Chapter II: Part 2

Socialism strives to remedy what is evil alike in domestic and in economic life, and its tendency is to insist that the economic remedy is all-sufficient in every case. We should all join in the effort to do away with the evil; but we should refuse to have anything to do with remedies which are either absurd or mischievous, for such, of course, would merely aggravate the present suffering. The first thing to recognize is that, while economic reform is often vital, it is never all-sufficient. The moral reform, the change of character――in which law can sometimes play a large, but never the largest, part――is the most necessary of all. In dealing with the marriage relation the Socialist attitude is one of unmixed evil. Assuredly woman should be guarded and honored in every way, her rights jealously upheld, and any wrong done her should be regarded and punished with severe judgment; but we must keep in mind the obvious fact that equality of consideration does not mean identity of function. Our effort should be to raise the level of self-respect, self-control, sense of duty in both sexes, and not to push both down to an evil equality of moral turpitude by doing away with the self-restraint and sense of obligation which have been slowly built up through the ages. We must bring them to a moral level by raising the lower standard, not by depressing the high. It is idle to prattle against the “economic dependence” of woman upon man. In the ideal household――an ideal which I believe, though very far from being universally realized, is yet now more generally realized than ever before――there is really complete economic interdependence, as well as the high spiritual and moral interdependence which is more nearly attained in happy wedlock, in a permanent partnership of love and duty, than in any other relation of life which the world has yet seen. Rights should be forfeited by neither partner; and duties should be shirked by neither partner. The duty of the woman to be the child-bearer and home-keeper is just as obvious, simple, and healthy as the duty of the man to be the breadwinner and, if necessary, the soldier. Whenever either the man or the woman loses the power or the will to perform these obvious duties, the loss is irreparable, and whatever may be the gain in ease, amiable softness, self-indulgent pleasure, or even artistic and material achievement, the whole civilization is rotten and must fall.

So with our industrial system. In many respects the wage system can be bettered; but screaming about “wage slavery” is largely absurd; at this moment, for instance, I am a “wage slave” of The Outlook. Under certain conditions and in certain cases the co-operative system can to a greater or less degree be substituted with advantage for, or, more often, can be used to supplement, the wage system; but only on condition of recognizing the widely different needs occasioned by different conditions, which needs are so diverse that they must sometimes be met in totally different ways.

We should do everything that can be done, by law or otherwise, to keep the avenues of occupation, of employment, of work, of interest, so open that there shall be, so far as it is humanly possible to achieve it, a measurable equality of opportunity; an equality of opportunity for each man to show the stuff that is in him. When it comes to reward, let each man, within the limits set by a sound and far-sighted morality, get what, by his energy, intelligence, thrift, courage, he is able to get, with the opportunity open. We must set our faces against privilege; just as much against the kind of privilege which would let the shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother has earned as against the privilege which allows the huge capitalist to take toll to which he is not entitled. We stand for equality of opportunity, but not for equality of reward unless there is also equality of service. If the service is equal, let the reward be equal; but let the reward depend on the service; and, mankind being composed as it is, there will be inequality of service for a long time to come, no matter how great the equality of opportunity may be; and just so long as there is inequality of service it is eminently desirable that there should be inequality of reward.

We recognize, and are bound to war against, the evils of to-day. The remedies are partly economic and partly spiritual, partly to be obtained by laws, and in greater part to be obtained by individual and associated effort; for character is the vital matter, and character cannot be created by law. These remedies include a religious and moral teaching which shall increase the spirit of human brotherhood; an educational system which shall train men for every form of useful service――and which shall train us to prize common sense no less than morality; such a division of the profits of industry as shall tend to encourage intelligent and thrifty tool-users to become tool-owners; and a government so strong, just, wise, and democratic that, neither lagging too far behind nor pushing heedlessly in advance, it may do its full share in promoting these ends.

Quack Cure-Alls for the Body Politic

The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism, nor unrestricted individualism, nor any other ism, will bring about the millennium. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation. No individual man could be kept healthy by living in accordance with a plan which took cognizance only of one set of muscles or set of organs; his health must depend upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care which affects hundreds of different organs according to their hundreds of needs. Society is, of course, infinitely more complex than the human body. The influences that tell upon it are countless; they are closely interwoven, interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others. It is pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe that some one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and haltings, we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress something can be done by continually striving to improve the social system, now here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come to each individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the attainment of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must represent the struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown not merely in the dealings of each of us within the realm of the State, but even more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate realm of the family; for the life of the State rests and must ever rest upon the life of the family and the neighborhood.

The Japanese Question

There are certain elementary principles all of which should be kept steadily in view if a nation wishes to act justly both by itself and by others. It must insist upon what is necessary for its own healthy life, and this even at the cost of a possible clash; but this insistence on what is due to itself should always be accompanied by all possible courtesy to and fair dealing with others.

These are the principles upon which the people of the United States should act as regards the question of the immigration of the Japanese into this country. The Japanese are a highly civilized people of extraordinary military, artistic, and industrial development; they are proud, warlike, and sensitive. I believe that our people have, what I personally certainly have, a profound and hearty admiration for them; an admiration for their great deeds and great qualities, an ungrudging respect for their national character. But this admiration and respect is accompanied by the firm conviction that it is not for the advantage of either people that emigrants from either country should settle in mass in the other country. The understanding between the two countries on this point should be on a basis of entire mutuality, and therefore on a basis which will preserve unimpaired the self-respect of each country, and permit each to continue to feel friendly good will for the other. Japan would certainly object to the incoming of masses of American farmers, laborers, and small traders; indeed, the Japanese would object to this at least as strongly as the men of the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States object to the incoming in mass of Japanese workmen, agricultural laborers, and men engaged in small trades. The Japanese certainly object to Americans acquiring land in Japan at least as much as the Americans of the far Western States object to the Japanese acquiring land on our soil. The Americans who go to Japan and the Japanese who come to America should be of the same general class――that is, they should be travelers, students, teachers, scientific investigators, men engaged in international business, men sojourning in the land for pleasure or study. As long as the emigration from each side is limited to classes such as these, there will be no settlement in mass, and therefore no difficulty. Wherever there is settlement in mass――that is, wherever there is a large immigration of urban or agricultural laborers, or of people engaged in small local business of any kind――there is sure to be friction. It is against the interests of both nations that such unrestricted immigration or settlement in mass should be allowed as regards either nation. This is the cardinal fact in the situation; it should be freely recognized by both countries, and can be accepted by each not only without the slightest loss of self-respect, but with the certainty that its acceptance will tend to preserve mutual respect and friendliness.

But in achieving this policy we should bear steadily in mind that it is our duty to combine the maximum of efficiency with the minimum of offensiveness. Only the National Government can carry out such a policy effectively, and the surest way to do harm is for State, municipal, or other local governments to pass laws which would be ineffective to obtain the real object and yet would produce intense irritation. The best of all possible ways in which to achieve the object is that which the governments of the two countries have now by common agreement adopted; for the Japanese Government has on its own initiative and of its own accord undertaken to prevent the coming hither in any appreciable numbers of Japanese of the classes to which I have referred. This agreement during the last year or thereabouts has worked so well that actually more Japanese have left the country than have come into it, and there has therefore been a diminution of their numbers. If this continues, all difficulties will cease without the need of further action, whether by treaty or by legislation. On the one hand, it is for the common interest of both countries that Japan should effectively and rigorously carry out this policy. On the other hand, it is not only the interest but the duty of America to take no further action until it can be seen whether this policy is successful; and this is just as wise, just as incumbent on us, whether we do or do not believe that it will be successful. The success of the policy must be gauged by its actual results; that is, by the extent to which it arrests the immigration of large bodies of Japanese. If the Japanese Government proves unable to carry its policy through, then undoubtedly this Government, by treaty or by legislation, must protect itself and secure the desired result on its own initiative. But in such a case it would be doubly incumbent upon us to take the action in the way that would provoke the least possible friction and cause the least possible hard feeling. Moreover, we should make it evident that the recognition of the fact that it is to the interest of both races that the masses of both races should be kept apart is in no way incompatible with the heartiest feelings of mutual respect and admiration between the two races.

The fact that all really patriotic and far-sighted Americans insist that hand in hand with a policy of good will toward foreign nations should go the policy of the upbuilding of our navy is often interpreted by well-meaning but short-sighted men as being a threat toward other nations, or as being provocative of war. Of the two assumptions the first is utterly unwarranted, and the second is the direct reverse of the truth. We have the right to say, for instance, what immigrants shall come to our own shores; but we are powerless to enforce this right against any nation that chooses to disregard our wishes, unless we continue to build up and maintain a first-class fighting navy. The professional peace advocate who wishes us to stop building up our navy is, in reality, seeking to put us in a position where we would be absolutely at the mercy of any other nation that happened to wish to disregard our desires to control the immigration that comes to our shores, to protect our own interests in the Panama Canal, to protect our own citizens abroad, or to take any stand whatever either for our own international honor or in the interest of international righteousness. Moreover, those well-meaning but fatuous advocates of peace who would try to prevent the upbuilding of our navy utterly misread the temper of their countrymen. We Americans are ourselves both proud and high-spirited, and we are not always by any means far-sighted. If our honor or our interest were menaced by a foreign power, this Nation would fight, wholly without regard to whether or not its navy was efficient. In the event of a crisis arising, the peace advocates who object to our building up the navy would be absolutely powerless to prevent this country going to war. All they could do would be to prevent its being successful in the war. A strong navy is the surest guaranty of peace that America can have, and the cheapest insurance against war that Uncle Sam can possibly pay.

Tolstoy

One of the comic features of the political campaign last fall was the letter which Count Tolstoy wrote on behalf of Mr. Bryan. In this letter Count Tolstoy advocated the election of Mr. Bryan on the ground that he was the representative of the party of peace, of anti-militarism. From the point of view of American politics, the incident possessed no importance beyond furnishing material for the humorous columns of the newspapers. But it had a certain real interest as indicating Count Tolstoy’s worth as a moral guide. He advocated Mr. Bryan on the theory that Mr. Bryan represented peace and anti-militarism. Now there was but one point in the platform of either political party in 1908 which contained any element of menace to the peace of the world. This was the plank in the Bryanite platform which demanded the immediate exclusion by law of all Asiatic laborers, and therefore of the Japanese. Coupled with it was the utterly meaningless plank about the Navy, which was, however, intended to convey the impression that we ought to have a navy only for the defense of our coasts――that is, a merely “defensive” navy, or, in other words, a quite worthless navy. Now I have shown in a preceding editorial that at this present time there is neither justification nor excuse for such a law――and this wholly without regard to what the future may show. The exclusion plank in Mr. Bryan’s platform represented merely an idle threat, a wanton insult, and it was coupled with what was intended to be a declaration that the policy of upbuilding the Navy, which has been so successfully carried on during the past dozen years, would be abandoned. Any man of common sense, therefore, ought to perceive the self-evident fact that the only menace to peace which was contained in any possible action by the American Republic was that contained in the election of Mr. Bryan and the attempt to put into effect his platform. That Count Tolstoy did not see this affords a curious illustration of his complete inability to face facts; of his readiness to turn aside from the truth in the pursuit of any phantom, however foolish; and of the utter fatuity of those who treat him as a philosopher, whose philosophy should be, or could be, translated into action.

Count Tolstoy is a man of genius, a great novelist. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karénina,” “The Cossacks,” “Sebastopol,” are great books. As a novelist he has added materially to the sum of production of his generation. As a professional philosopher and moralist I doubt if his influence has really been very extensive among men of action; of course it has a certain weight among men who live only in the closet, in the library; and among the high-minded men of this type, who, because of their sheltered lives, naturally reject what is immoral, and do not have to deal with what is fantastic, in Tolstoy’s teachings, it is probable that the really lofty side of these teachings gives them a certain sense of spiritual exaltation. But I have no question that whatever little influence Tolstoy has exerted among men of action has told, on the whole, for evil. I do not think his influence over men of action has been great, for I think he has swayed or dominated only the feeble folk and the fantastic folk. No man who possesses both robust common sense and high ideals, and who strives to apply both in actual living, is affected by Tolstoy’s teachings, save as he is affected by the teachings of hundreds of other men in whose writings there are occasional truths mixed with masses of what is commonplace or erroneous. Strong men may gain something from Tolstoy’s moral teachings, but only on condition that they are strong enough and sane enough to be repelled by those parts of his teachings which are foolish or immoral. Weak persons are hurt by the teachings. Still, I think that the mere fact that these weak persons are influenced sufficiently to be marred means that there was not in them a very great quantity of potential usefulness to mar. In the United States we suffer from grave moral dangers; but they are for the most part dangers which Tolstoy would neither perceive nor know how to combat. Moreover, the real and dreadful evils which do in fact share in his denunciation of an attack upon both good and evil are usually not evils which are of much moment among us. On the other hand, we are not liable to certain kinds of wickedness which there is real danger of his writings inculcating; for it is a lamentable fact that, as is so often the case with a certain type of mystical zealot, there is in him a dark streak which tells of moral perversion. That side of his teachings which is partially manifested in the revolting “Kreutzer Sonata” can do exceedingly little damage in America, for it would appeal only to decadents; exactly as it could have come only from a man who, however high he may stand in certain respects, has in him certain dreadful qualities of the moral pervert.

The usual effect of prolonged and excessive indulgence in Tolstoyism on American disciples is comic rather than serious. One of these disciples, for instance, not long ago wrote a book on American municipal problems, which ascribed our ethical and social shortcomings in municipal matters in part to the sin of “militarism.” Now the mind of this particular writer in making such a statement was influenced not in the least by what had actually occurred or was occurring in our cities, but by one of Tolstoy’s theories which has no possible bearing upon American life. Militarism is a real factor for good or for evil in most European countries. In America it has not the smallest effect one way or the other; it is a negligible quantity. There are undoubtedly states of society where militarism is a grave evil, and there are plenty of circumstances in which the prime duty of man may be to strive against it. But it is not righteous war, not even war itself, which is the absolute evil, the evil which is evil always and under all circumstances. Militarism which takes the form of a police force, municipal or national, may be the prime factor for upholding peace and righteousness. Militarism is to be condemned or not purely according to the conditions. So eating horse meat is in itself a mere matter of taste; but the early Christian missionaries in Scandinavia found that serious evil sprang from the custom of eating horse meat in honor of Odin. It is literally true that our very grave municipal problems in New York or Chicago have no more to do with militarism than with eating the meat of horses that have been sacrificed to pagan deities; and a crusade against one habit, as an element in municipal reform, is just about as rational as would be a crusade against the other. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that it had taken a century to remove the lark from American literature; because the poets insisted upon writing, not about the birds they saw, but about the birds they had read of in the writings of other poets. Militarism as an evil in our social life is as purely a figment of the imagination as the skylark in our literature. Moreover, the fact that in spite of this total absence of militarism there is so much that is evil in our life, so much need for reform, ought to show persons who think that the destruction of militarism would bring about the millennium how completely they lack the sense of perspective.

Another disciple used to write poetry in defense of the Mahdi, apparently under the vague impression that this also was a protest against militarism and therefore in line with Tolstoy’s teachings――as very possibly it was. Now, Mahdism was as hideous an exhibition of bloodthirsty cruelty, governmental tyranny, corruption and inefficiency, and homicidal religious fanaticism as the world has ever seen. Its immediate result was to destroy over half the population in the area where it held sway, and to bring the most dreadful degradation and suffering to the remainder. It represented in the aggregate more wickedness, more wrong-doing, more human suffering, than all the wickedness, wrong-doing, and human suffering in all the Christian communities put together during the same period. It was characteristic of the fantastic perversion of morality which naturally results from the serious acceptance of Tolstoy as a moral teacher that one manifestation of this acceptance should have been a defense of Mahdism. Of course when the Anglo-Egyptian army overthrew Mahdism it conferred a boon upon all mankind, and most of all upon the wretched inhabitants of the Sudan.

So much for Tolstoyism in America, the only place where I have studied it in action, and where its effect, although insignificant for good, has been not much more significant for evil, being absurd rather than serious. As to the effect in Russia itself, I am not competent to speak. But the history of the Duma proved in the most emphatic way that the greatest danger to liberalism in Russia sprang from the fact that the liberals were saturated with just such folly as that taught by Tolstoy. The flat contradiction between his theory and practice in such matters as his preaching concerning the relations of the sexes, and also concerning private property――for of course it is an unlovely thing to profit by the private property of one’s wife and children, while affecting to cast it aside――is explicable only by one of two very sad hypotheses, neither of which it is necessary here to discuss. The important point is that his preaching is compounded of some very beautiful and lofty sentiments, with much that is utterly fantastic, and with some things that are grossly immoral. The Duma fell far short of what its friends in other lands hoped for, just because it showed these very same traits, and because it failed to develop the power for practical common-sense work. There were plenty of members who could utter the loftiest moral sentiments, sentiments quite as lofty as those once uttered by Robespierre; but there was an insufficiency of members able and willing to go to work in practical fashion, able and willing to try to make society measurably better by cutting out the abuses that could be cut out, and by starting things on the right road, instead of insisting upon doing nothing unless they could immediately introduce the millennium and reform all the abuses of society out of hand with a jump. What was needed was a body of men like those who made our Constitution; men accustomed to work with their fellows, accustomed to compromise; men who clung to high ideals, but who were imbued with the philosophy which Abraham Lincoln afterwards so strikingly exemplified, and were content to take the best possible where the best absolute could not be secured. This was the spirit of Washington and his associates in one great crisis of our National life, of Lincoln and his associates in the other great crisis. It is the only spirit from which it will ever be possible to secure good results in a free country; and it is the direct negation of Tolstoyism.

To minimize the chance of anything but willful misunderstanding, let me repeat that Tolstoy is a great writer, a great novelist; that the unconscious influence of his novels is probably, on the whole, good, even disregarding their standing as works of art; that even as a professional moralist and philosophical adviser of mankind in religious matters he has some excellent theories and on some points develops a noble and elevating teaching; but that taken as a whole, and if generally diffused, his moral and philosophical teachings, so far as they had any influence at all, would have an influence for bad; partly because on certain points they teach downright immorality, but much more because they tend to be both foolish and fantastic, and if logically applied would mean the extinction of humanity in a generation.

A Southerner’s View of the South

It seems rather queer to go abroad and discover an American author. Two books have appeared in England during the last year or two, named “The Scar” and “The Scourge.” They have been a success, not only in England, but on the Continent; for translations have appeared or are appearing in German, French, and Russian. Yet they are by an American, Mr. Warrington Dawson, of South Carolina; and they deal with localities, questions, and types exclusively and typically American. It is not very creditable to us that this American, writing with unusual power of American scenes and problems, should have an exclusively European audience.

Mr. Dawson’s stories are laid in the country districts and small towns of Virginia. In each volume a Northerner, in the first a woman, in the second a man, is thrown into intimate contact with the members of a proud caste of provincial aristocrats, who have been slowly sinking under the burden of grinding poverty, whose poverty-stricken lives are both hardening and narrowing, but in whose strongly individualized natures there dwell qualities and capacities of the highest kind. It is in his studies of these native Southern whites――both men and women, both those who are painfully struggling upwards and those whom an iron fate is slowly forcing downwards――and in his studies of the dark-skinned alien race standing so utterly aloof from them and so intimately connected with them, that Mr. Dawson excels; and it is not necessary to agree with all his conclusions in order to appreciate the value of his work. But almost equally good is the study of the Northerner who dwells South, who has made a real business success, who is in his own fashion devoted to the interests of the people with whom he has spent his life, but whom they at bottom never cease to regard as an interloper; and Mr. Dawson is entirely just in showing how ungenerous and unwarranted part of this attitude is, and, on the other hand, the measure of justification which it has in the hard narrowness that makes the intruder insist on trying to do good to the community in many ways which represent what is either unnecessary or even injurious.

I have no intention of writing a criticism of Mr. Dawson’s two books; but it is worth while calling attention to the fact that this author, who writes with power and interest of vital home matters, has his critics and his audience abroad, but has neither critics nor audience at home. He should have both.

The Thraldom of Names

It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names, and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the reverence for or antipathy toward a given name in order to achieve some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of “liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word “order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a State or by a private corporation.

Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of the Second Republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny and all public order have disappeared together. The Second Empire in France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did not produce another violent reaction, but left the French Republic standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be ruled by a king as by a mob.

Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the direction of the Great Monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.

We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist, between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement of the Eighth Commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”

First and foremost we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern exposure of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into a terror-struck defense of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential that we should wrest the control of the Government out of the hands of rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to put the control of the Government into the hands of demagogues and visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with, as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it would make no more difference that one was called individualism, and the other collectivism, than it made in French history whether tyranny was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a Committee of National Safety, or of a King.

The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical, are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his own devices, he will utterly discredit the entire system of government by individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will, he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by the State that any abuses connected with the untrammeled control of all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We cannot afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits. It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the functions of the State. It has been shown beyond power of refutation that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” cannot be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private monopoly if the State does not interfere at all, as it would be crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets of the extreme Socialists.

In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential both to the material and moral progress of the country that these forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth. What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr. Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex American character; it would have been marvelous if a stranger of his slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):

“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.