Brooks Adams

“ But supposing, in the face of such a government, the unfortunate class should protest, as they already do protest in Russia, in Germany, and even in England and here at home, that a legal system which sanctions such a civilization is iniquitous. Here, the discontented say, you insist on a certain form of competition being carried to its limit. That is, you demand intellectual and peaceful competition for which I am unfit both by education, training, and mental ability. I am therefore excluded from those walks in life which make a man a freeman. I become a slave to capital. ”

“ I must work, or fight, or starve according to another man’s convenience, caprice, or, in fine, according to his will. I could be no worse off under any despot. To such a system I will not submit. But I can at least fight. Put me on a competitive equality or I will blow your civilization to atoms. To such an argument there is no logical answer possible except the answer which all extreme socialists have always advanced. The fortunate man should be taxed for all he earns above the average wage, and the State should confiscate his accumulations at death. ”

“ At the Restoration Massachusetts had grown arrogant from long impunity. She thought the time of reckoning would never come, and even in trivial matters seemed to take a pride in slighting Great Britain and in vaunting her independence. Laws were enacted in the name of the Commonwealth, the king’s name was not in the writs, nor were the royal arms upon the public buildings; even the oath of allegiance was rejected, though it was unobjectionable in form. She had grown to believe that were offence taken she had only to invent pretexts for delay, to have her fault forgotten in some new revolution. ”

“ Not content with this, Mather goaded his congregation into frenzy from the pulpit. “Consider also, the misery of them whom witchcraft may be let loose upon. What is it to fall into the hands of devils?... O what a direful thing is it, to be prickt with pins, and stab’d with knives all over, and to be fill’d all over with broken bones? ‘Tis impossible to reckon up the varieties of miseries which those monsters inflict where they can have a blow. No less than death, and that a languishing and a terrible death will satisfie the rage of those formidable dragons.” ”

“ Thus is the memory of their grievance held sacred by the descendants of their adversaries after the lapse of a century, and the local self-government for which they pleaded has become the immutable policy of the empire. The principles they laid down have been equally enduring, for they proclaimed the equality of men before the law, the corner-stone of modern civilization, and the Constitution they wrote still remains the fundamental charter of the liberties of the republic of the United States. ”

“ We are very close to England now, but we may be certain that, were we to press, as Germany pressed, on British maritime and industrial supremacy, we should be hated too. It is vain to disguise the fact that British fortunes in the past have hinged on American competition, and that the wisest and most sagacious Englishmen have been those who have been most alive to the fact. ”

“ Moses was the first great optimist of whom any record remains, and one of the greatest. He was the prototype of all those who have followed. He was a visionary. All optimists must be visionaries. Moses based the social system which he tried to organize, not on observed facts, but on a priori theories evolved out of his own mind, and he met with the failure that all men of that cast of mind must meet with when he sought to realize his visions. His theory was that the universe about him was the expression of an infinite mind which operated according to law. ”

“ Thus were the early liberals crushed in Massachusetts; the bold were exiled, the timid were terrified; as a political organization they moved no more till the theocracy was tottering to its fall; and for forty years the power of the clergy was absolute in the land.
The fate of Anne Hutchinson makes a fit ending to this sad tale of oppression and of wrong. In November, 1637, when her friends were crushed, and the triumphant priests felt that their victim’s doom was sure, she was brought to trial before that ghastliest den of human iniquity, an ecclesiastical criminal court. ”

“ This manipulation of the plague by Moses, upon what seems to have been a sudden inspiration, was a stroke of genius in the way of quackery. He was, indeed, in this way almost portentous. It had a great and terrifying effect upon the people, who were completely subdued by it. Against corporeal enemies they might hope to prevail, but they were helpless against the plague. And they all cried out with one accord, “Behold we die, we perish, we all perish. Whosoever cometh anything near unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?” ”

“ Here in a half-a-dozen sentences Saint Paul exposes the ceaseless conflict between mind and matter, whose union, though seemingly the essence of life, creates a condition which we cannot comprehend and to which we could not hope to conform, even if we could comprehend it. In short, which indicates chaos as being the probable core of an universe from which we must evolve order, if ever we are to cope with violence, fraud, crime, war, and general brutality. Wheresoever we turn the prospect is the same. ”

“ Massachusetts became the hot-bed of rebellion because of this unwonted alliance between liberality and sacerdotalism. Liberality was her birthright; for liberalism is the offspring of intellectual variation, which makes mutual toleration of opinion a necessity; but that her church should have been radical at this crisis was due to the action of a long chain of memorable causes.
The exiles of the Reformation were enthusiasts, for none would then have dared defy the pains of heresy, in whom the instinct onward was feebler than the fear of death ”

“ For human society, to deserve the name of civilization, must be an embodiment of order, or must at least tend toward a social equilibrium. I take, as an illustration of my meaning, the development of the domestic relations of our race.
I assume it to be generally admitted, that possibly man’s first and probably his greatest advance toward order—and, therefore, toward civilization—was the creation of the family as the social nucleus. As Napoleon said, when the lawyers were drafting his Civil Code, “Make the family responsible to its head, and the head to me, and I will keep order in France.” ”

“ But though this noble principle has been at length established, long years of bloodshed passed before the victory was won; and from the outset the attitude of the clergy formed the chief obstacle to the triumph of a more liberal civilization; for howsoever bitterly Catholic and Protestant divines have hated and persecuted each other, they have united like true brethren in their hatred and their persecution of heretics; for such was their inexorable destiny.
Men who firmly believe that salvation lies within their creed alone, and that doubters suffer endless torments, never can be tolerant. ”

“ But Moses felt that he had offended God, “Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”
Moses had become an old man, and he felt himself unequal to the burden he had assumed. He recognized that his theory of cause and effect had broken down, and that the “Lord” whom at the outset he had firmly believed to be an actual and efficient power to be dominated by him, either could not or would not support him in emergency. ”

“ But Cromwell, gifted with noble instincts and transcendent political genius, a layman, a statesman, and a soldier, was a liberal from birth till death.
“Those that were sound in the faith, how proper was it for them to labor for liberty, ... that men might not be trampled upon for their consciences! Had not they labored but lately under the weight of persecution? And was it fit for them to sit heavy upon others? Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? ”

“ If the governor of Massachusetts and the leader of the emigration could thus describe his moral growth,—a man of birth, education, and fortune, who had had wide experience of life, and was a lawyer by profession,—the awe and terror felt by the mass of the communicants can be imagined.
Jonathan Mitchel, one of the most famous of the earlier divines, thus describes his flock: “They were a gracious, savoury-spirited people, principled by Mr. Shepard, liking an humbling, mourning, heart-breaking ministry and spirit; living in religion, praying men and women.” ”

“ And so it has always been with each new movement which has been stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and which could cause men to move toward perfection along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can move no otherwise. In this point of view nothing can be more instructive than to compare the Roman with the Mosaic civilization, for the Romans were a sternly practical people and worshipped force as Moses worshipped an ideal. ”

“ Like all phenomena of nature, the action of the mind is obedient to law; the cause is followed by the consequence with the precision that the earth moves round the sun, and impelled by this resistless power his destiny is wrought out by man. To the ecclesiastic a deep debt of gratitude is due, for it was by his effort that the first step from barbarism was made. In the world’s childhood, knowledge seems divine, and those who first acquire its rudiments claim, and are believed, to have received it by revelation from the gods. ”

“ And the struggles and the agony by which this poor and isolated community freed itself from its gloomy bondage, the means by which it secularized its education and its government, won for itself the blessing of free thought and speech, and matured a system of constitutional liberty which has been the foundation of the American Union, rise in dignity to one of the supreme efforts of mankind. ”

“ Under our present form of capitalistic life there would seem to be no reason why this fluid capital should not fuse and by its energy furnish the motor which should govern the world. Rome, for centuries, was governed by an emperor, who represented the landed class of Italy, under the forms of a republic. It is not by any means necessary that a plutocratic mass should have a recognized political head. And America and England, like two enormous banking houses, might in effect fuse and yet go on as separate institutions with nominally separate boards of directors. ”

“ In an archaic age the priest is likewise the law-giver and the physician, for all erudition is concentrated in one supremely favored class—the sacred caste. Their discoveries are kept profoundly secret, and yet to perpetuate their mysteries among their descendants they found schools which are the only repositories of learning; but the time must inevitably come when this order is transformed into the deadliest enemy of the civilization which it has brought into being. The power of the spiritual oligarchy rests upon superstitious terrors which dwindle before advancing enlightenment ”

“ On looking back at Massachusetts as she was in the year 1700, permeated with the evil theocratic traditions, without judges, teachers, or books, the mind can hardly fail to be impressed with the unconquerable energy which produced great jurists from such a soil; and yet in 1725 Jeremiah Gridley graduated from Harvard, who may fairly be said to have been the progenitor of a famous race; for long before the Revolution, men like Prat, Otis, and John Adams could well have held their own before any court of Common Law that ever sat. ”

“ In fine, it was with Prussia a question of competition, brought to its ultimate tension by war. Prussia had no alternative as a conquered land but to radically accelerate her momentum, or perish. And so, at the present day, it may not improbably be with us. Competition must grow intenser.
With England the situation in 1800 was very different. It was less strenuous. Nothing is more notable in England than to observe how, after the Industrial Revolution began, there was practically no means by which a poor man could get an education, save by educating himself. ”

“ Whatever may have been the date of the establishment of the cities of refuge, I suppose that it will not be seriously denied that the law of the covenant as laid down in Exodus XX, 1, Numbers XXXV, 6, is at least as old as the age of Moses, in principle, if not in words; and this legal principle is quite inconsistent with, if not directly antagonistic to, all the prejudices and regulations, moral, religious, or civil, of a pure nomadic society, since it presupposes a social condition which, if adopted, would be fatal to a nomad society. ”

“ We have all forgotten when we first learned how the Jews came to migrate to Egypt during the years of the famine, when Joseph had become the minister of Pharaoh through his acuteness in reading dreams. Also how, after their settlement in the land of Goshen,—which is the Egyptian province lying at the end of the ancient caravan road, which Abraham travelled, leading from Palestine to the banks of the Nile, and which had been the trade route, or path of least resistance, between Asia and Africa, probably for ages before the earliest of human traditions,—they prospered exceedingly. ”

“ Supposing, for example, we consider, in certain of their simpler aspects, some of the relations of Great Britain toward ourselves, since Great Britain is not only our most important friend, assuming that she remain a friend, but our most formidable competitor, should competition strain our friendship. Also Great Britain has the social system nearest akin to our own, and most likely to be influenced by the same so-called democratic tendencies. For upwards of a hundred years Great Britain has been, and she still is, absolutely dependent on her maritime supremacy for life. ”

“ Moses promised his congregation that, if they would spare nothing they should enjoy abundance of good things, without working for them. He was much more pitiless than such a man as King David thought it necessary to be, but Moses was not a soldier like David. He could not promise to win victories himself, he could but promise what he had in hand, and that was the spoil of those they massacred. Moses never had but one appeal to make for obedience, one incentive to offer to obey. ”

“ The growth of Cluny was marvellous; by the twelfth century two thousand houses obeyed its rule, and its wealth was so great, and its buildings so vast, that in 1245 Innocent IV, the Emperor Baldwin, and Saint Louis were all lodged together within its walls, and with them all the attendant trains of prelates and nobles with their servants.
In the eleventh century no other force of equal energy existed. The monks were the most opulent, the ablest, and the best organized society in Europe, and their effect upon mankind was proportioned to their strength. ”

“ Saturday.—The Lord has permitted Satan to raise an extraordinary storm upon my father and myself. All the rage of Satan against the holy churches of the Lord falls upon us. First Calf’s book, and then Coleman’s, do set the people in a mighty ferment. All the adversaries of the churches lay their heads together, as if, by blasting of us, they hoped utterly to blow up all. The Lord fills my soul with consolations, inexpressible consolations, when I think on my conformity to my Lord Jesus Christ in the injuries and reproaches that are cast upon me.... ”

“ But even assuming that this problem of individual competition be overcome, we are as far as ever from creating a system of moral law which shall avail us, for we at once come in conflict with the principle of abstract justice which demands that free men shall be permitted to colonize or move where they will. But supposing England and America to amalgamate; they now hold or assume to control all or nearly all the vacant regions of the earth which are suited to the white man’s habitation. And the white man cannot live and farm his land in competition with the Asiatic ”

“ Pondering deeply on these things as he roamed, he persuaded himself that he had solved the riddle of the universe, by identifying the great first cause of all with the deity who had been known to his ancestors, whose normal home was in the promised land of Canaan, and who, beside being all-powerful, was also a moral being whose service must tend toward the welfare of mankind. For Moses was by temperament a moralist in whom such abominations as those practised in the worship of Moloch created horror. ”

“ Not only has the great conception of New England been accepted as the fundamental principle of the Federal Union, but it has been adopted by every separate State; and more than this, during the one hundred and six years since the people of our Commonwealth wrote their Constitution, they have had as large a measure of liberty and safety under the law as men have ever known on earth. ”

“ Together they were barely a thousand strong, and were completely at the mercy of the populous and hostile province they had been sent to awe.
The temptation to a bold and unscrupulous revolutionary leader must have been intense. Apparently it needed but a spark to cause an explosion; the rabble of Boston could be fierce and dangerous when roused, as had been proved by the sack of Hutchinson’s house; and if the soldiers could be goaded into firing on the citizens, the chances were they would be annihilated in the rising which would follow, when a rupture would be inevitable. ”