Part 1

Chapter 13,849 wordsPublic domain

THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW

_PUBLISHED QUARTERLY_

VOL. I JANUARY-JUNE 1914

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

VOLUME I

No. 1. JANUARY-MARCH, 1914

THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT =The Editor= 1 THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT =Fabian Franklin= 22 THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS =Grant Showerman= 34 THE NEW MORALITY =Paul Elmer More= 47 PROFESSOR BERGSON AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH =The Editor= 63 TWO NEGLECTED VIRTUES =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 112 THE UNFERMENTED CABINET =E. S. Martin= 124 A NEEDED UNPOPULAR REFORM =H. B. Brougham= 133 OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST =Henry W. Farnam= 145 OUR ALCOHOL: ITS USE =Clayton Hamilton= 163 THE MICROBOPHOBIAC =Grant Showerman= 175 THE STANDING INCENTIVES TO WAR =David Starr Jordan= 185 THE MACHINERY FOR PEACE =H. B. Brougham= 200 EN CASSEROLE: Tobacco and Alcohol--Answering Big Questions--Decency and the Stage--What's the Matter with our Colleges? (VERNON L. KELLOGG)--Proportionate News (F. J. MATHER, JR.)--Simplified Spelling 212

No. 2. APRIL-JUNE, 1914

THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM =Alvin S. Johnson= 227 A SOCIOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE =W. P. Trent= 245 SOCIAL UNTRUTH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST =Fabian Franklin= 252 NATURAL ARISTOCRACY =Paul Elmer More= 272 THE RIGHT TO BE AMUSED =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 297 HOW WOMAN SUFFRAGE HAS WORKED =H. B. Brougham= 307 THE BABY AND THE BEE =Vernon L. Kellogg= 333 THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES =Grant Showerman= 343 THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS =Emily J. Putnam= 358 OUR SUBLIME FAITH IN SCHOOLING =Calvin Thomas= 375 THE BARBARIAN INVASION =Warner Fite= 389 TRUST-BUSTING AS A NATIONAL PASTIME =Henry R. Seager= 406 OUR GOVERNMENT SUBVENTION TO LITERATURE =Charles W. Burrows= 415 EN CASSEROLE: Special to our Readers--A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation--A Model of Divinatory Criticism (CALVIN THOMAS)--Some Deserving "Climbers"--Simplified Spelling 431

The Unpopular Review

VOL. 1 JANUARY, 1914 NO. 1

THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun--which statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.

The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be as long as life is worth living in it--and longer. There was one between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery. Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy, order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.

That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by those in front enslaving those behind--the minority enslaving the majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization--as we regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot were getting on the other leg--the majority trying to enslave the minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times, however--say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe, and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and letters and the arts--when in two instances these men were legislated away from powers and immunities granted to others.

* * * * *

Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us.

* * * * *

Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic. Now they have become nation-wide and world-wide; and until evolution has got so near its goal of equilibration that the differences between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater, the conflict will be irrepressible.

The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now, and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers and land-owners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the talk of equality, until the proletariat "tasted blood" in the greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This delusion dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at last as far along in a certain sort of "progress" as the older civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines preached all the way from Emma Goldman up to some of the most "progressive" of the college professors.

* * * * *

But however discouraging the situation among the wage-earners may be, it is perhaps better than one of ox-like content. The average man is beginning to have ideals--not very high ideals; most of them concern merely his back and his belly; but there are a few which find vent in the orchestras and dramatic efforts at the settlements and village halls; and in the bandstands on the village greens, horrible as generally are the noises made in them. But these awakening ideals also appear in the boycotts among the Danbury hatters, in the vandalisms of the I. W. W., in the Los Angeles dynamiting, and in murders among the Chicago teamsters and Pennsylvania miners, as well as in the assassination of McKinley.

Then there is an intermediate showing of them, neither in art nor in physical force, but in the opinions behind the force, in all sorts of schemes toward the material basis of enlarged life. The people seek short cuts across the gulf, and follow like sheep those who promise them what they want. Just as Jack Cade promised them that every pint pot should hold a quart, so Bryan promised them, virtually, that silver should be as good as gold, and Roosevelt virtually promised them that all judges should be afraid to decide against them in industrial conflicts. True, he explains all that away in the Hibbert Journal. But the people he harangues do not read the Hibbert Journal, and he is astute enough to know it.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Irrepressible Conflict is where it is not between two sides wanting the same dollars, but between the real and the ideal. Nearly all the schemes are ideal, eminently desirable, but utterly impossible in any state of human nature that we know or can clearly foresee. Yet they appeal to the sympathies of all, and therefore mislead the judgments of many. We wish we felt as certain as we do of sunrise that in the present stage of American evolution democratic government is not one of these ideals; but we cannot. The American people has just passed its first two measures of distinct and unqualified class legislation, and has been running wild after the two greatest demagogues in history. But fortunately as they both promise substantially the same things--"steal each other's clothes," they tend to neutralize each other.

* * * * *

The sources of the most pronounced conflict between facts and ideals are that ordinarily a man cannot have more than he creates and conserves; that the desire to will torture those who create and conserve little, as long as they have to look upon others who create and conserve much; and that, as long as the difference lasts, those who have little will want to get hold of what is held by those who have much. The things that all men want, but few men have. Those who have not, envy and often hate those who have. Of late this disposition has been greatly intensified by the multitude of rapid fortunes from the new control of Nature and from the trusts, and the parvenu ostentation accompanying them. It makes a difference whether princely state surrounds the king's son, or one's own pal of yesterday.

Worst of all, so many of these fortunes have been obtained wrongfully that they intensify the impression that _all_ fortunes above the average have.

Now the fundamental question in this conflict is: to whom does that money rightfully belong? Among wise people who are not economists, the width and profundity of the ignorance on this point tends to dissipate the current skepticism regarding the miraculous.

The fortunes wrongfully acquired are exceptional and abnormal. Nearly all comfortable fortunes come from legitimate industry. Within a generation the economists have got the question of to whom they rightfully belong, into the qualitative stage of settlement. The quantitative stage is a much nicer and more complicated problem, and varies more with different cases. Possibly the first germ of the solution appeared a generation ago in a sentence in Marshall's "Economics of Industry."

It was: "The earnings of management of a manufacturer represent the value of the addition which his work makes to the total product of capital and industry." The same holds true of a farmer, miner, transporter, merchant or anybody else who directs industry. It is more easily recognized in the case of the inventor. Francis A. Walker took up this theme and gradually demonstrated that so far from the employer's profits being wrung out of the wage-earner, they are generally greatest where wages are highest, and proceed from devices and economies effected by the employer, and would not exist without them. This is being constantly illustrated by some employers succeeding where others have failed, and failing where others have succeeded. In support of the general thesis Walker says: "Discussions in Economics and Statistics," (Vol. I., pp. 367-75):

"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken, as it should be, into account.

"Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the employers of what may be called the no-profits class.

"... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and machinery; from boldly incurring the expense--the often large expense--of improved processes and appliances, while closely scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his accumulations....

"If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too often entertained by the wages class, which regards the successful employers of labor--men who realize large fortunes in manufactures or trade--as having in some way injured or robbed them....

"In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods, and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them, each employer's profits representing that which he has produced over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and capital."

All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions, but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.

Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery. But that wealth is _generally_ the result of pillage, and not of invention, good management and other good forces, is probably the worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.

This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes. This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not always, it has been accumulated to their profit.

Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not, thinks that the man who has it, stole it--that it belongs to the man who handled it. And he is going to take it.

But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong. He is going to take it "by due process of law"--by his vote: the law has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot hold on to what he has already got of it.

At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is unquestionably in conflict with the principle _suum cuique_. The problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing forces.

Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To the education in the common schools are now being added medical supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who pay most of the money for them.

In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need, or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to stop it?

Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much farther--especially in distributing favors elsewhere--without attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossible that there should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the desirability of having every man feel his interest in government, through _some_ degree of the pinch of taxation.

Any considerable increase of the recent legislation, would of course lead to the diminution of capital, both through expenditure and through discouragement of accumulation. It would also diminish the activity of those who are able to handle capital profitably, and the consequent effect on wages would perhaps in time become apparent to even the order of intellect behind the legislation.

How far can it go without drying up the springs of charity? There is already free talk of saving income taxes out of charities.

Such legislation is certainly nursing antagonisms, and whether the spread of general intelligence can be expected to be rapid enough to prevent serious harm, is doubtful. It even sometimes appears a question whether the conflict can be settled without more serious bloodshed. Fortunately neither side has yet as much to complain of as one side had in the revolutions which cost Charles I and Louis XVI their heads; and it is doubtful whether either side has the power or coherence or disposition to drive it to arms--whether the existing sentiment in any civilized nation is longer such as to make such a consummation possible. Times are growing more peaceful. Not only has the biggest army in the world for nearly half a century been the biggest engine of peace; not only has a permanent international courthouse been built among the fortresses, after several temporary ones had already done good service; but when the brotherhood of locomotive engineers gets into conflict with their employers, instead of settling it in the freight yards with torches and brickbats, both sides go to the Waldorf-Astoria and have a judicial proceeding. For a centrifugal explosion, they substitute a centripetal adjustment. And the brawn supplies its share of the brains to do it.