Part 5
“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left wholly wanting. Little is done by the State. All is left to the initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and successful combinations to override the public interest. All such corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears almost a return to savagery. The defenselessness of individual liberty against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies, nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members in the legislative bodies――pocket Assemblymen, pocket Representatives, pocket Senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless greed on one side, and lawless brutality on the other――the outlook frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or embittering these antagonisms――still more, on the fortune of the people in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get dollars is the one end of life――it depends whether the future of the United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster. It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as a modern business condition, the curious result will follow that all power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the State took absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big corporations, each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as dependent upon it as if the Government had assumed complete charge of the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for the Government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness in the business world are either insincere, or blind to the facts, when they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism; save in a very few able and powerful men, who tend to become dictators in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the State to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much as it would be crushed out by State control. The very reason why we object to State ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the Nation as an antidote to the movement for State Socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement towards State Socialism.
There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially the big corporations, in the industrial world, in the interest of our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and therefore it must be administered by executive officers, and not by lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done, the agitation to increase out of all measure the share of the Government in this work will receive an enormous impetus. The movement for Government control of the great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty. On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge irresponsible corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of Government agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the streets who wishes liberty from police interference.
But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to learn, and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots;” and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other. That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children and those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom it is his duty to care, food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education, a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements, and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit them in their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has reached this point, which of course will vary greatly under different conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically right, indeed I am tempted to say it is emphatically the first duty of each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously phrased it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first duty to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great deal; and after the living has been earned, getting dollars should come far behind many other duties.
Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in this country where assault is made not upon evil wherever found, but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class. The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn, or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either profligacy, or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance. This country cannot afford to let its conscience grow warped and twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions. We must draw the line not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.
Give Me Neither Poverty Nor Riches
In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those who preach and practice a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches. Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is regulated in the interest of the whole community.
The movement which has become so strong during the past few years to secure on behalf of the Nation both an adequate supervision of and an effective taxation of vast fortunes, so far as their business use is concerned, is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent, restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and forceful men who desire to reform matters, from a legitimate object, into the channel of bitter and destructive agitation. The reader of Prince Kropotkin’s Memoirs must be struck by the damage wrought to Russia by the unwise opponents of all reform, who, by opposing every sensible movement for betterment, turned the energies of the young men who under happier conditions would have worked for rational betterment into the channels of a useless and destructive revolutionary movement.
The multimillionaire is not _per se_ a healthy development in this country. If his fortune rests on a basis of wrong-doing, he is a far more dangerous criminal than any of the ordinary types of criminals can possibly be. If his fortune is the result of great service rendered, well and good; he deserves respect and reward for such service――although we must remember to pay our homage to the service itself, and not to the fortune which is the mere reward of the service; but when his fortune is passed on to some one else, who has not rendered the service, then the Nation should impose a heavily graded progressive inheritance tax, a singularly wise and unobjectionable kind of tax. It would be a particularly good thing if the tax bore heaviest on absentees.
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Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.