Part 23

Capitalism is material, gross, ugly. Yes, but it has a soul--toleration, liberty, fraternity. And this, like most souls, is not so much in being as in becoming. It is only in the most highly capitalistic centers that even business has partly freed itself from elements of personal oppression. There is no state nor city in which the fraternity of labor is more than an emerging fact. Under capitalism, workingmen are brothers, but there is still a vast deal of the Cain and Abel in their feelings toward one another. Remove the pressure of capitalism at this instant, and the lessons of fraternity would quickly be forgotten. Relax the profit motive, and mankind would again stand forth in its pristine narrowness and bigotry and cruelty. Conceive for a moment that the United States were now under Socialistic management. With what spirit should we greet the oppressed of other lands, fleeing to us for refuge? We should probably judge of the problem in terms of dividend and divisor: so much food, so many mouths; let not the number of mouths be increased. To be sure, there is an economic fallacy lurking in this syllogism; but when has an economic fallacy ever been crushed except by weight of a brute class interest? Our workingmen are brothers of those of England and France and Germany, under the pressure of cosmopolitan capitalism. But the natural attitude of a group of Socialistic nations toward one another will be a coveting of one another's rich mines and fertile provinces. At least such will be the natural attitude until fraternity, imposed by capitalism, has descended from men's lips and entered into their blood.

There is a wise saying in Karl Marx's _Critique of Political Economy_ (Preface): "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society." What Marx said of the material embodiment of capitalism, we can apply to its soul. Capitalism is growing toward liberty and fraternity. But the immense distance we must traverse before this goal can be attained is evidence of the vitality that remains in the system. Were capitalism to be abolished today, the hard-won gains of the last two centuries would vanish. But by this very fact it is proved that capitalism cannot be abolished today.

VI

In its present stage of development capitalism, every one admits, is ugly. Haste and vandalism have characterized the work of constructing it. It is like the wall of Athens, rough stone upon hewn memorial tablets to the dead, upon the trunks and limbs of statues of gods and men and beasts. The feast of Our Lady of Carmel was beautiful in Palermo; transplanted to New York, it is grotesque. There was dignity in the demeanor of the Lithuanian on his native soil: in the anthracite towns, the Lithuanian is a mortar-disfigured torso, thrown heedlessly into the courses of a rubble wall. All the mixing up of peoples, of customs, of ideals, that an incipient capitalism implies, produces a conglomerate that is inevitably ugly.

And quite apart from the ugliness of discordant combinations, there is an ugliness originating in the very virtues of capitalism. As we have seen, it is the tendency of capitalism to leave human nature free in all that transcends the narrow limits of the process of profit making. And this would be well if, as the optimists assure us, human nature were uniformly beautiful. Those of us, however, who are not committed to dogmatic optimism know that if some part of human nature is most beautiful when unrestrained and unadorned, another part is most seemly when well laced with stays of custom, well draped in garments of convention. At any rate, in the initial phase of the capitalistic liberation of human nature, which we are now experiencing, it is an open question whether our eyes are not more frequently offended than regaled.

It is in the field of material objects, however, that the contrasts between present capitalism and the earlier order are most clearly visible. Time was when the man who built a house granted to the whole community a voice in determining its design. And the community permitted variation from type, but only a moderate, well regulated variation. Thus were the walled cities of the Middle Ages governed by a harmony of construction, which gave to each dwelling, at the very least, a beauty of use and wont. Today in America the builder is free. If he chooses to dwell in a Greek temple or a Gothic chapel or a Chinese pagoda, there is no one to dissuade him. No one, except perhaps an architect whose plans have been rejected or a good citizen at large, ex-officio adviser of an unheeding world.

In the economic field human conduct is narrowly ruled and restricted by capitalism; but in the non-economic field--the greater and more significant part of life--the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly, are set free by capitalism, to struggle for existence. Capitalism offers no direct pecuniary rewards for virtue and beauty. Nor, however, does it impose any penalties upon them. Did any earlier order of society impose such penalties? To be sure. Let us recall the contempt for the arts on the part of militaristic Rome, the pride in illiteracy of the glittering mediæval knight. Capitalism does not require a merchant or a banker to become a connoisseur of art. Nor does it require him to apologize for any such variation from typical instincts.

If good and evil must thus strive in a fair field, neither rewarded nor penalized economically, what will be the outcome? The evil will prevail, say those who--strangely enough--describe themselves as idealists. Most of us refuse to engage in prophecies. But so much is clear: the good and the beautiful that may prevail under a thorough-going capitalism must be better and more beautiful than the values of old time. Capitalistic freedom demands that there must be greater variety and wealth of beauty than an earlier order required; capitalistic fraternity demands that charity and toleration must extend beyond the bounds of class and race. Unless the art and the practical ethics of perfected capitalism represent an advance in universality, they will be thrust aside as meaningless and worthless.

It is, to be sure, more difficult to establish fixed values upon a broad basis of human life than upon a narrow one. More difficult were the problems that confronted Euripides the Pan-Hellene, than Sophocles the Athenian. There is a contrast in technical perfection, between the work of Balzac the Frenchman, and Daudet the adoptive Parisian; between that of Kipling the imperialist, and Bridges the Englander; between that of Ibsen the cosmopolitan, and Björnson the Norwegian. But in all these instances the loss in classical perfection is vastly overbalanced by the gain in human worth. There were poets and dramatists in Scandinavia before the days of Holberg. They had an elaborate canon, all the rules of which were violated by Holberg's iconoclastic cosmopolitanism. What has become of the works of Holberg's predecessors? No one can read them. But Holberg was never so widely read and honored as today.

A broader and more liberal humanity than the world has known before--such, after all, is the evolving soul of capitalism. This does not indicate, however, that capitalism will last forever, or deserves immortality. There comes a time when the most responsive body becomes a clog upon the soul, and should accordingly be buried. The body of capitalism is none too responsive; therefore we may be certain that it must, in the end, be discarded. What the succeeding order will be, no man can forecast. But it will not be one of unbridled individualism; for a spirit of fraternity, transcending that imposed by capitalism, will carry the principle of coöperation to lengths beyond present dreams. And it will not be Socialism; for the spirit of toleration and freedom, now only germinating, will have attained to its full efflorescence in institutions that guarantee a range of personal development not compatible with the well-regimented scheme of a Socialistic state. Capitalism will disappear; but can we doubt that it will be honored in history as a most significant stage in the progress of the human soul towards liberty?

A SOCIOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE

[Greek: Ta môra gar pant' estin Aphroditê brotois.]

Eur. Troad. 989.

The wise Hecuba accused the frail Helen of throwing upon Aphrodite blame which really belonged to no one but Helen herself. Can it be that, now the whole world has turned sociologist, many of us are guilty of throwing upon poor society blame that ought solely to attach to us as would-be students of society? When emancipated spirits give utterance to their views with regard to the iniquities of the man-ruled world of the past, and describe the ideal eugenic world of the future, in which woman is to be man's superior, and the family a new thing under heaven, one wonders how far the nature of the views and the character of the vision are determined by the deficiencies, and how far by the exceptional endowments, mental and moral, of the critic and prophet. When economists cross their scientific hearts, and assure us on their honor as impartial students that, however much they may regret to announce its speedy demise, the monogamous family is a doomed institution, one is tempted to ask whether a few shrivelling leaves of a brief season would be reliable authorities with regard to the condition of a large tree at its roots. To anyone who inquires whether a metaphor or an analogy is an argument, we will say that we have known political economists who spoke of themselves and their work in terms indistinguishable from those employed by students of the so-called physical sciences.

We are free to confess that these perhaps inconsequential remarks proceed from a middle aged person who is not a sociologist, or an economist, or even an adept in the New History. That we make any remarks at all is due to the fact that, as our title perhaps indicates, a little too much sociological diet has induced in us a condition analogous to nightmare. When a small boy of our acquaintance, in a family not yet extinct, is afflicted with this disorder, he invariably screams out lustily and runs to his mother. Following his example as nearly as manners and circumstances permit, we vent our feelings in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW.

"But who forces you, in this free country, to feed upon sociological diet?" This hypothetical question from a hypothetical reader admits of an easy reply. It is impossible to earn one's living pent up in a barricaded study, reading Greek; and outside of such a fastness, how can one escape the amateur sociologist? He intrudes himself into your most select circle at your club. He, or she, sends you through the mail notices of "thon's" books and lectures. He preaches at you if you go to church, and you make him an excuse for staying away. He assails your ears at college commencements. He makes the _Congressional Record_ duller. He solicits your vote for this and that candidate, on the ground that they are advocates of a new freedom, or exponents of a progressive social and political movement, or, at the very least, stanch friends of the people. He writes editorials and letters in your morning and evening newspapers, and articles in your favorite magazine. He punishes you for your weakness in attending a public dinner. He--or rather she--airs his--or rather her--most advanced ideas when you are just beginning to sip your afternoon cup of tea, and you are fortunate if, in your disgust, you do not play havoc with the china of your hostess. Avoid sociological diet in the year of our Lord one thousand, nine hundred and fourteen? It was far easier to avoid the Plague in the year sixteen hundred and sixty-five.

We admit frankly that the amateur sociologist is not the only person our weak nerves dread. We avoid a Pragmatist and a New Realist almost as assiduously, and with but slightly more success. Latter-day novelists, poets, statesmen, and educators, "uplift-men" in general, and advocates of scientific efficiency in particular, preachers of social service who blandly assume both that society wants their services and that they have services to render, when what is chiefly apparent is their own need of education--these and other sons of thunder too numerous to mention have given us many a bad quarter of an hour. But it is the amateur sociologist alone who is able to give us a nightmare.

We confess that such was not always the case. We entered one of the first classes ever taught in this country in what was then called the Science of Society. We listened with amused interest, possibly with profit, to the remarks, interspersed with puns, which the erudite professor allowed himself to make on the subject of marriage as an institution. Later we read ponderous books on this topic and kindred ones, and we even plumed ourselves upon our advocacy of woman suffrage and our practical interest in organized philanthropy. Political economy and history were not neglected by us, and so we rounded out the last century cherishing the delusion that we were somewhat progressive. Alas, we were primitive enough to spell it with a small "p." And now, but a few short years later, we are wailing in or about a Sociological Nightmare! Is it that, in the natural course of things, we have merely become conservative, have been caught up with, and passed, by a more radical generation, and are taking out on them, regardless of justice and of shifting metaphors, a spite caused by our own weakness of mental digestion?

Perhaps so, perhaps not. Thus far we have not flung even the tiniest of stones at the important study known as Sociology, nor have we meant to hit any of its serious students. The banner under which we enlisted as the humblest of privates, we still salute, and as the army of workers marches on, we, droppers-out yet loyal, raise our feeble cheer. But behold! we are caught in a frantic mob of camp-followers, and we struggle in vain to extricate ourselves. And what a mob it is! Men and women who call themselves "Progressives" without being able to read a pedometer; anarchists who, with less sense than bulls, mistake a red flag for a new Gospel; propagandists of peace who have no respect for rest; advocates of nostrums who actually resent being called quacks; women who rejoice in being "hikers;" philanthropists who are doing their foolish best to make the under dog a mad one; lecturers who convert their lungs into cash; fashionable women who open their drawing-rooms to cranks, and their heads to whims;--but why attempt an impossible description? It seems better to fall back upon Matthew Arnold's more decorous expression of his feelings, in _Bacchanalia; or, the New Age_:--

Thundering and bursting In torrents, and waves, Carolling and shouting, Over tombs, amid graves, See! on the cumbered plain Clearing a stage, Scattering the past about, Comes the new age. Bards make new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, Critics new rules. All things begin again; Life is their prize; Earth with their deeds they fill, Fill with their cries.

Have we, then, got at the root of the matter? Tired out with "strenuosity," fatigued with American "progress," dinned with lectures, conferences, civic forums, and all the other modes of vociferous self-expression dear to this Age of Talk, are we, like the poet, the poet who, be it remembered, wrote of Sophocles that he "saw life steadily, and saw it whole," are we really longing for an impossible golden reign of universal silence, and, in despair of obtaining it, railing at what happens for the moment to be the most noisy object within our dyspeptic range of hearing--the amateur sociologist?

We are not sure that this is not the case, but why should we undertake to analyze our own feelings? The main point is that we feel them; the next point, almost as important to ourselves, is that we want to express them. And who that is past fifty is not warranted in indulging in mild objurgations when it is possible to overhear at a dinner party, as the dominant note of an eager conversation between a lady and a gentleman, that latest intruder into the limited vocabulary of fashionable life, the ugly word "prostitute"! No one placed in so astounding a situation would stop to reflect that, if he had overheard such a conversation--save the mark!--two centuries ago, the dominant word would have been, most assuredly, both shorter and uglier. Not for us at least such cold philological comfort in the presence of our arch-enemy, the amateur sociologist. Here we have caught him in the innermost recess of civilization, caught him at our very dinner table--a more loathsome and dangerous foe than the Satan-Toad squat at the ear of sleeping Eve!

For where in all Creation's round Can now a _sleeping_ Eve be found?

They are all awake--God bless them and save them!--awake and listening to the amateur sociologist, or else to the sociological dramatist, which is every whit as bad, or worse. They are awake and forming drama-leagues, attending lectures for political education, giving suffrage teas and balls, flocking to conventions, marching under banners and "hiking" in squads, grabbing at slippery presidents, writing their pretty fingers off, converting the tenets of the New Morality into lullabies, in short, following a modern Pied Piper--into what?

We are brought up with a shock before the blank wall of our own question, and we are out of our nightmare. This world, even if in this particular year of grace it does seem to be overstocked with sociologists, is a pleasanter place to inhabit than a Hades tenanted by gibbering ghosts. It is possible to advocate equal franchise and to help along other causes in which one may believe without mistaking one's heels for one's head, difficult though this may be in these dancing days. We suspect that a suffrage ball in New York is in many ways a less objectionable affair than a London masquerade of the early eighteenth century given under the direction of the long forgotten John James Heidegger. It is fairly certain that in the same city at the same period "Orator Henley" was as convinced of his own omniscience as any sociologist or political economist who discusses the future of the family or white slavery before a woman's club. Every age must cherish its pet variation of the standing illusion of the race--that for our day and generation we are wiser than our ancestors were for theirs. Who would not run after a good thing, and what better things are there to run after than schemes for human regeneration, even if we frequently find that our rainbow has not led us to a pot of gold? Have we not been assured on good authority that out of the clash of opinions truth emerges? Is it not the prime article of our democratic creed that the _vox populi_ is the _vox dei_, and, even if the _vox populi_ speaks with an unmistakably sociological twang, is it not our duty, at the risk of being labelled "undesirable citizens," to imagine, nay, to believe and aver, that we are listening to the dulcet harmonies of heaven? What if that gruff old person, Dr. Samuel Johnson, would, were he alive, assert in his most stentorian tones that our strenuous democratic optimism is the vulgarest and the shallowest philosophy ever permitted by a too indulgent Providence to flourish under the sun! Is not the grumpy Doctor safely buried, and common sense along with him?

But this is no way to shake off the effects of a nightmare. Let us conclude in an humbler, more supplicatory strain. Will not our gifted reformers, for a while at least, forbear to announce that they have converted ethics into a science, and education into a highway to Paradise? Will not our politicians admit between their speeches, that people who question or censure their latest panaceas are, on the whole, exemplary and fairly intelligent citizens, who in no other respect than their momentary recalcitrancy seem to be fit candidates for a jail or an asylum? Will not exponents of New History, New Philosophy, and New Literature give a slightly larger portion of their time to reading what a not altogether benighted past managed to accomplish in those departments of human knowledge, speculation, and imaginative creation? Will not suffragists and anti-suffragists call a short truce for the purpose of admitting that, if a sense of humor and a spirit of tolerance are totally banished from our devoted country, the lot of future generations--if there are to be any--will be somewhat parlous? Finally, will not the ladies and gentlemen who are tearfully or gleefully forecasting the doom of the monogamous family, occasionally condescend to glance at Homer's description of the parting of Hector from Andromache and Astyanax, or at one of Raphael's Madonnas with the Christ-Child, with the intent of asking themselves whether in human evolution there are not other forces at work than those dubbed economic? Let but these good men and women consider without impatience their petitioner's modest requests, and he will wish them Godspeed in their commendable if arduous and often thankless task of regenerating the human race.

SOCIAL UNTRUTH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST

"The Author's object," said Dickens in the original preface to _Nicholas Nickleby_, "in calling public attention to the system would be very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person, emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down, lest they should be deemed impossible." In his preface to the later editions, he speaks of the race of Yorkshire schoolmasters in the past tense. "Though it has not yet finally disappeared," he says, "it is dwindling daily. A long day's work remains to be done about us in the way of education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities towards the attainment of a good one have been furnished, of late years, to those who can afford to pay for it."

But if, in his pursuit of this object, Dickens had drawn an exaggerated picture of Dotheboys Hall--even if he had depicted as representative of a type that which was, in point of fact, merely an individual and abnormal instance of an evil which in general was far less extreme--the only objection to such a course would have been the general objection to any form of untruth; unless, indeed, we were to add that manifest misrepresentation of this kind is less likely than a truthful presentation of the case to be effective for its object. Dickens was driving with all his might and main at a monstrous blot on English civilization, a hideous inhumanity and cruelty, to which hundreds of English children were subjected by heartless parents or guardians, and by brutal, sordid, and ignorant schoolmasters. And if in his zeal to wipe out that blot and to end that monstrous inhumanity he had over-stepped the bounds of legitimate portrayal, there are few who would not say that the offense was altogether pardonable. Yet he felt it necessary to assure the world that he had not done this; and in his preface he not only makes the general denial of such exaggeration quoted above, but points explicitly to the observations made by himself, and the records of courts of law, which form the basis of his exposure.