Our Benevolent Feudalism

“There never was a time,” says Justice Brewer, in the concluding lecture of a series recently delivered by him at Yale University, “when public opinion was more potent.” Possibly the saying is true; but whatever force it may have lies in the application. Public opinion may make for a general passivity – an acquiescence in things as they are – quite as much as for a general strenuousness. Nowhere, for instance, among civilized peoples, is public opinion more powerful than in a quiet and isolated community, held fast to certain habitual modes of speech and action. Only a brave man, or a desperate woman, so environed, would dare defy the tribal customs.

Public opinion in these United States may be more potent than ever before, but the personal attitude which it supports and encourages becomes more and more one of acquiescence in the existing régime. A legislative reaction and a judicial reaction are manifested; and a growing irritation is expressed, as from time to time those rude disturbers of the public peace, the social reformers, come forward with plans for curing imputed evils. Social and political quietism becomes our everyday philosophy. An “air of contentment and enthusiastic cheerfulness … characterizes our society,” writes Professor William G. Sumner, of Yale, in a recent number of the Independent; and though the judgment might be somewhat more accurately worded, he is not far wrong. A keen-eyed observer from Italy, – Professor Angelo Mosso, of Turin, – who visited us a few years ago, gives somewhat similar testimony. The fact astonishes him, as he confesses, since he saw much of political and industrial evil which he could not comprehend a democracy enduring; yet for all that the evidence was convincing.

I

Among the causes making for this acquiescence in existing social conditions, there are three which may be considered here. The first is the one which so strongly impressed Professor Mosso. It is the rage for individual exploitation. The imaginations of most men are fired by the spectacle of the few achieving great fortunes; each believes that a like fortune lies somewhere within his own reach, and with blind fatuity he tolerates conditions which he instinctively feels to be inequitable, simply because he expects himself to master them. “I believe,” writes Professor Mosso, “that the desire to become wealthy is so strong and powerful in every American that, in order to reserve the opportunity of realizing such desire, Americans willingly submit to the continuance of laws which allow such accumulations.” It is the petty gambler’s faith, the conviction that, though everything be against him, he will somehow “beat the game.” And just as the petty gambler’s faith is fostered by the runners and “cappers” for faro, policy, roulette, and keno, so the faith of the industrial underling is fostered by a tremendous trumpeting of the ways and means to worldly “success.” The preaching of “success” has become, in these last five years, a distinct profession, honored and well recompensed.

A second cause of the prevailing acquiescence in the present régime applies more particularly to social reformers, and to those who, while not actively enlisted as “come-outers,” do yet sympathize with the activities of their more aggressive brethren. It is a feeling, born of years of experience in promoting some collective good, of the hopelessness of achievement. Opposed at all points, frustrated at many, there comes a time, sooner or later, when all but the most resolute reformers are forced to admit that little or nothing can be done. Many thereupon fall back into the ranks of the do-nothings and the care-nothings; while others, in whom the fire of purpose is not entirely quenched, reluctantly exchange their radical and comprehensive plans of social changes for more narrow and immediate purposes, – the giving of small charities, the doing of near-at-hand services, and the occasional support of a particular public measure.

II

A third, and perhaps the most important, cause is the continual output from pulpit, sanctum, forum, and college chair, of our professional moulders of opinion. Now not all of this output, it is freely conceded, makes for acquiescence; but the overwhelming mass of it unquestionably does. From these instructors of the people we learn that conditions, while not perfect, either are reasonably near to perfection, or, if evil, are not to be corrected except by individual regeneration. We learn of the irrationality or the moral obliquity of discontent; the viciousness or fanaticism of impertinent persons who seek to change things; the virtues of obedience; the obligation of toil (specifically directed to those who are doing most of the world’s work, for the profit of others), and of the worth, benevolence, and indispensability of our magnates.

The denunciation of discontent becomes more common and more emphatic. A plentiful crop of instances is always forthcoming to any one who cares to look for them. The generation of Rousseau and the following generation of Jefferson set high hopes for mankind on the faculty of discontent. The past generation, compromising between theology and evolution, found in discontent a perpetual factor making for the creation of a better environment. But our present reaction takes us back to the days of the Stuarts. The magnificent invectives of Dryden, voiced in that —

against the sedition and discontent frequently manifested during the reign of Charles II, might serve for a thousand texts for present-day sermons, lectures, and editorials. The thought, common these last hundred years, that discontent is usually the result of privation, wrong, or oppression, is given over; and our modern moulders of opinion revert to the notion that it is fostered by ease and comfort.

asks “Glorious John” in satirizing his rival Shadwell. Tripe and carrion did not form the usual nourishment for rebellion. We find the same idea constantly echoed in very recent days; and the demands of organized workmen for better pay are almost invariably regarded in certain intellectual circles as evidences, not of need, but of the pride and rebelliousness engendered by an already attained competency.

Honors are even between churchmen and lay publicists, when it comes to the denunciation of discontent. The pulpit, the stump, the college chair, and the editorial sanctum are alike busied with its condemnation. Perhaps a typical protagonist in the work was the late E. L. Godkin. The thought recurs again and again in his writings. “I must frankly say,” he avers in his essay, “Social Classes in the Republic,” “that I know of no more mischievous person than the man who, in free America, seeks to spread among them [the workers] the idea that they are wronged and kept down by somebody; that somebody is to blame because they are not better lodged, better dressed, better educated, and have not easier access to balls, concerts, or dinner parties.” Whereupon, to make clear his contention, he tells of the following pathetic little episode: —

“Two years ago I was in one of the University Settlements in New York, and was walking through the rooms of the society with one of the members. They were plain and neat and suitable, and he explained to me that the purpose in furnishing and fitting them up was to show the workingmen the kind of rooms they ought to have ‘if justice were done.’ To tell this to a workingman, without telling him in what the injustice consisted and who worked it if he had not such rooms, was, I held, to be most mischievous.”

Even President Roosevelt, doubtless impressed by the modern reiteration of the notion, felt called upon, in his Providence speech (August 23d), to rebuke discontent, and incidentally to identify it with envy. “Not only do the wicked flourish,” he says, “when the times are such that most men flourish, but what is worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy and hatred springs up in the breasts of those who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, yet see others, who are no more deserving, doing far better.”

Education, in the modern view, is largely responsible for discontent, and should be restricted. Judge Simeon A. Baldwin, of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and lecturer in the Yale Law School, is quite certain upon this point. His “signed editorial,” in the April 9th issue of a New York newspaper published by the Yale lecturer on journalism, expresses a view which is coming to be widely held. Our young men, he notes with great complacency, are obliged to leave school early, in order to go to work; and he thereupon urges that young women also should clip their education at an early age. “Girls would make better wives and mothers and housekeepers,” he writes, “if they finished school at from fourteen to sixteen years of age. As it is, they obtain a smattering of many studies, which in my opinion cannot do them much good. They are possessed by a spirit of unrest to-day, and develop ambitions not compatible with the happiest homes.”

Professor Harry Thurston Peck expresses the modern view more succinctly. Professor Peck, it may be stated for the benefit of the unenlightened, is an instructor of Latin in Columbia University. No pent-up Utica, however, contracts his powers; he has courageously sallied forth from his particular domain and has taken all knowledge for his province. Over this province he ranges with unconstrained freedom, noting what he will, and, with something of the “large utterance of the early gods,” making known to a waiting world his impressions and beliefs. What a great lexicographer said of an amiable poet may be repeated in present praise: He touches nothing that he does not adorn. Some intellectual limitations it is possible he may have; but as a reflector of certain current views obtaining in high places he is probably without a peer. In his article, “Some Phases of American Education,” in the Cosmopolitan magazine a few years ago, he put the matter in this way: —

“Linked closely with many other very serious educational mistakes, and from many points of view by far the most profoundly serious of them all, is that curious fancy, which is almost universal among our people, that education in itself and for all human beings is a good and thoroughly desirable possession… There is probably in our whole system to-day no principle so fundamentally untrue as this, and there is certainly none that is fraught with so much social and political peril for the future. For education means ambition, and ambition means discontent.”

But, as Shakespeare’s Fluellen remarks, “the phrase is a little variations.” All discontent is not the same, and that which stirs in the bosom of Professor Peck must be carefully discriminated from the sort nurtured by plain John Smith. “Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy,” sang Sir John Fletcher; but what is meet for an Elizabethan poet or a present-day philosopher may be most unmeet for a common plebeian. “Now discontent,” continues this pharos of the unenlightened, “is in itself a divine thing. When it springs up in a strong, creative intellect, capable of translating it into actual achievement, it is the mother of all progress; but when it germinates in a limited and feeble brain, it is the mother of unhappiness alone.”

Dr. Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University, also has doubts. His recent book, “The Education of the American Citizen,” might be supposed, from its title, to be a plea for the popular diffusion of knowledge. Such it is, in fact, only the author draws the line at “sociology and politics and civics and finance.” “When the plea is urged, as it so often is,” he writes, “that they constitute a necessary and valuable training for citizenship, we are justified in making a distinct protest. Except within the narrowest limits, they do harm rather than good. As ordinarily taught, … they tend to prepare the minds of the next generation to look to superficial remedies for political evils, instead of seeing that the only true remedy lies in the creation of a sound public sentiment.”

The term, “superficial remedies for political evils,” means, in plain words, social legislation; and it brings up a second matter upon which our moulders of opinion have made a considerable approach to unanimity. We hear legislation flouted on all sides, and appeals made for individual regeneration. The matter-of-fact persons who hold that sixty years of factory acts have had more to do with establishing humane conditions in certain quarters of the planet than nineteen hundred years of hortatory appeals to the individual man, are dismissed with a smile of contempt; and the declaration is made that most legislation is mischievous, and that nothing but character counts. Mr. Godkin was “far from denying that legislation and political changes have been the direct means of great good,” though he held that “every good change in legislation or in government has been preceded or brought about by an increase of intelligence, of reasonableness, or of brotherly kindness on the part of the people at large.” A conclusion, to say the least, not overfreighted with historical learning, since many and perhaps most reformatory laws have been passed by an earnest minority against the active opposition of many, and despite the stolid passivity of most, and what mankind has heretofore called social progress has been largely due to the reaction of such laws and like institutions upon individual character.

President Hadley differs somewhat from Mr. Godkin. Too much stress, he believes, is laid upon the mechanism of government and of industry, and too little upon the force by which this mechanism is kept at work.

“Not by the axioms of metaphysics on the one hand, nor by the machinery of legislation on the other,” he writes, “can we deal with the questions which vex human society… Conscious of its honesty of purpose, it [democracy] is impatient of opposition, and contemptuous of difficulties, however real. It undertakes a vast amount of regulation of economic and social life in fields where two generations ago a free government would scarce have dared to enter. In these new regulations there are many instances of failure, and relatively few of success. We have had much infringement of personal liberty, with little or no corresponding benefit to the community.”

In Justice Brewer’s recent volume of Yale lectures, also, there is much regard for character, and much even for associated work in bettering the life of the nation. But as to legislation as a means of achieving this betterment, there is a cautious silence. There is the declaration that each man in free America is a ruler – glad tidings to the persons ignorant thereof. There are some original lines, —

which, though somewhat reminiscent of the good-natured Bottom’s lines, —

do yet body forth the noble summation: —

But though the freeman’s vote is a kingly prerogative, there is no suggestion that he shall use it in initiating or passing upon legislation for the collective good. Rather the plea is for obedience; and the warning is of those violators of the public peace, the labor organizations.

So, too, Mr. Stimson. “The unexpected weakness of democratic government,” he writes, “is its belief that statutes can amend both nature and human nature.” And he rejoices that the judiciary, convinced, no doubt, that neither human nature nor its manifestations can be amended by statutes, have actively intervened by declaring many laws unconstitutional. He finds, moreover, that the general principle which has caused the adverse action of the courts, is that these statutes have been “restrictive of private liberty, of the right of a free citizen to use his own property, and his own personal powers in such a way as he will, if so be that he do not injure others.” A perspicuous and conclusive judgment, no doubt, considering that the very point at issue is the matter of injury to others. He is not satisfied with condemning legislation, moreover, but proceeds further to a gentle remonstrance with the classes of persons who have urged certain regulative laws. 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.

So, too, Professor Sumner, Professor Walter A. Wyckoff, the entertaining author of “The Workers,” and a host of other instructors of the public, the mere roster of whose names would require several pages of fine print. Of the only two safeguards of the dependent classes against complete exploitation – social legislation and the labor society – our moulders of opinion would seem to have taken the job of demolishing the former, leaving to the magnates themselves the task of attending to the latter.

With many if not most of these publicists the criticism is delivered not only at protective laws, but at the force behind them – democracy. “Every age,” writes Professor Sumner, “is befooled by the notions which are in fashion in it. Our age is befooled by ‘democracy.’ We hear arguments about the industrial organization which are deductions from democratic dogmas, or which appeal to prejudice by using analogies drawn from democracy to affect sentiment about industrial relations.” Many of our moulders of opinion elaborate the argument often made in the writings of our literary magnates, that only men who are themselves possessed of property should have any voice in the disposition of wealth or the regulation of property rights. To justify this view recourse is had to several recently imported dogmas, fashioned by Mr. W. H. Mallock, author of “Aristocracy and Evolution.” 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. The large assumption among others in Mr. Mallock’s argument – that those who efficiently sow and those who richly reap are the same persons – need not concern us here. It is sufficient to point out that his argument has been eagerly taken up by a number of our own moulders of opinion, fostered and even developed to further conclusions.

Professor Peck, for instance, rather heroically improving on the spirit, and not infrequently following the text, of Mr. Mallock, puts the matter in this way: —

“Every really great thing that has been accomplished in the history of man has been accomplished by an aristocracy. It may have called itself a sacerdotal aristocracy, or a military aristocracy, or an aristocracy based on birth and blood, yet these distinctions were but superficial; for in reality it always meant one thing alone – the community of interest and effort in those whose intellectual force and innate gift of government enabled them to dominate and control the destinies of States, driving in harness the hewers of wood and drawers of water who constitute the vast majority of the human race, and whose happiness is greater and whose welfare is more thoroughly conserved when governed than when governing.”