Part 8
These young men are by no means effete dilletanti. They are strong, vigorous young men, and they plunge into what they know to be a competitive field with a full knowledge that they are not likely to go very far unless they earn their way. For in these same offices, and working in the field in hot competition with them, there is still an army of young men from the provinces, so to speak, who actually do live upon the proceeds of their work. It gave a real personal joy to discover that, in several of the banking houses which I looked into, the poor young man who starts out into the world in competition with these scions of the wealthy aristocracy is paid a better salary at the beginning than is his moneyed competitor, and has at least an equal chance for advancement. Indeed it is recognized that the wealthy young man has a marked advantage through his personal acquaintance with men of money, and more is expected of him in return from his training than is expected of the self-supporting clerk. As a rule, however, the real workers are given outlying districts of the country to canvass, while the aristocracy of the profession does its work in the city.
I sketch this phenomenon in some detail, because I think it is a very significant thing in its bearing upon the subject of this book. Perhaps more than any other one outlet it is an avenue leading toward honourable labour, suited to the capacity and the taste of our wealthy young men. That the market is crowded to-day, and has been crowded for five years past, more than it ever was crowded before in the history of the financial profession, speaks far more eloquently than I can speak of the change of sentiment amongst the wealthy.
In the Harvard Club, of a Saturday afternoon in winter, you will find groups of young men sitting around and talking, just as you would have found them fifteen years ago. There is one marked difference. Fifteen years ago they would have been talking about social events, the sports, and various other trivial things that went in those days to make up the sum and substance of a fashionable young man’s career. Nowadays many of these groups are earnestly discussing finance, not in its relation to their own private fortunes or misfortunes in the stock market, but in its broader aspect. You hear such phrases as “gold supply,” “premium bond,” “over-production of securities,” “diversion of money from the legitimate market,” “intrinsic value,” “investment outlook,” etc. They are, in fact, talking shop; and I do not think I have ever met any other class of men more addicted to the habit than these novitiates of the financial game.
Even their sisters, nurtured in luxury, and taught, as they still unhappily are, that elegant idleness is the proper portion of the sex, are beginning to rebel. They are seeking knowledge eagerly, sometimes in places and under circumstances that promise not the best of results. More particularly during the past five or ten years there has been the really extraordinary propaganda amongst the women of the younger set in our great cities looking toward the strengthening of the body and the building up of a vigorous and buoyant health that would have been considered actually vulgar in the generation that preceded them. Health, in fact, in many of the younger sets, has become almost a religion, a sort of fetich. They study hygiene, biology, and the mystery of life. Perhaps they are coming to know too much at too early an age, but in excuse let it be said that it is far better to know too much than to know too little.
On the other hand, I have already written of the tendency of the fashionable young women of the day toward charity and reform. They follow fads madly, working as hard and using up as much nerve force in this pursuit as any young woman of the middle class gives to her household work, or even to her bread-winning activities. I could name a dozen young women of the finest families in New York who within the past twelve months have actually thrown themselves into this sort of function with such fiery ardour and zeal that they have either totally neglected their social activities or broken down completely under the strain of double labour. Such instances are more numerous year by year. I do not know that I fully approve it, but I set it down here for the judgment of the world.
So, on the one hand, the ranks of the doomed class are being swiftly depleted by what I must call rank out and out desertion. The idle rich, particularly the younger set, are depleted year by year by squadrons of young men and women who go over to the army of workers. I do not know that there is any one single sign in the world in which I live that gives me greater hope than this. The dishonour of inactivity, sloth, and idleness is coming to be widely recognized in the very best classes of Society. Old prejudices are breaking down under the demands of the younger men for something to do. Even labour with the hands is not beneath them. As I pause to think, I could name at least half a dozen young men of my own set who within the past two or three years have gone into the railroad business, carried chains with engineering gangs in the field, or done other real manual labour. To-day the son of one of the oldest and noblest families in New York is superintending the laying of sewers in a New England town under a municipal contract.
If actual desertion is thinning the ranks of the idle rich, there is another and even greater cause which will tend in the future, as it is tending to-day, to limit the number of this class. It lies much deeper than the mere phenomenon of desertion. It is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the removal of the means of making gigantic fortunes through the exploitation of men.
I do not intend to dwell upon this phase of the passing of the idle rich to any great extent, because its effects are necessarily slow. Indeed, they will not be felt for many years to come. Yet I would point out one or two phases of this question that seem to me to be intensely interesting and vastly important. In the first place, the opportunities for the making of gigantic fortunes are being limited more and more by the world-embracing activities of those who already possess gigantic wealth.
Let any man discover in the mountains of Mexico, in the forbidding ridges of Alaska, or on the plains of the Yukon, great new deposits of iron, or coal, or oil, and immediately, almost before the news of such discovery has reached the world at large, a dozen secret agents rush to investigate. They represent the Pearsons, of London; the Guggenheims or Morgans, of New York; the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds, of New York or Germany. They are the first in the field; they preëmpt, for fortunes already far beyond competition, the opportunity of making a tremendous fortune out of the new discovery.
Think of the raw materials of commerce--sugar, meat, oil, iron, coal, copper, cotton, wheat, corn, lumber--is it not absolutely true that in the manufacture and exploitation of this tremendous mass of the raw material of wealth the possibility of amassing enormous fortunes is almost hopelessly limited by the activities and the world-girdling power of capitalist groups already far beyond the reach of competition?
The free land of America is gone. All these great staples that have been in generations past the vehicles in which men have been carried upon the road to lordly fortunes are already in the hands of a few hundred families. This fact, sinister as it undoubtedly is in its broader aspect upon the economic conditions of the country, must certainly tend to eliminate more and more the possibility for the creation of additional gigantic industrial fortunes in this country. In so far as this is true it is a very important item indeed among the forces that tend toward the elimination of the idle rich.
More than this, as I have pointed out already in a phrase, the growing knowledge on the part of the people of the ways and means by which they have been exploited for the creation of wealth will surely prevent any further long-continued growth of this same process. Men are being sent up to congress year by year sworn to break up and destroy the coördinate political machine that has made possible the growth of the power of the trusts. Earnest fighters like La Follette may well be watched, for though no little of his work and his talk is based on fallacy, yet in this at least he represents the temper of the whole United States, that he is a bitter and an ardent enemy of the concentration of wealth. The agitation over the Guggenheim claims in Alaska, the bursts of popular acclaim over land-fraud prosecutions in the West, the sardonic joy of the people over the retrieving of enormous coal land areas stolen by railroads, the warm enthusiasm of the West for government reclamation, conservation, and preëmption--these are signs of the times all pointing in the one direction.
They do not mark the end of the idle rich, to-day existent. They do point unmistakably toward the prevention of a new crop of great American fortunes won through exploitation of government property and popular rights. If you couple with them the ever-growing movement toward Socialism, and the hundred and one private propaganda along strange and often faulty economic lines, you cannot help but feel as I feel, that even if there were a revolution, in a hundred years, when the present great fortunes of America are subdivided, split up, and scattered among a thousand heirs, the wealth of America will certainly not be held ninety-five per cent. in the hands of five per cent. of the people and five per cent. in the hands of the rest of the people. And it is self-evident that since the gathering together of wealth in the hands of the few gave us the idle rich, the natural scattering of that wealth into more and more hands as the years go on must tend in the other direction.
_The days of the idle rich in America are as a tale that is told. To-morrow in this land there will be one of two things, either an evolution or a revolution._
_... The class I represent will again be merged into and assimilated by the body of the nation.... We shall reënact in this land some of the most terrible tragedies of history._
_Chapter Eleven_
THE END OF THE STORY
We have come to the end of the story. The days of the idle rich in America are as a tale that is told. To-morrow in this land there will be one of two things: either an evolution or a revolution. Either by one of those characteristically swift and marvellous changes for which the history of our race is noted, the class which I represent will again be merged into and assimilated by the body of the nation, as it was half a century ago, or we shall stand face to face with the forces of anarchy, Socialism, trade unionism, and a hundred other cults that either do represent or claim to represent the spirit of this mighty people, and we shall reënact in this land some of the most terrible tragedies of history.
I do not believe a middle course is possible. I know, of course, that the rank and file of the class I represent are blind and careless. I know that many of them, if they read this book, will lay it aside with a smile, calling it hysterical, calling it untrue. Wealth never yet in history has recognized its true position in the world, and I suppose it never will. Yet I am bound to say the things I think, and I can only trust that some few at least will be impelled to study facts and come before the tribunal of public opinion within the next few years armed and prepared for their own vindication.
I have written in vain if I have not made it clear that while the class of the wealthy has been increasing steadily during the past five years, faster than it ever increased in a similar period before, that growth in numbers has been accompanied also by an ever-increasing knowledge on the part of the wiser heads in the social world, by a serious, sober, and careful analysis of the real conditions among the wealthy themselves, and by a genuine adaptation of the minds of the wealthy to these new conditions as they come home to us. This is the one hope of American Society. It is not conclusive, but at least it points the way toward the future of America.
I do not want to be considered an alarmist or to cry panic from the house tops. Yet, in the light of facts, and in the face of the terrific changes that must take place within the next decade in our social and business structure, I cannot see how the business world of America can long escape a reckoning that has for years been overdue. There has to be in this country an adjustment that will shake the financial and business world to its foundations. It is possible, though not probable, that the necessary social changes of the next decade could be accomplished without a cataclysm; but with the concurrent business changes, the necessary shifting of the bases of our industrial system, the inevitable scaling down of the extravagance to which the nation as a whole has become accustomed, it is, I should say, utterly impossible that we can go through without an industrial disturbance that will strike far deeper than any we have known since 1893.
For the poison of gold has debauched and corrupted American Society, it has brought within our gates new armies of parasites, it has led to a degree of ostentation and of luxury, and even of vice and profligacy, comparable with that of the Roman Empire under Heliogabalus. I said in a former chapter that the middle class in America has almost if not quite lost its power. One of the most vital reasons for this fact is that much of that middle class has become confused with the lower fringes of the wealthy class, has learned to ape its habits and its luxuries, has come to live with ostentation and display, and has given up its traditional habits of frugality and thrift to waste its substance on a riotous form of living that is, as it were, but a faint and unworthy imitation of the habits of life of the wealthy.
In the process of adjustment that is unavoidable this drunkenness must pass. The great professional class, which in all ages has produced so many thinkers, writers, and makers of a nation’s history, must come back into its own; it must learn again the lesson of thrift and providence which it has learned so well in France and Germany, and which, forty years ago, were the most striking features of its character here in this land. If, as is true, the class I represent has very much to learn, I take it to be equally true that every other class in the land also has its lessons to learn. The process of learning is not to be an easy one. It may be that we as a nation will be tried in the fiery furnace of adversity, immersed in the gloomy depths of business depression, and crushed beneath a load of debt and repudiation before we have learned the first small principles upon which the newer order of things in America must be founded.
It is not my business, however, to talk to the people of America at large. I am addressing this book to Society, to the men and women whom I know, to the boys and girls who are to take our places in the social world as years go by. To them, in all sincerity, I am preaching a sermon of warning. I am calling them to gird themselves for battle--a battle the like of which has never been fought in this land before--a battle for life.
My appeal, if it were merely an appeal to save ourselves, would be sordid indeed. For it is ours to think of saving others. The bugle of the assured destiny of our race should quicken us to the service of a great and holy cause. The call is the call of the future, and the cause is the cause of humanity. I covet for you, my friends and members of my class, a higher destiny than the mere panic-stricken flight to safety. I am aware not only of your views, but of your virtues. Never before has there been such an opportunity for real service to mankind. You have the means, you have the power, you have the position, you have all, save only the will. I feel confident that if you give the matter study, and do not throw away this book as mere idle talk, the will to serve will come to you.
I know that the great bulk of Society can be reconstructed only by one agency, and that is death. To-day, in the South, there linger here and there many old men and women who never yet have ceased to call down curses from heaven upon the head and memory of Lincoln. It is perfectly self-evident that in this other cause of which I write, and that has come to be so near to me, the army of the unreconstructed must remain for many years tremendous. Particularly is this true of the newer recruits within the golden gates of the city of wealth. You may note that we are still enjoying the company of the first generation of the captains of industry. The second generation marches swiftly upon us. It will not be satisfied, it will not be sated, until it has reached the mellowness of age. It will follow the will-of-the-wisp of society to the bitter end. It is more stubborn, I think, than even that ancient culture of Boston and Philadelphia. Most certainly it is much more offensive to the public at large. In fact, more than any other specific subdivision of the army of wealth, it flaunts its glaring banners in the faces of the people.
I often think, as I watch the young men and women of my class trying to enjoy themselves, what a terrible problem we have bequeathed to them. I am no longer young; even my friends call me middle aged. At any rate, I have reached a stage in life where I can stop and weigh the facts, and come to a conclusion unbiased by the mere joy of living. Therefore I am moved to pity as I watch the very young of my class at play. For I am positively certain that three out of four of them will face, in the fulness of their lives, many bitter and heart-searching problems. Already the shadow of impending events falls heavily upon them. Many of them, even in their very tender youth, have learned that they belong to a hated class. How different is their lot from mine! For I, as a boy, was taught to consider myself the heir of all the ages. I was taught that I belonged to a class loved and respected for its virtues, envied and looked up to for its opportunities. I was taught that the women of my class were models and examplars to all the world. I was taught that the men were the uncrowned kings of America, leaders of thought, leaders of action, masters of destiny, masters of business.
To-day, in New York, the girls of our class cannot read the newspapers without learning the fearful lesson that their fathers are despised by the people and their mothers are suspected by the women of the nation. Ridicule, slander, sarcasm, and obloquy are poured upon us day by day. I sometimes wonder how the class can survive it. It is a fearful thing for a young girl to be brought up to womanhood in an atmosphere like this. It must breed either careless, heartless indifference, or a spirit of discontent. I hope it is the latter, but, alas! I very much fear it is more likely to be the former.
What are we going to do about it? I wish I could answer the question in one great, sweeping generality. Unfortunately, I do not believe it can be answered so. I know that the author of “The Trust: Its Book” has found an answer in a Utopian partnership between capital and labour. I know that Mr. Carnegie has found the answer in coöperation. I know that such skilful writers as Lloyd and Wells have solved the riddle by Socialism. I know that many thousands of the hardest thinking, hardest working citizens of this country are pledged already to the doctrine of government ownership of the sources of wealth. I know that Danton and Robespierre thought that they had found it when they set up the guillotine in Paris. I know that the Terrorists of Russia have worked out their own solution. I know that the Rockefeller Foundation, the Sage Foundation, and a thousand other mighty charities are intended as an answer. I know that Samuel Gompers and John Mitchell think that the extension of trade unionism will solve it. Above all, I know that many of the seasoned leaders of the social world believe that it will swiftly solve itself. I believe that Mr. Morgan and his wonderful group of associates thought they had taken a long step toward the solution when they threw the entire money power of the United States into the fight against panic in 1907. They believed that they had earned from the people of this country undying admiration, endless devotion, and an end of all warfare, because they thought they had stepped between panic and its victims.
Yet I cannot believe that any one of these solutions is the right one. No permanent change in the social structure of this nation can be accomplished except by a revolution or by the process of evolution, at which I have vaguely hinted here and there throughout this book.
Education must go on. The professional reformer, the sycophant who bows before us, the parasite who eats our bread and dispenses the wisdom of the ages in return, harp upon this theme. Only, to their mind, education means simply the training of the lower classes into a traditional habit of mind that will permit the continuance of the present conditions. To me education has no such meaning. More than any other class in the United States, we, the rich, need it. We must get it.
We must learn the truth about ourselves, our strength, our weakness, our true position in the world. We must learn the truth about our nation, our political institutions, our laws, our misuse of special privilege, our brigandage of the people’s rights at Washington and at every state capital in the land. We must learn the truth about the people, their rights, their wrongs, their power, and their weakness.
And, as we learn, we must act. We must ourselves eradicate the worst of our faults. We must ourselves condemn to death the idle rich. We must see to it that as our young men and women grow to maturity they learn to condemn and to scorn the sort of ostentatious display, the miserable vices, the degenerate luxuries, and the positive moral crimes that to-day are so rampant among us. We must, if we are to save ourselves and the world that we inherited, go back to the traditions of our fathers. We must reestablish in the social world of America the Spartan principles that marked that world in the days of Lincoln.
The age of arrogance is ended. That is a hard lesson. The idle rich of America, with the bitter voice of poverty and the deep tones of science alike ringing in their ears challenges of their existence as a class, may well tremble at the tones of that other voice which, though seeming silent, yet speaks aloud. The nation’s greatest builder, Lincoln, built as unto liberty. That temple from which he drove the idle driver of slaves, for these long years dedicated to the uses of Mammon, yet looms large in the visions of the disinherited.
Above all else that we may do on the positive side there remains the privilege of putting our study to practical work in the amelioration of the conditions that exist and the prevention of the recurrence of the phenomena that gave us these conditions. As a class we are, to-day, obstructionists. It is our class conservatism, you may say, that impels us to look with suspicion upon the rising of the people against, for instance, such a political debauch as has ruled Rhode Island for so long. We, on the contrary, should stand in the front ranks of such a battle as that. First of all, we, the people of this country, should detect political corruption, we should recognize the symptoms of the palsying touch of gold--and we should stand out before the world as the sworn champions of justice, equality, and honour.