Chapter II: Part 2

Perhaps you think that Society, as such, cares little about these things. You are eternally wrong. Society is a group of men and women and children. The best of the men and the best of the women think deeply, as the best of men and women think deeply everywhere. Because it is educated, and because it, too, is engaged in an eternal fight for life, Society, perhaps, studies these matters more zealously and more accurately than the rest of the world that makes a nation.

The leaders of the social world in the middle of the last century saw as clearly as any one the tendencies of the time, and recognized as fully as any one the bearing of the conditions of labour and capital upon the purely social problems. They knew that because wealth was evenly distributed as it flowed from the mine, the forest, and the field, Society had nothing to fear. They knew, too, that, when the division of wealth began to be uneven, danger to the social world began. The lesson of the French Revolution was better understood in those days than it is to-day in high Society--because high Society in those days had, at least, read Carlyle or Junius; while to-day it reads little more than the Sunday editions of the newspapers.

Very few, in that time, were the new recruits in the army of Society. The old laws still lived. The ancient families of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia still held sway. The leader of the social world could afford to speak of her father and her grandfather and even, in some cases, of her great-grandfather, without treading on dangerous ground. The subtle barriers of caste, flimsy as they always are in a new country, had yet withstood all the puny assaults to which they had been exposed.

Happy, indeed, was Society; and happy, too, were the people of the country. Yet the poison was even then at work within their veins. Already, here and there, rich men were selling out of industry, taking their mighty profits, and moving away from the industrial cities and towns into the great social and business centres. There is no social index to record the exodus; but one may note, here and there, in government reports of the time, strange facts that to-day are all too clear in their meaning.

In the year 1840, at the beginning of this golden period of national happiness and prosperity, there were in this country 1,240 cotton manufacturing plants, with a combined gross output of $46,000,000 worth of goods. Each plant made $37,000 worth of goods. Twenty years later, the number of plants was 1,091, and the output was $115,000,000.

Our fathers saw these figures; but it is not on record that any man, at that time, saw their true meaning. It was simply, to their minds, the working out of the factory system to its completion. It meant economy. It was part of the same system that had reduced the cost of making a yard of broadcloth from fifty cents in 1823 to fifteen cents in 1840.

They could not, naturally, see in it, as we can, the seeds of a revolution that was to make over again the America of that day, to drag the boasted freedom of America in the mire of poverty, to prostitute our political system, to tear and wreck and sweep away the sacred barriers of Society. It was, in truth, the handwriting on the wall, but America lacked a prophet. If, indeed, there had been such a one, his warning would have been in vain. For evolution is inexorable; and the nation, high and low, rich and poor, poverty and Society--all are but its creatures, brought into life by it, buried at its command.

Let me hurry on to sketch the progress of this wonderful change that was to found in America two great new classes, the Idle Rich and the Slaves of Industry.

I have compiled a table from the census reports, dealing with textile industries alone, because that branch of manufacturing was the oldest and one of the greatest, as it is to-day, and because it illustrates perhaps better than any other the progress of principles, rather than the influence of special causes, particularly through this twenty-year period of which I am writing:

TEXTILE INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES

Average Av. No. of
Year No. Capital Employés Product Average

1860 3027 50,000 65 75,500
1870 4790 62,500 57 108,600
1880 4018 103,000 96 144,000

In these few figures all the industrial history of that great period may be found epitomized. The number of plants, instead of increasing as the volume of demand for products increased, was contracted. The leadership of the trade, and, therefore, the making of prices, was taken by the houses of larger capital. The average capital employed in the trade doubled in the twenty years. The output also doubled for the average factory. The number of employés, on the other hand, increased but half. Better machinery, more efficient control over the workers, more drastic industrial discipline, fiercer industrial competition for individual work, did their destiny-appointed task.

Here one begins to see on this broad canvas, but faint in outline, the tracing of the picture of America to-day. The chains began to tighten. Men who had grown to comfortable wealth in the long period of small factories, scattered industries, and free and easy industrial democracy, began to gather together into industrial groups. Little industries were rolled together into big industries. The capital of the factory expanded, doubling, on an average, in the decade. At the same time, by more intense methods of carrying on the trades, the number of employés needed to produce a given value of products was cut down.

Let me turn, for a moment, to introduce a slight record of that industry which has done more, perhaps, than any other to bring about the creation of the class of whom I write--the idle rich. I have not dwelt upon it in the beginnings of American industry, for it was scarcely existent. I refer to the iron and steel industry.

In 1860 there were in this country only 402 plants manufacturing wrought, forged, and rolled iron. They used an average of $58,000 of capital apiece, produced products worth $91,000 each, and employed an average of 55 men. In 1880--twenty years--there were 1,005 such plants, with an average capital of $23,000, average products of $296,005, and an average roll of 121 men. Here the evolution of an industry from the small, scattered plants to the concentrated, efficient, and powerful “combine” is unmistakable.

To summarize: In this twenty-year period, the value of products trebled, while the number of workers doubled. The wealth-producing capacity of each worker increased from $1,438 to $2,015.

If the tendency toward monopoly was striking in the twenty years from 1860 to 1880, what may one say of the twenty years that followed? In the iron and steel trade, the 699 plants of 1880, with an average production of $419,000 each, became 668 with an average production of $1,203,500 in 1900. The average number of employés per plant rose from 197 to 333. In the cotton mills, the average number of employés in each mill rose during the same period from 287 to 1,185.

Here is the birthplace of the idle rich. Hundreds of men who had owned small manufacturing plants sold them out at good profits in the first ten years of this era and retired to live on the proceeds. Men who, twenty years before, had built their puny mills on river banks and rapidly developed them into great wealth-producing plants by natural growth, then turned them over to the trusts and combinations at prices that would have staggered the imagination of the fathers of the industry.

The firm gave way to the corporation. Industries that had been for generations family affairs were suddenly capitalized in the form of stocks and bonds, and the owners retired from the active business, hiring skilled men to carry on the work. They themselves sat down in comfort and ease and luxury to draw their sustenance from interest and dividends on the securities that represented the plants.

Into the mighty cities of the East there moved an ever-growing army of those who had gathered, from the mines of California, from the forges of Pittsburg, from the forests of Michigan, from the metalled mountains of Montana, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. They had capitalized the products of their own labour, and brought with them the tangible evidences of wealth in the shape of stocks and bonds.

I remember very well the first great march of the suddenly rich upon the social capitals of the nation. Very distinctly it comes back to me with what a shock the fact came home to the sons and daughters of what was pleased to call itself the aristocracy of America that here marched an army better provisioned, better armed with wealth, than any other army that had ever assaulted the citadels of Society.

The effect of these immigrations from the fields of labour to the cities of capital I shall sketch more fully in another chapter. I would now, instead, touch upon the conditions that they left behind them, the conditions that made possible their own retirement from actual labour to the ease and comfort of luxurious leisure.

It is not too much to say that they left behind them a people reduced to industrial slavery. Gone forever was the free America our fathers knew. Faded into history was the ideal of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln. From the year 1890 onward the progress of the United States has been the fearful march of manufacturing industry. In that year the products of industry and agricultural wealth were about equal. Ten years later the products of industry were two to one against the wealth gathered from the fields.

Side by side with this conquest of America went the growth of tenant farming, as against the old free tenure farming that had marched steadily into the farthest untilled corners of the land so long as land was free. To-day there is no free land within the borders of the nation, save for a few small tracts hardly worth mentioning. Here, as in the industries, capital did not hesitate to claim and capture all that it dared. Law after law was passed to prevent the centralization of the power of exploiters over great tracts of the West. Law after law was broken, evaded, or laughed at. Once the spirit of exploitation on a large scale was abroad in the land, nothing could stand against it.

To gain its ends, wealth crept stealthily into every seat of power. The law stood in its way; therefore, in legislative halls and in political caucuses, wealth had to have its representatives. The legislatures, the courts, the press--these were made pawns in the game of exploitation. Where-ever possible, the army of exploiters laid profane hands even upon the trusteed funds that guard the poverty of the spoiled and broken, the funds of the savings-banks, and of the insurance companies. Nothing was sacred; nothing was secure.

The raw material of wealth, as I have stated in a previous chapter, is the labour of men. In the days of individual effort, exploitation of labour was not possible, for men shied off from the chains of the exploiter, took to the boundless free fields of the West, and declared over again that they would dwell and labour in freedom, or they would die.

But, in the census of 1900, it is shown clearly that the average employé in this country produces every year $1,280 of wealth, after full allowance for the cost of the material he works with and all possible running expenses that are paid by his employer. Out of this amount of wealth he gets $437. The remainder, $843, goes into the hands of other men--the capitalist or the exploiter of labour.

That money, nearly two thirds of the wealth produced by the men who labour with their hands and heads, goes to pay interest and dividends on the securities that represent the increment gathered by those who sold out in other days, or who capitalized their plants and settled down to draw their sustenance from the labour of other men.

Hence the idle rich. I do not mean to say that by any means all of the dividends and interest are gathered by the idle rich. Such a condition as that can exist but once in the history of a nation. It came about in Rome--and it led to the fall. It came about in France--and it led to the terror. Here, in America, it has gone far to be sure, and the tendency is still onward; but it has not yet quite reached a point where one may say: “To-morrow the harvest is ripe!”

“_As well might the oligarchy attempt to stay the flux and reflux
of the tides as to attempt to stay the progress of freedom in
the South. Approved of God, the edict of the genius of Universal
Emancipation has been proclaimed to the world, and nothing,
save Deity himself, can possibly reverse it. To connive at the
perpetuation of slavery is to disobey the commands of Heaven. Not
to be an abolitionist is to be a wilful and diabolical instrument
of the devil. The South needs to be free, the South wants to be
free, the South SHALL be free!_”

--HINTON ROWAN HELPER.

_Chapter Four_

WHO ARE THE SLAVES?

For thirty years, since 1880, we have been piling up wealth in the hands of men who do not work. In almost every year there has been pouring from our mills a steady grist of idlers. It has gone so far that to-day, in every city of the Union, the class of the idle rich has reached proportions that to the thoughtful student of events are alarming. The millionaire habit has spread until to-day men of millions are far more numerous in our great cities than were men of one tenth the wealth twenty years ago.

I do not desire to criticize wealth; for I am not a Socialist, and I entertain no Utopian dreams concerning the equal distribution of wealth among the people or the public control of all sources of wealth. I agree thoroughly with Mr. Carnegie, and with much older economists, in the opinion that any arbitrary distribution of wealth, or any arbitrary assignment of the sources of wealth, would be but temporary, and would be followed by another period of adjustment which would end with the reappropriation of wealth and the reassignment of the sources of wealth into the hands best qualified by nature to hold them. I take it to be proven by the experience of the world that individual exploitation of the sources of wealth remains as the established basis of the industrial, commercial, and social development of the world.

Yet, I confess, the terrific sweep of industrialism across this land throughout the past century appalls me as I study it from records written and unwritten. I cannot go down through the crowded tenement sections of our great cities without having it borne in upon me that we as a nation pay a fearful price in human blood and tears for our industrial triumphs. I cannot see the poverty, even the degradation, of the wives and children of the wage-working class in many cities, and even in many rural districts, without being visited by the devastating thought that surely, if the principle of the thing be necessary and right, there must be fearful errors somewhere in the application of the principle.

For the grim fact stands out beyond denial that the men who are the workers of the nation, and the women and the children dependent upon them, are not to-day given the opportunities that are their proper birthright in free America; and that, struggle as they will, save as they may, lift their voices in protest as they dare, they cannot obtain from our industrial hierarchy much more than a mere living wage. And, on the other hand, it is equally true that the wage of capital is high, that the class of idle rich has grown out of all proportion, and that it has taken upon itself a power and an arrogance unsurpassed in the industrial history of the world.

Somewhere there is something wrong. I speak as a rich man. I speak as a representative of the class of which I write, and to which in particular I address myself. We can no longer blind ourselves with idle phrases or drug our consciences with the outworn boast that the workingman of America is to-day the highest paid artisan in the world. We know those lying figures well. Many a time I myself, in personal argument, have shown that the American workman receives from one and a half to three times as much as his English cousin at the same trade; but we know now that it means nothing. We are learning, instead of envying the American workingman his lot, to pity more deeply that English cousin. We are learning, too, that what we give our workers in wages we take back from them in the higher cost of necessities, in food, in clothing, in medicine, in insurance--in a hundred devious ways all with one tendency--to keep the living margin down.

Many centuries ago two great Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, predicted that the time would come when the tools of wealth production--machinery--would have reached such an advanced stage of development that it would become unnecessary to enslave anybody for the sake of allowing any one class to devote itself to the pursuit of culture. These great philosophers believed in slavery during that period of the world’s development in which they lived, on the ground that only by the exploitation of forced labour could any class be left free to develop the higher attributes of mankind. Yet both looked forward to the time when, in the progress of humanity toward the ideal, the perfection of methods would permit the emancipation of all mankind.

Aristotle and Plato were no visionaries. Their dreams, so far as the methods are concerned, are to-day realities; but, alas, how different the result! Instead of emancipation we have welded about the necks of the people the chains of industrial slavery. It is true that the form of slavery, the direct exploitation of the bodies of men, has been wiped out in every civilized nation; but is it not equally true that since our own great struggle for freedom from the pollution of chattel slavery we have but stepped out of a process of direct exploitation of a few enchained slaves into a process far more expansive and embracing far more people, namely, the indirect exploitation of wage workers for the benefit of capital?

The fruit of the genius of the inventors of the world is plucked not by the hands of the workers, but by the hands of the comparatively small and personally insignificant class who, by virtue of the genius of their fathers, or by virtue of mere chance, administer the tremendous power of capital.

The evolution of the ages, then, has brought about this strangely ironical condition. Humanity is face to face with a God-given opportunity to acquire and apply knowledge. The wealth producing machinery of the world has the capacity to give to all men the opportunity of enjoying leisure. Knowledge and culture are the proper birthright of humanity to-day. Even in the face of obstacles, knowledge and culture spread among the people. Only one great obstacle remained to block the fulfillment of the prophecy of the great philosophers. That obstacle is the idle rich. It is the leisure class that to-day destroys the spirit of our dream.

It cannot be for long. We in America are moving fast toward social revolution. Conflicts between labour and capital are assuming the proportions of civil war. The once powerful middle class, which is the safety of every nation, is to-day weak, and is every day declining. Soon, politically it will be a memory, and the battle field will be cleared for conflict.

It is, I know, a hopeless and a thankless task for any man to raise his voice in an appeal for peace. The forces which have been set in motion in the making of America so far must, I suppose, run their allotted course. To-day the class spirit in America is thoroughly aroused, and it is almost with terror that I, a representative of one of the two classes that are to fight this battle, raise my feeble voice in warning to the other members of my class.

But lately I have read again a monumental work, written fifty years ago by a Southerner, in an attempt to turn the minds of his fellow citizens from the fatal error of chattel slavery. The book is called “The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It.” Of all the books that I have ever read upon public problems it has always seemed to me to be the most sane and factual. Here is a paragraph taken from it which I marked when first I read the book, and which I have read over and over again with infinite satisfaction:

The truth is that slavery destroys or vitiates, or pollutes
whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence
of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the
nostrils of Christendom--it makes Southern politics a libel upon
all the principles of republicanism--it makes Southern literature
a travesty upon the honourable profession of letters.... When will
the South, as a whole, abandoning its present suicidal policy,
enter upon that career of prosperity, greatness, and true renown,
to which God by His word and His providence is calling it? That
voice, by whomsoever spoken, must yet be heard and heeded. The time
hastens--the doom of slavery is written--the redemption of the
South draws nigh.

To-day the author’s position is similar to that of Helper, who wrote these words, save that it differs in one important particular. Helper, though a Southerner, was not a slave-holder. I am in every sense a member of the class to whom I write. I do not flatter myself that my words will have any more effect among mine own people than Helper’s had among the people of the South, but fortunately my voice is but one of a hundred that are raised to-day to warn the leisure class of the rocks toward which it is drifting.

Hinton Rowan Helper died but a little time ago. Four years after the appearance of his book he saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the end of that war he saw the states of his beloved South bent like reeds in a storm, its armies overthrown, its fields laid waste, its homes destroyed, its cherished institutions gone forever. I wonder, as I write, whether it be possible in this age of civilization and advancement that I, too, am but a voice crying in the wilderness. Will our capitalist class, like the old French monarchy, “learn nothing and forget nothing?”

Many a time, while engaged in the manifold activities of social life, at a dinner or a ball, or amusing myself in the country, this question has come to me. I have wondered whether it is all really as it seems. Here are gay hearts, merry voices, lives all brimming with laughter, young men and maidens all untouched by the sterner things of life, boys with their fortunes to inherit and high positions in life secured, débutantes with every problem solved for them, a formulated education leading to a formulated social routine, stately matrons born to rule their little social world, fine men and women of more ripened years, whose careers have led to what seemed a purposeful goal. It all seems happy and light-hearted, and yet there _must_ be shadows, if these men and women are really men and women, and not mere thoughtless, heartless, brainless creatures. Is it, again, “after us the deluge?”

Again, I remember very well an occasion this past winter, when the same thought came to me. I was dining in one of the city hotels. Music and laughter flooded the place as sunshine floods the fields. Outwardly, the scene had all the appearance of perfect ease and happiness. Looking around, I lighted by chance upon a table where a group of elderly people, all well known to me, were dining. They were people who live well, and who take a large part in the social world as well as in the world of business. I watched them as they talked. I noted an air of gravity, of seriousness, and I wondered what it was all about. A little later, as their table assumed the normal aspect, I went over and exchanged greetings with them. Incidentally, I asked them what had made them so very serious throughout the evening.

One of them, an old friend of mine, told me. They had been discussing a statement that had appeared as a news item during the afternoon. It was part of a speech made in the senate at Washington. It was an attack upon the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It was really a veiled denunciation of the principle upon which Society is founded. These men and women, all part and parcel of the social world, had spent most of their evening discussing that item of news.

A very few years ago such an episode as this would have been dismissed by almost any group of men and women who belonged to Society, with hardly a single thought. Somebody might have introduced the subject; somebody else would have abusively called the senator a demagogue, or an agitator, or a Socialist--and the conversation would have drifted on into the latest sporting news or talk of somebody’s ball a month or so away. But now, the older men and women of Society know better. They have learned, in fact, to distinguish real news from mere sensation. They know a statesman from a demagogue and facts from sensations.

I do not say that it is general, this tendency to take seriously the social, industrial, and economic questions of the day. In my own case, I do know that up to a very few years ago none of these problems bothered me very much. I know that very rarely did I hear the question raised as to the permanence of the conditions under which we lived within our social barriers. Nobody, in my world, considered the problem of industry his own; and every one drifted onward through the years secure in the conviction that in the end everything was going to be all right.

To-day how different it is! To-day we are studying the sources of our wealth, finding out for ourselves the real price paid by humanity to give us the privileges of the social life which we and our fathers have enjoyed. Excited by curiosity, we go down to inspect the mines our fathers left to us. We watch the men at work, mere pitiful animals, risking their lives in terrible endeavour for a meagre wage, that we, the heirs of time and of eternity, may take our leisure in the palaces of wealth. In the mills of Pittsburg we watch the workers in iron and steel, toiling in the white hot blast of the furnaces that we, who never have toiled, may draw our dividends and spend them on the luxuries we love.

All around and about us are millions of active, industrious human beings. How can we, the rich, longer remain idle? Is it possible that the heroism of the wealth-producing, life-preserving population of the world exerts no influence upon those who are not forced by circumstances to work? I know from my own experience that those who are worth while in the social and financial world have not only been influenced by the activity of the world’s workers, but I can positively state that mere pleasure-seeking idlers are disappearing so fast that it is a question of but a few years more before their extinction is complete.

But a very few years ago we would have visited the mines of Scranton or the forges of Pittsburg, and we would have looked upon the workers there with eyes of pity, perhaps, and we might have talked more or less glibly of the hardships of labour. Yet it would not have been _our_ problem. To-day we recognize the relationship between the labour that produces our wealth and the wealth which we enjoy.

“_It is quite plain that your government will never be able to
restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the
majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a
minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when in the
State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom have had more
than half a breakfast or expect to have more than half a dinner,
will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of
Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching
patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public
faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of
capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted
... to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in
want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is liable to be
preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more
bread?_”

--LORD MACAULAY, 1857.

_Chapter Five_

THE AWAKENING OF SOCIETY

Many are the causes that have led to this great change in the attitude of the wealthy classes toward the world at large. First and foremost, in my judgment, is the change in the attitude of the working classes themselves toward the rich. For, more assiduously than anything else in this world, we, the wealthy, seek the praise and admiration of the crowd. It may seem a strange confession from a member of the wealthy class, but it is true.

And the attitude of the people at large toward the rich has been changed indeed. I remember, even in my own lifetime, a period when the people of this country looked up with admiration and respect to their wealthy classes. It was in the end of that long period of which I have spoken, in which the wealth of the nation was well distributed and had not been gathered together into the hands of the few by means of the exploitation of the masses.

To-day how great the change! How wonderful the transformation! At first a few weak voices told what a few eyes saw. In unheard-of journals of the labour movement, in certain revelations of high finance, corruption of politics, dreadful tales were told--stories long since forgotten. In Henry Demarest Lloyd’s “Wealth vs. Commonwealth” we have a strong voice describing what keen eyes clearly discerned. Soon were published several profound historical studies which aroused the more thoughtful. Then, with drum and trumpet and black banners flying, came the army of the muck-rakers. And their revelations made the nation heartsick.

It is but five years since the white light of the noon-day sun beat down upon the hitherto deeply buried roots of America’s industrial and social life, and eighty-five millions knew whence the social fruitage of our age draws its sustenance. Just what, in this connection, has been the effect of these five years upon American opinion?

When the nineteenth century closed, America worshipped great wealth. It sanctified its possessors. It deified the hundred-millionaire. In five years’ time America has learned to hate great wealth. Plutocracy is disgorging, but public opinion is relentless.

Never before in the history of the world has there been anything analogous to the campaign of the American muck-rakers. The progressive forces of French society raged at the monarchy and the Church before the French Revolution. But their propaganda took thirty years to gain power, and fifty years to accomplish its purpose. The work of destruction here seemed to be done in a night. The “pillars of Society” tumbled. From official statements of the President of the United States down to the output of ten dollar a week hack-writers, our publications teemed with the products of the popular trade of exposure. Great commercial and industrial institutions were analyzed. National and municipal governments were dissected. Universities and churches did not escape the busy seeker for sin. After submerging itself in the story of its shames, the nation turned in disgust to more pleasing visions. But it had answered the question “How?” And the answer is by no means forgotten.

Some day, perhaps in the twenty-first century, some Carlyle, sitting in the shade of elms before an old country house, will head another chapter, “Printed Paper,” and describe the war made with words upon the crumbling ideals and ideas of an age. He will tell how a nation from worshipping wealth on Monday learned to hate it on Saturday. He will relate how it came that myriads of poor, blessing the alms giver as they fell asleep in low hovels and crowded tenements, awoke with their hearts full of bitterness and hatred for those whom they had worshipped. He will humorously describe how the plutocracy itself, alarmed beyond power of expression, sought to disgorge its ill-gotten gains upon the multitude; its primal virtue, acquisition, transformed to the crime, possession. He will recall for the amusement of students of history the frantic endeavour of the demagogue to raise himself in public esteem through decrying the idle rich.

To us, who, through the heyday of our popularity, simply sat in the sunshine and throve and grew fat in happiness, it came as a terrible shock, this change of the popular attitude. At first we laughed at it; then we preached little sermons about it, half jesting, half serious; then we began to talk about it among ourselves; and we held indignation meetings every time we met our friends, and called down the wrath of heaven on these sharp-eyed and glib-tongued investigators.

Finally--and here lies the heart of the matter--we began to read these outpourings of the popular sentiment very seriously indeed. They came, at last, from sources that we dared not disregard. Instead of mere muck-raking expeditions they assumed the proportions of crusades. Instead of the frantic mouthings of mere sensation mongers there confronted us in the columns of the press and in the more sedate and orderly pages of the magazines the speeches of a President, or sane, sober editorials written by men who knew both sides, and who commanded our respect as well as the respect and admiration of the crowd. We recognized--those of us who thought, and saw, and felt--that instead of being a passing phase, as we had dreamed or hoped, this change of popular sentiment was the beginning of a revolution.

I hesitate to say how deep this arrow struck. Perhaps I can illustrate it best by telling a story that came to my ears this past winter. A lady of the old school was sending her daughter, a young girl, to one of the preparatory schools here in the East. She went herself to look at the college and to talk with some of the professors. In conversation with the principal, she said:

“I want Estelle, right from the beginning of her course, to get a full understanding of where wealth comes from. I want her year by year to learn of the debt and the responsibility that she, personally, owes to the people that work. Are these things taught in your courses?”

The principal was astounded. She protested that such education was entirely out of line with the principles and precepts of that college. Very delicately and tactfully she intimated that one of the foundations of a social education was the constant instillation into the minds of the young of the idea of the superiority of the aristocracy over the masses. To teach Estelle that she and her class are really dependent upon the grimy men who labour with their hands would be to turn upside down the curriculum of that college.

The upshot of it was that Estelle to-day is enrolled as a student in a high school in New York City. Her mother believes that the salvation of the wealthy classes in this country depends upon the coming generation understanding the true relationship between capital and labour.

This is, perhaps, an extreme case, for only a very few years ago that matron herself was absolutely immersed in the whirlpools of the most frivolous Society which has a real right to use the term in talking about itself. Always she was a woman of a most active mind, of broad sympathies, of excellent benevolent character; but her mind found its full exercise in the pursuit of social fads, her sympathies found outlet in sporadic raids upon the strongholds of misery and poverty, and her benevolence satisfied itself with much hidden largess to various and sundry charities. She did not really understand any of the problems of the day.

The first awakening of this one woman came about through chance. Bored to death at a summer resort, half sick, and therefore restricted in her activities, a friend who stopped on the piazza to extend her sympathies happened to leave on the table a book. The lady picked it up and began, half absently, to turn the pages from back to front, as one will. A heading caught her eye. Here it is:

“OUR BARBARIANS FROM ABOVE.”

She did not understand it; and her habit of mind led her to investigate. She had lost the page, but she searched until she found it. Then she read the paragraph:

If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will
not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from
above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into
seats of power kings do not know. The forces and the wealth are
new, and have been the opportunity of new men. Without restraints
of culture, experience, the pride or even the inherited caution
of class or rank, these intoxicated men think they are the wave
instead of the float. To them, science is but a never-ending
repertoire of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates,
government but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers
in squads, and the million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth
written for them.

She read on and on. She finished the book, and turned back to its beginning. She could not read it all; but she read enough to realize her profound ignorance of facts. That night, at dinner, she astounded her husband in this wise:

“Who is Henry Demarest Lloyd?”

“He is a Socialist writer,” was the answer, “who amuses himself attacking our class.”

“I wish,” she said, “you would get me all his books.”

From that time on her mind found new occupations, new interests, new ideas. A world that she did not know existed came swiftly over her horizon. She did not rush madly into extremes--she has not to this day--but her life has changed considerably. We who knew her so little time ago as one of the typical, clever, brilliant, and flashy purveyors of cheer and social joy find her to-day no less charming in the matter of mere entertainment; but we expect, when we meet her, to find in her mind many other and more serious things. She never appears in print, she is not a suffragist, she has dropped her little fads. She is not that strange abnormality of her sex that neglects the old pursuits of women to follow the strange gods of men; but she is, in every sense, a student of the true conditions that surround her. The mists of golden tradition have cleared from her eyes.

To-day she has plenty of company in her own set. She did not convert them. She detests the rôle of a propagandist. They simply came of their own accord to read and learn. And when the educated classes really become interested, I think they study things more deeply than any other class. Even the most violent and anarchistic of the publications that pretend to portray the facts of the class relationships have thousands of readers among the very wealthy.

I remember a case in point. Mr. Upton Sinclair, a pronounced Socialist of the flamboyant type, was invited to lunch one day, by a mutual acquaintance, with a young man of the most exclusive set in this city. They met in a private dining-room at the Lawyers’ Club. In the course of the lunch Mr. Sinclair referred to an article he had published in _Wilshire’s Magazine_, a Socialist sheet of the noisy class.

“Yes,” said the other, “I read it.”

“You read it?” exclaimed Mr. Sinclair, in complete surprise.

“Oh, yes--I always read it,” said the other, in a matter-of-fact way.

There are many like him. Five years ago you probably could have counted on the fingers of two hands the men in the wealthy classes who read the literature that comes from below. To-day it is a very common occurrence to hear in the best clubs of New York wealthy men discussing with intense earnestness and real economic sense articles of which they never would have heard five years ago.

It is not that many of us really feel the danger that impends. It is simply that our armour of complacency and self-satisfaction has been pierced, and our pride has been wounded.

“I used to think,” said a clubman to me last winter, “that we were well beloved; but I guess our class is the best hated class in the land. I am only beginning to find out why.”

Of course, I do not want to give the reader the idea that the muck-raker wrought this change. As a matter of fact, he is but the skirmish line. The wealthy classes would have weathered his attack without much trouble and gone upon their all-complacent way if he had been the culmination, instead of the mere beginning, of the hard attack. But after him, as I have said, came a great army of sober, sedate, forceful writers, hurling volleys of stinging facts upon our careless trenches. We roused ourselves to meet the real attack. Fiercely it swept upon us. Yet even that we might have met and gone back in the end into the peace and security of our age-long self-confidence, no whit the worse for the battle.

Worse--or better--was to come. When the pulpit and the press had done their worst--or best--the heavy artillery opened. Senators on the floor of the senate, governors from the chair of office, mighty lawyers before the bar, judges from the bench, and, last, a President from the White House, raked our outworn defences, and even the silliest and most fatuous of men within the walls knew, at least, that we were under fire.

To-day there is a lull. Many of those who awakened to the sound of battle but two or three years ago are slipping back into fancied security. The older heads know better. We see the forces of labour and poverty forming new lines upon the plains and hill sides. We see them lashed to new fury by the whip of rising prices; we hear the stern, stentorian voices of their tribunes calling them to battle for their lives and liberties; we smell the reek of them as they crowd from the dusty mines and sweaty factories.

We do not flatter ourselves, even those of us most drunk with the strong liquor of power and the sweet wine of indolence, that the forces of attack are weakened or weakening. We know full well that this great lull of renewed national prosperity has been used by the forces of the men that labour to make themselves stronger, cleaner, better caparisoned for the long battle of to-morrow.

In the midst of the peace and calm of high prosperity we hear the rumble of the thunder of war. We read in the papers that a great manufacturing city of the Middle West has chosen a Socialist mayor. Over the wires there comes to us the news that an anti-corporation campaign in Denver has broken to atoms the organized power of both the great political parties which, for generations, we have used as pawns in mightier games than theirs. An able public servant is openly and publicly branded a thief and a betrayer of trust, because, the people say, he works with the larger capitalists to help their plans to completion. Public clamour and disapprobation greet the plan of one of the richest of men to incorporate his charities in order that they may be more efficient. The people refuse absolutely to believe that there is no ulterior project behind the incorporation.

These are incidents of warfare, not of peace. Here, as in Denver and Milwaukee, it is an attack upon an outpost, a skirmish in force. There, as in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation, it is a determined effort to block what the leaders of popular thought believe to be a strengthening of the redoubts of wealth.

Strange, it seems to me, it is that still within the gates of gold there dwells a great host of people barely roused. For I have failed of my aim if I have given the impression that Society is to-day wholly roused, wholly armed, wholly awake to its danger. It is, alas! not true. It is no more true than it was true before the rebellion that the people of the South were all in sympathy with Helper. There were a few, to be sure, but the rank and file of the slave-holders called him a visionary and an alarmist.

So to-day, perchance, the vast majority of the men of wealth in this and other cities will call me a visionary and an alarmist. I wish it were true. Would that I could bring myself to believe that the things I see about me are but the passing phases of a natural adjustment. I have tried for many years to persuade myself that all is well. I have failed.

“_Six years ago no proposition to which the great corporation
interests of the country were strongly opposed was looked upon
as having any practical chance of being realized.... The killing
and maiming or stifling of bills of this kind in committee was a
foregone conclusion, and the only answer to protests was Tweed’s
old query: ‘What are you going to do about it?_’”

--FRANKLIN FABIAN.

_Chapter Six_

FOR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER

I have, in previous chapters, touched very briefly upon some of the vile excrescences that have found a resting place within the gates of our once so fair city of Society. Again, I have sketched in the briefest outline the process by which the idle class was created. I have shown how the seed was planted in the too fertile soil of American industry. I have dwelt, but briefly, upon the simple fact that we of the older orders have come to find out something about that planting and the manner of the growth.

I turn with something like dismay from a sketch of the methods of the culture of this growth. For it is watered with the bloody sweat of labour and the salt tears of bitter poverty and suffering; and it is fertilized with the dead bodies of men and women outworn in the grim battle of life. Tended and watched it is by a foul horde of underlings, hired judges in the law, panders in politics, prostitutes in the pulpit, lickspittles in college chancelleries, Judases in the press, blackmailers in business, and miserable, time-serving parasites clinging like filthy leeches upon the administrative bodies of the nation.

To my mind, as I have studied this question, there has come a sad conviction: This nation is betrayed. The planting of the seed of our industrial system, whose fine flower has been reached in our class of idle rich, was quite possible without any betrayal of the people. Even its growth for two decades was possible without a conscious effort on the part of the keepers of the public citadels to throw open the doors to a public enemy. May a thinking man dare to say that the growth of this system since 1890 could have been possible without criminal negligence on the part of those public servants sworn to guard the true and lawful interests of the people of this nation?

For it was perfectly evident, years ago, that the industrial evolution of this country was a process of exploitation. It was the knowledge of this fact that lay behind the Sherman Law of 1890; and again the Interstate Commerce Act, which sought to restrain, to a limited extent at least, the boundless license to plunder which had been taken unto themselves by the railroads. No broad-minded man can read with an open mind the facts with regard to the Homestead strike, the Pullman strike, the war in the Cœur d’Alene, or the coal strike of very recent years, without coming to the conclusion that no matter who was in the wrong in the immediate circumstances leading to those national catastrophes, the real underlying cause was a revolt on the part of a subjugated people against the hardships of industrial slavery.

Without going into details, let us examine, in the light of history, a few of the cardinal facts that have so far made possible a continuance, indeed, a constant widening and deepening, of this process of exploitation. Let us remember always, as we face the facts, that the primary cause of this condition lay in that evolution, which was probably inevitable, from the household stage of manufacturing in this country to the stage that is represented by the modern trust. That evolution stands to-day completed. It was, as a matter of fact, completed on the day when the American Sugar Refining Company assumed the dominating position in the sugar trade. Subsequent developments have been but a repetition, sometimes on a larger scale, sometimes on a smaller, of that climax. What, then, makes possible the continuance of this process in the face of the ever-growing public knowledge of its existence?

The answer is our public shame. This process, openly recognized by the public, thoroughly analyzed day by day and year by year by brilliant writers in press and periodical, exposed again and again in excellently written books by college economists, has gone on and on through climax after climax for the simple reason that the one power in the world that could stop it--the will of the American people--has been turned from its purpose, defeated in its honest efforts, and betrayed in its administration, through the fact that in our democratic political world the power of mobilized wealth has been sufficient to restrain the hands of our political parties and prevent the striking of the blows that would have put an end to the process. To-day, in America, the people elect their statesmen; but the exercise of the people’s power through these statesmen is curbed, directed, and controlled by groups of moneyed interests. This is a statement that many will challenge; it is a statement that cannot be proved or disproved. I give it as my opinion, based upon long, careful study, and based, too, on personal knowledge.

America, then, is a plutocracy. Always politically, the power of a plutocracy depends upon the maintenance of the _status quo_. It has come into being through the operation of certain industrial or commercial conditions. It lives by virtue of the continuance of those conditions, and by virtue of their freedom from attack by the one power strong enough to destroy them--namely, the people.

To maintain this _status quo_ has been the gigantic task successfully carried out by the financial interests of the United States. It is not my intention--indeed, it is not within my power--to go into any complete details of the methods and machinery used for this end. It has not all been accomplished, by any means, through direct political corruption, though much of it has been accomplished in that way. The few scattered and unimportant instances of conviction are enough by themselves, without going into surmise at all, to establish the fact that in almost every state of the Union, and at the seat of the central government itself, there has been for thirty years past widespread corruption of political parties.

Deeper than this, more sinister even than the most recent example of an administrative officer bound like a slave to the wheel of his master’s chariot, has been the indirect subornation of public opinion through a subsidized press, subsidized pulpits, and subsidized public speakers. We have heard a great deal of demagogues and wicked Socialistic leaders of the mob. We do not hear much of that other phenomenon, the oily sycophant who talks to the people with words of cheer and paragraphs of exhortation, having in his mind always the one single idea how best he may serve the moneyed interests that stand behind him.