William J. Ghent

“ Most of the magnates show a frugal and a discriminating mind in their benefactions; but it is a prodigal mind indeed which governs the expenditures that make for social ostentation. It is probable that no aristocracy—not even that of profligate Rome under the later Cæsars—ever spent such enormous sums in display. Our aristocracy, avoiding the English standards relating to persons engaged in trade, welcomes the industrial magnate, and his vast wealth and love of ostentation have set the pace for lavish expenditure. ”

“ In most ages the working farmer has been the dupe and prey of the rest of mankind. Now by force and now by cajolery, as social customs and political institutions change, he has been made to produce the food by which the race lives, and the share of his product which he has been permitted to keep for himself has always been pitifully small. ”

“ If we could get rid of some of our notions about liberty and equality, and could lay aside this eighteenth-century philosophy, according to which human society is to be brought into a state of blessedness, we might get some insight into the might of the societal organization: what it does for us and what it makes us do.... If we are willing to be taught by the facts, then the phenomena of the concentration of wealth which we see about us will convince us that they are just what the situation calls for. ”

“ Out of the sense of class dependence arises the extreme deference which we yield, the rapt homage which we pay—not as individuals, but as units of a class—to the men of wealth. We do not know them personally, and we have no sense of personal attachment. But in most things we grant them priority. We send them or their legates to the Senate to make our laws; we permit them to name our administrators and our judiciary; we listen with eager attention to their utterances, and we abide by their judgment. ”

“ The new Feudalism evidently requires a tempering—let us say, a conservative adjustment—of the wage-scale. Those whom the gods dower with plenty may for the present give freely of their store, while those who feel the parsimony of Providence must withhold. ”

“ Though only a few of us are irreconcilable at all times, all of us are disaffected sometimes—especially when our particular interests are pinched. We talk threateningly of instituting referendums to curb excessive power, of levying income taxes, or of compelling the Government to acquire the railroads and the telegraphs. We subscribe to newspapers and other publications which criticise the acts of the great corporations, and we hail as a new Gracchus the ardent reformer who occasionally comes forth for a season to do battle for the popular cause. ”

“ The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for about the same thing, his salary. We are the tools of vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. ”

“ From magnate to baron, from workman to villein, from publicist to court agent and retainer, will be changes of state and function so slight as to elude all but the keenest eyes.
An increased power, a more concentrated control, will be seen. But these have their limitations, which must not be disregarded. A sense of the latent strength of democracy will restrain the full exercise of baronial powers, and a growing sense of ethics will guide baronial activities somewhat toward the channels of social betterment. For democracy will endure, in spite of the new order. ”

“ What those consequences are, the average man knows full well. They are ostracism, a reduction, sooner or later, to the poorest livings; a hemming in and constraining to the narrowest fields of effort and influence—in a word, the full sum of the forceful rebuke which it is possible for the magnate class and its retainers, in the present state of society, to deliver. In the more developed state of the future the rebuke will be yet more emphatic; for the influence of the pulpit, whatever it may be in degree, must in kind be confirmatory of the right of the magnate class to rule. ”

“ The new régime, absolving itself from all general responsibility to its workers, extends a measure of protection, solely as an act of grace, only to those who are faithful and obedient; and it holds the entire mass of its employed underlings to the terms of day-by-day service. The growth of industries has overshadowed the importance of agriculture, which is ever being pushed back into the West and into other and remote countries; and the new order finds its larger interests and its greater measure of control in the workshops rather than on the farms. ”

“ With the rise of the magnates to power comes a growing self-consciousness of their authority and responsibility. “I am a citizen of no mean state,” is the reflection of each of them as he looks upon the emergent order of which he is so large a part; and thereupon it becomes his mission to live up to his rank and function. Frequently his benefactions increase, and always he takes on a more Jovian air, and views with a more providential outlook the phenomena passing before and about him. ”

“ All increase of wealth, all advance in knowledge and virtue, contends Mr. Mallock, come from an aristocracy—a word which he defines as meaning the “exceptionally gifted and efficient minority, no matter what the position in which its members may have been born, or what the sphere of social progress in which their efficiency shows itself.” Therefore, since the efficient have produced everything above the maximum which the ignorant and unskilled workman can produce without this higher aid, it follows that the efficient should be left in untroubled possession of their holdings. ”

“ There is no social betterment without precedent individual betterment, it is urged. “You cannot make a bad man good by legislation,” is the admonitory adage, and “You cannot make a poor man rich by legislation” is its twin. If certain persons hold to the theory that corrective laws have a definite reaction upon character, and that in every civilization worthy the name there are social institutions, founded in law, which are immeasurably in advance of the general average of sanity, sobriety, and honesty of the citizenship, such persons are but dreamers, and are not to be taken too seriously. ”

“ Science, art, and industry constantly pile up new commodities. Mankind finds that through them it secures longer and healthier, if not happier lives. It recognizes that by this increase of wants more human beings are employed, and that by a slight diminution thereof tens of thousands are thrown into idleness. And finally it recognizes that by a division of labor, in which natural aptitude in particular directions is sought to be secured, the greatest and most economical production follows. ”

“ Matters are not yet at such a stage in free America: great frauds, both of the group and of the individual, are still practised. But the almost infinite possibilities of other days have been sadly restricted by the operation of those natural laws which tend to fit beings to their environment. Pomp, too, is less a factor of control than in past times. It has a powerful grip on the imaginations of the poor, as the columns of our “yellow” journals, which devote so large a space to the ceremonies of the great, amply attest; but though it charms the more, it deceives the less. ”

“ With old men the dream of its revival is warrantable, for it springs from that retrospective mood of age which gilds past times, and that attendant mood which recreates and projects them into some imagined [7] future; but with the younger generation visions of free competition are but as children’s dreams of wild forests and shaggy animals—the atavistic reminders of experiences unknown to the individual, though knit into the fibre of the race. ”

“ The good Bishop Potter, in his address before the Diocesan convention in New York City, September 24, felt called upon to rebuke envy and hatred and to deny the existence of social classes in the republic: “Wealth is unequally distributed, we are told, and the sophistries that are born of envy and hatred are hawked about the streets to influence, in a land which refuses to enthrone one class above another, the passions of the less clever or thrifty or industrious against those who are more so.” ”

“ Labor leaders, he discovers, distrust experience, and Socialists detest lucidity—a brace of acute judgments in the face of the fact that the thing actually rated highest in trade-union circles is experience, and that whatever the defects of Socialists or of their system may be, the signal contributions of the best Socialist writers to the study of political economy have been lucidity of thought and definiteness of expression. ”

“ In such a crisis as that following upon the displacement of labor a host of economists, preachers, and editors will be ready to show indisputably that the evolution taking place is for the best interests of all; that it follows a “natural and inevitable law”; that those who have been thrown out of work have only their own incompetency to blame; that all who really want work can get it, and that any interference with the prevailing régime will be sure to bring on a panic, which will only make matters worse. Hearing this, the multitude will hesitatingly acquiesce and thereupon subside ”

“ But in our day the direct appeal of the newspaper is more hesitatingly obeyed. Frequently it has happened, in municipal elections, that a candidate or candidates have been elected in the face of an almost solid opposition of the press. A newspaper may be patronized for this or that special feature by persons who pay no attention to its editorials, by others who read them merely to learn an opposing view of things, and by others still—a far larger class—who, reading between the lines, choose for themselves what to rely upon and what to doubt. ”

“ It is one of those conventional puzzles which none can explain, that it is possible in our cities to restrict table and wheel gambling, but seemingly impossible to restrict certain other forms. Poker, for instance, maintains its hold, unawed by statute and unhampered by authority; while policy and race-betting, the special refuges of the desperately poor and the desperately fatuous, win new and lasting converts day by day. ”

“ The liberty of the employer to pay his employees in brass checks or store orders was affirmed by the Kansas Supreme Court on December 9, 1896, and the act requiring payment in lawful money was declared invalid. “To say that a free citizen can contract for or agree to receive in return for his labor one kind of property only, and that which represents the smallest part of the aggregate wealth of the country, is a clear restriction of the right to bargain and trade, a suppression of individual effort, a denial of inalienable rights.” ”

“ The wage-system, with its mechanical simplicity, continuing in force, there is an absence of the old exactions of special work. A mere altering of the wage-scale appropriates to the noble whatever share of the product he feels he may safely demand for himself. ”

“ Often there are attendant circumstances which might tempt a rival, for his own interests, to interfere on behalf of the workers. But the thing is never done; and he who should do it would declass himself as effectually as a mediæval nobleman would have done by enlisting in a peasants’ rebellion. There is, furthermore, a definite seigniorial determination to withstand to the utmost the agitation for public ownership; every magnate, with his intellectual retainers behind him, makes of himself a modern Stonewall Jackson in resistance to this movement. ”

“ The lesser gravitates to the larger. It needs no modern Newton to proclaim that in finance, commerce, [16] and industry, as in the physical world, all bodies attract one another in direct proportion to their mass. Distance provides a limitation, it is true, to the action of this law in the physical world; but less so in the economic world, for such is the perfection of our means of communication that they provide a more transmissible medium to capital than is the pervading ether to light and gravitation. ”