping craze which they profess to abhor. They vastly over-estimate concentrated wealth as a factor in human progress. They erect money into a powerful deity, just as do all other worshipers of the dollar. The difference is that they wish to make it a benevolent deity.

It is an excellent thing that the rich should be aroused. A rich man who does nothing for his brother-man is a contemptible fellow—almost as contemptible as a poor man who does nothing for his brother-man. The selfish rich man can plead in extenuation that temptations, beyond human nature’s power to combat, have narrowed and chilled and withered him. But, save ignorance, what excuse has the poor man for selfishness? However, if by chance the selfish rich man become aroused and give—give manlily, democratically—of his riches, he must not be excited about the importance to others of what he has done. Its main importance is purely personal. He is a better man for doing it and has a stronger title to self-respect. But if he had not done it, the poor, old, stupid, blundering human race would have managed to stagger along somehow.

By all means let the rich give. For their own self-respect, for their own self-satisfaction, they ought to give largely and intelligently. Let the honest rich give in sympathy—let the dishonest give in humility. But we must remember that all such gifts put together are as a mere drop in the ocean so far as the effect upon civilization is concerned.

We have not reached our present estate through the generosity of any class of men. And we shall not advance to our destined higher estate because of the generosity and benevolence of any class. The benevolence of the rich may earn for them an honorable place in the procession of humanity ever toiling upward, and may enable laggards or the too heavily handicapped to keep in line. But this procession, that has marched on over kings and emperors, over tyrants and oppressors and false teachers, that has met and swept away army after army of embattled wrong, is not to be perceptibly retarded or accelerated by the errors or the virtues of a class of men who are merely rich.

Rich men did not implant in the human heart the all but universal passion for progress. Rich men did not put into the human skull the marvelous mechanism of the human mind. Rich men did not endow that mind with the body to carry out its will. Wealth has not made the great pictures or paintings, has not written the great books nor achieved the great discoveries, nor erected the great institutions, nor evolved any of the glories of the emancipation of man, social, political, industrial, intellectual. All these we owe to men in whom the wealth-getting instinct was at most a shriveled rudiment. Wealth did not build this Republic in its present majesty; Pliny the younger said—and said truly—that wealth had ruined Rome. Concentrated wealth, breeder of parasitism and patronage, has shriveled and rotted—always, everywhere. If history had not been written by snobs and persons tainted with aristocratic error, this fact would be as clear as print could make it.

The real wealth, the real riches of humanity are these capable minds and capable bodies, the creators of intelligent, progress-producing thought and action.

The value of civilization, of an orderly social system, is great to, and is keenly felt by, the rich. But that value is just as great to, just as keenly felt by, the masses. Are they not wholly dependent upon it for well-being, just as are the rich—no more, no less?

And the work of preparing the oncoming generation for the preservation and improvement of the social structure is done in each generation not by the rich, not by generosity and benevolence, but by the masses themselves in a myriad of homes, in a myriad of schoolhouses, in the hourly personal and helpful intercourse of a myriad intelligent, aspiring men, women and children. It is not concentrated wealth that places the resources of the world at the disposal of the masses. It is the intelligence of the masses, demanding those resources, that enables concentrated wealth to gain its too often hideously unjust demands. Concentrated wealth may to a limited extent promote progress; but that is overbalanced by the fact that concentrated wealth still more heavily penalizes progress.

If civilization, freedom, love of order, were dependent for their existence or spread in any large degree upon the rich philanthropist and his fellow-millionaires, cataclysm would be a mild word for what would be about to befall us.

As for the “spirit of commercialism and greed,” what reason is there to suppose it stronger now than in the past? Because the wealth-producing capacity of the masses has enormously increased, because the opportunities for earning comfort have infinitely multiplied, because millions are striving for prosperity now where the few once monopolized it all—are these reasons for accusing us to-day of being greedy and growing greedier?

Was there ever a time or a place in history where mere money was so powerless and brains so mighty as the present day in the American Republic? Was there ever a time or place where the individual man was at once so powerful to protect his own rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and so powerless to snatch away those rights from others?

The conscientious rich man does well to try to whip his fellow-millionaires into line with the procession. But he need not torment his declining years with horrid visions of coming anarchy if these rich men do not stop groveling and grasping and begin to entertain worthy ambitions. Let the rich do their part; but let every man, rich or poor, high or humble, remember that his first duty is to see that he is doing his own part.

One loses patience with the constant precedence given the idea that riches alone mean success. Why is it that the only men who are eagerly interviewed and importuned to write articles on “the secret of success” are multi-millionaires?

Are there no successful men but multi-millionaires? There are not more than five thousand of them in the country. Carlyle once described England as “inhabited by thirty millions, mostly fools.” And our own country, if none has succeeded in it but the multi-millionaires, may be described as inhabited by “eighty millions, mostly failures.”

Success is a glittering word, capable of many meanings. A man is not necessarily a failure because he has not made money—a million dollars or a hundred. Some very successful men have never tried to make money. They preferred to make something, and if they achieved their desires they succeeded—from their own viewpoint, at least.

Agassiz would not accept five thousand dollars a night to lecture. “I have no time to make money,” he said. Scientific inquiry and discovery were the objects of his life, and he succeeded in his pursuit of them. Wellington, after conquering Mysore, was proffered a gift of five hundred thousand dollars by the corrupt East Indian Company. He refused to touch it. Piling up “big money” was not his idea of success, either.

When John Hancock, one of the signers of our great Declaration, was sitting in the Continental Congress a letter was read from Washington suggesting the destruction of Boston by bombardment. Hancock was one of Boston’s largest property owners, but he instantly said: “All my property is in Boston; but if the expulsion of the British from it require that Boston be burnt to ashes, issue the order immediately.” There was another man who didn’t believe that “success” was only another name for millions.

Charles Sumner refused to lecture at any price. “My time belongs to Massachusetts and the nation,” he said. Big money was not his idol. Thomas Jefferson died insolvent. Was he therefore a failure? Abraham Lincoln died a poor man. Was he also a failure? Grant died so poor that his opinion on “how to succeed” would have been of no value to the money-mad, even if he had left it.

Finally, can you imagine any of the great real benefactors of mankind plotting to make the service they rendered a heavy tax upon posterity for maintaining their descendants in foolish idleness and luxury?

Sooner or later there will be a reaction from this search for “the secret of success” among the trust kings and the sudden-rich heroes of the stock ticker. “I know of no great men,” says Voltaire, “except those who have rendered great service to the human race.” Judged by that true standard, the mere makers of “big money” cannot tell our young men the “secret of success.” They do not know it themselves.

The money success is blatant and strong. It flaunts itself and tries to absorb all attention. But it ought not to deceive any but the superficial observers of the American people. Our ideals still centre in the affections, not in the appetites. To be free, to love, to think, to grow—the joy of life. That sums up America. Gilt may for the moment reign; but gilt does not rule.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big, slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the burdens of a mighty people. The big hands, the big feet, the great, stooped shoulders tell the same story of commonness and strength.

Then you look at the face. You find it difficult to keep your hat upon your head.

What a countenance! How homely, yet how beautiful; how stern, yet how gentle; how inflexible, yet how infinitely merciful; how powerful, yet how tender; how common, yet how sublime!

Search the world through and you will find no greater statue than this—the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by St. Gaudens. It is Lincoln; but it is also a great deal more. It is the glorification of the Common Man—the apotheosis of Democracy.

As you look at that face and that figure you feel the history of the human race, the long, the bloody, the agonized struggle of the masses of mankind for freedom and light. You see the whole history of your own country, founded by common men for the common people, founded upon freedom and equality and justice.

Here is no vain haughtiness, no arrogance, no supercilious looking down, no cringing looking upward, nothing that suggests class or rank or aristocracy. Here is Democracy, the Common Man exalted in the dignity of his own rights, in the splendor of the recognition of the equal rights of all others; the Common Man, free and enlightened, strong and just.

The statue is in the attitude of preparation to speak. What is that brain formulating for those lips to utter?

The expression of brow and eyes and lips leaves no doubt. It is some thought of freedom and justice, some one of those many mighty democratic thoughts which will echo forever in the minds and hearts of men.

Let us recall three of those thoughts:

“The authors of the Declaration of Independence meant it to be a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”

“That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

“I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor.”

These were the ideas that found this country a few ragged settlements trembling between a hostile sea and a hostile wilderness and built it up to its present estate of democratic grandeur. Not tyranny, not murder disguised as war, not robbery disguised as “benevolent guidance,” not any of the false and foolish ideas of imperialism and aristocracy. But ideas of peace, of equal rights for all, of self-government.

Our era, conscious of the mighty works that can be wrought, conscious that we are all under sentence of speedy death, eagerly seeks out the young man, the obscure man. It has need of all powers and all talents, especially of the talents for creating, organizing, directing. Instead of it being true that a good man doesn’t have a chance any more, the reverse is true—inferior men have chances greatly beyond their powers, and immature men are forced into important commands, and discredited and ruined, so impatient is the pressure for men to do the world’s important work. This is the day of the man who wants a chance.

It is also a day in which we hear a great deal about the “unruly class.” This phrase is employed to designate some vague element in the masses of the people that is naturally turbulent and ever looking about for an excuse to “rise” and “burn, slay, kill.”

You may search through history page by page, line by line, and you will find no trace of the doings of this alleged “unruly class.” The more you read the more you will be struck by the universal and most tenacious love of quiet and order in the masses of mankind. You will see them robbed, oppressed, murdered wholesale upon mere caprice, the victims of all manner of misery. Your cheeks will burn and your blood run hot as you read. And you will note with wonder that they endured with seemingly limitless patience until they were eating grass by the wayside. Then, once in a while, but only once in a while, they “rose.” All the machinery of law and order was in the hands of the oppressors, so they were compelled to resort to violence. But even then they established new machinery or patched up the old as quickly as possible.

Every society that has been overturned from, within has been overturned by misrule; never by the unruly.

No; the real “unruly classes” are these “respectabilities” with the “pulls,” and these governmental officers who are “pulled”;—they violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation; they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people; they misuse the machinery of justice.

Turn to your history again. You find that every once in a while the dominant element has begun to talk about the “unruly class,” to express fear of “risings,” of mob violence. And in every instance you find that the real reason for this denunciation and dread was that the dominant element had begun to be acutely conscious of its own misdeeds. It feared that its own weapons of injustice would be turned against itself by outraged justice. It feared that its punishment would be in proportion to its crimes.

Gladstone said that the Nineteenth century was summed up in the phrase, “Unhand me!” Its science struck off the shackles of ignorance upon the intellect—shackles of error, of false reverence, of superstitions about the causes of the inequalities of men. Thus, the Nineteenth century made it possible for this to be the Age of the Common Man. Not to states, not to institutions, not to class-made law, not to castes and orders and rank belongs the Twentieth century. It belongs to the Common Man—to you. You with your stout heart and your willing and capable hands. You with your active, intelligent brain, impatient of traditional nonsense, however poetically or plausibly englamoured. You with your enlightened sense of the equal rights of all men. You with your passionate resolve scientifically to correct the stupid and cruel inequalities of opportunity, that are as intolerable in an era of science as a cannibal feast in the temple of the Most High.

What is the watchword of this new day? From lip to lip, from land to land, from race to race, flies the “password eternal”—Democracy.

How the Nineteenth century did belie all the prophecies of pessimism! And how the Twentieth century will belie all the prophecies of its pessimists!

To realize this you must penetrate the dust and noise and clamor that are the surface of things. You must discard prejudice and that narrowness which makes you exaggerate the importance of the things immediately at hand—the things that are mere details of the great pattern which time is weaving in the loom of history—details incomprehensible unless you look at the pattern as a whole. Disregard tradition and egotism; free yourself of the small silliness that leads you to confuse intelligence with etiquette and clothes, with formal education which may or may not affect the intellect. Look deep into the realities and see there the lines of the Common Man—the toiler at the desk and bench and lever and plow, his mind bent upon his work, his work the improvement of his own condition and the handing down of the heritage of life richer and better in every way than he received it.

Through the ages this Common Man has been building like the coral insect—silently, secretly, steadily, strongly. History has little to say about him or his work, and that little misleading; the historians have been unable to get away from courts and battlefields and the legislation halls where fierce but futile and evanescent class struggles rage. But the real story of the past of the human race as an interpreter and prophet of the future is the story of the building of the coral continent founded broadly and deeply upon freedom and justice, upon Intelligence and Democracy. And now at last this continent of enduring civilization begins to emerge not here and there, not merely above the ebbtides of ignorance and tyranny, but everywhere and for all time.

Let us read the past aright. Its departed civilizations are not a gloomy warning, but a bright promise. If limited intelligence in a small class produced such gleams of glory in the black sky of history, what a day must be now dawning!

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.

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Table of Contents

- THE REIGN OF GILT
- TABLE OF CONTENTS
- CHAPTER I WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED
- CHAPTER II THE MANIA FOR GILT
- CHAPTER III PLUTOCRACY AT HOME
- CHAPTER IV YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS
- CHAPTER V CASTE-COMPELLERS
- CHAPTER VI PAUPER-MAKING
- CHAPTER VII THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE
- CHAPTER VIII AND EUROPE LAUGHS
- CHAPTER IX “WE, THE PEOPLE”
- CHAPTER X THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY
- CHAPTER XI DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO
- CHAPTER XII A NATION OF DREAMERS
- CHAPTER XIII NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE
- CHAPTER XIV THE INEVITABLE IDEAL
- CHAPTER XV OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD
- CHAPTER XVI THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN
- CHAPTER XVII AS TO SUCCESS

- CHAPTER XVIII THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE