The raid on prosperity

Front matter

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Preface

When men cannot answer facts or arguments, they usually resort to impugning motives, and they descend to abuse more or less coarse, according to the fiber of their natures. To such persons it is useless for one to give a reason for acts or utterances which they assail. The student with judicial mind finds his way to explanations of motives by processes that require no emendation. For him a statement is not necessary. To the hurried, sincere man a prefatory word may be proper.

Since I entered upon this discussion, a year and a half ago, when my opinions met violent opposition, a marked change seems to have come over a large portion of the public.

The subjects discussed in these pages I pronounced myself upon for the most part twenty years ago. My convictions have not come to me out of the exigencies of a college presidency or by the contaminating influence of millionaires! I am on record, with such record as a comparatively young man could make, far back beyond the present agitation. From the time when as a lad of fourteen I passed around the continent from Maine to Oregon to the times

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when I penetrated to its centers and crossed it along its diameter, I have had an increasing appreciation of our country's magnitude and the immensity of our times, and I have believed that if as a people we were as large as our opportunity, the civilized world would revolve around us as its axis because we would comprise the blood and force of all great peoples, and our mighty endeavors, restricted only by the extent and enormous resources of our vast territory, would be the necessity and service of all lands.

The occasion for my speaking is due to certain incidents in the administration of the goverrunent which I believe unwarranted by our Constitution, and in their tendency destructive to our liberties and the progress of our commerce. Carried to their conclusions — and these are not far away — they must result in an oligarchy. A lawmaking, courtcontrolling executive department, a government by commissions, a personal construction of the Constitution is not a republic.

The trial of business corporations in courts of the administration, by a prosecuting administration, the arraignment of citizens and their business by name in a condemnatory way, the characterizing of private citizens offensively, and the commenting adversely upon men under indictment waiting trial, unseemly quarrels with the representatives of our highest official positions before an astonished civilized world, and gratuitous attacks upon citizens for their personal opinions and teachings, have seemed to me so opposed to all our dignified traditions and such a menace to our boasted freedom as to justify an examination of some first principles.

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I speak by no man's favor nor am I restrained by any mjm's frown. My credentials are sufficient. I am an American citizen.

If a corrective to existing evils should be applied in any casfe, it should be done by calm, statesmanlike perception of the large and far-extended interests of the country; not as " punitive only, but as protective " also, and not as " offensive alone, but defensive " of our country's immense commerce, both foreign and domestic, rather than by emotional and sensational fiction writers of socialistic vagaries, whose romancing is accepted against the character of firms of the highest reputation in their commercial relations, which are the most sensitive courts of probity and honor, or by small men whose official relations to such mighty questions is the accident of political preferment, men usually without previous training or practical knowledge.

The future of our country depends upon the men of faith, men who believe in the sure movement of the gulf stream of human events along definite lines of progress with no very serious or fatal deviations. We must navigate these currents by adjustments suited to their laws.

I believe in American citizens, and abhor any intimation that that citizenship has a basis in anything but manhood. Riches do not make citizenship. The thought now urged in demagogic and socialistic agitation that there is a class in this country downtrodden and oppressed by the rich is an impertinence and an insult to our intelligent working people and mechanics. It is an anarchistic importation. Nothing can oppress us but our own voluntary ignorance and

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vices. So little patience have I with the attempt to create classes in this country that I hesitate even to discuss the subject, lest by inference I recognize it as a tendency of our constitutional government.

We all have enormous opportunities. We need only to put into them faith in our possibilities, wdsdom in the use of our resources, reverence of our time, and devout gratitude to the " Giver of every good and perfect gift."

I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of Van Norden's Magazine and Leslie's Weekly in permitting me to use portions of articles which I had furnished to those periodicals.

J. R. D.

Syracuse UwrvERsiTy, August lo, 1907.

Contents

I. — ^The New Age II. — ^New Proportions III. — The Citizen .

IV. — ^The Rights of Speech V. — Reactionaries VI. — Stretching the Constitution VII. — Rights of Corporate Business VIII. — The Corporations IX. — ^The Corporations — Continued X. — The Standard Oil Company .

XI. — Standard Oil Defended by Economic Writers XII. — The Standard Oil Company in Court XIII. — Exact Justice XIV. — Swollen Fortunes XV. — Charitable Trusts XVI.— Tainted Money .

Chapter I

WE cannot overestimate the value of a full acquaintance with the ages that have preceded us since they are storehouses out of which we may bring much that will greatly aid us to an appreciation and to a proper use of our times. Since history constantly repeats itself, by tracing the course of peoples gone we shall find that many of those experiments with which men are now meddling in philosophy and religion and practical affairs have been tried and have failed because of inherent defects, while much more that engrosses the present age has always ministered to the highest interests of man. Among such archives we shall discover many things that will modify the conceits of the twentieth century and much that will prove helpful for the solving of perplexities that now confront us in many departments of human endeavor.

But valuable as the past is to us, its chief value is in interpreting for us the present. Ancient petrifactions and historic embalmments tell the story of how peoples have lived in their times, and from it we learn lessons for practical application to our endeavors. Our business is the making of an ever oncoming age.

Man must be more than a collator and venerator of what has been. He must create history for ages yet to be. If he may look upon the past he must, like Janus, have a face on both sides of his head that he may be always apprehending the future as well. But while it is our duty to appreciate these times, our ability to arrive at a just comprehension of the age may not be so clear. We confess that to take a comprehensive and discriminating, a philosophical and practical view of the times we live in, is not a trifling matter — is not an easy thing to do. On the contrary, it is a most difficult task. If it does not demand the acroamatic skill for the solution of abstruse subtilties it certainly does call for the acrobatic feat of swinging oneself above the dust of party strife and beyond the influence of all those prejudices which so confuse the vision and bewilder the judgment. Bacon says that " the understanding of man is like a mirror which is not true and so mixing its own imperfections with the nature of things distorts and perverts them." For example, old age indulges in imaginative memory. Youth indulges in imaginative hope. Neither Is accurate, but both are overdrawn and overcolored. So for want of an accurate memory and unprejudiced comparisons there always are some who do injustice to the present in their recollection of the past. There are people who say there are no such orators as in the days of Clay, Webster, and Wirt, no statesmen like those who ruled the destinies of the earlier Republic, no poets like those whose verses they recited in childhood, no preachers like those under whose sermons they used to sleep fifty years ago.

But the fact is things appear not only as they are but often as they are not, according as we may look at them or the media through which they are seen. You recall that this is the theory of colors and, in fact, of seeing. Dr. Thomas Young showed us that in the human eye there are certain nerve fibers which respond to certain waves of ether and produce the sensations of the colors. There are three kinds of these fibers at least and the combinations effected produce all of the colors of the spectrum. There is the one class which when irritated produces the sensation of red, the second the sensation of green, and the third that of violet. The first is excited by the waves of ether of the greatest length, the second by the middle waves, and those which convey the impressions of violet are created by the shortest vibrations of ether. Now it sometimes happens that when one of these nerve fibers is defective the person is by just so much colorblind. In some the fiber responding to red is defective and they cannot see any difference between red and green or violet. The color of a blossom and a leaf is all the same to them. Because of this defect men have made great physical mistakes.

There are a great many people in the world who are troubled with mental color blindness. These persons will of course represent things as they see them, while often that which they see is in their eyes and not in the thing seen. In looking at our times we must make due allowance for our nerve fibers, otherwise we may make grievous mistakes and become the victims of just ridicule.

We must remember that our profession, our calling, the educational course over which we have come, our national pride, our social bias, our physical temperament, our digestion even, will have much to do with the way things will appear to us. The time of life also at which the painting is made, whether in the rosy morning or the evening shadows or the full golden splendor of the noon, will effect very materially the coloring of the picture.

With such reflections we can fortify ourselves against the charge of pessimism with which I have no sympathy. For though I cannot exactly accept the rose-tinted view of our age I have less sympathy with the pessimistic wailings that too often enter into a discussion of the times in which we live.

We live in a choice age. There never has been a sublimer arena since creation than that which awaits the young man to-day. I am not an optimist with regard to the times. Neither do I believe in the impending crash of aU things good and great which some men think they see. I feel no rumble of earthquakes opening their jaws to swallow us up. I hear only the thunder of glaciers launching icebergs under the heat of the early summer sun. I see a mighty growth and giant uplift and hear the consequent cracking and snapping off of some dead and moss-covered branches which sometimes split back promising growths as they fall. It is to guard such growth that I speak.

But after we admit all that is bad and listen to the mutterings of every storm threatening in our widely expanding skies, our times are the grandest this world ever has known. There never were greater men than those who project our vast achievements, nor men who should receive in a larger degree the confidence of the people. To such men the reins should be given.

We are multiform — more so than men of any previous age. In this regard we differ decidedly from the epochs that have preceded us. Other periods of human history are more like the early formations of our earth, our own resembles the later upheavals and intersections. In the structure of some portions of our earth we recognize great creative epochs and that there was a time when the periods were regularly tabulated on the rocky strata. Each formation was marked and distinctly defined with these stratlgraphical characters. There was order from foundation to summit and every layer was recognizable from Laurentian to Pliocene. But the evidences are that at a later date there was an eruption which resulted in a confusion of these epochs and now we have " the formations horizontal, vertical, inclined, contorted, and undulated, and the older is frequently superimposed upon the more recent." So that the near surface of our modern earth contains fragments of every formative period. Among them and over them the husbandman drives his plow, little thinking perhaps that his beautiful earth with its valleys and hills, its enameled meadows and castellated mountains is a contribution of all of the ages.

So has it been with human history. There have been well-defined ages with their lines of demarcation sharply drawn and their character made distinct by some one thought or movement or phase of human progress. So we hear about the stone age and the iron age and the ages of bronze and brass and there have been ages in architecture and ages of literature and ages of art and ages of philosophy, each of a peculiar type and each with its own and appropriate name. There have been ages ancient, mediaeval, and modern, and men have marked the time when many of these began and when they ended as we calendar the weeks of the year. But when you come to inquire about our age, it is like the superficial structure of the earth which is composed of all the creative periods. It is the cumulation of all the times. It is like our architecture which combines Hindoo, Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Italian, and English with their styles Doric, Ionic, Gothic, Corinthian, Pyramidal, and varieties purely modern and nameless. It is like our language which Is composed of all the languages. It is like our climate within whose broad expanse different zones of temperature and flora are found from the pines of Maine to the semltropic fruits and flowers of Florida and California.

All ages have been fused into the twentieth century and we are living in the universal times — met in every department of life by the facts and forms and fancies of other continents, of other peoples, of other ages. In all of our considerable cities the four corners of the earth are represented, the traditions of all lands are venerated. We are in the track of the nations of the world — the old world on our East, the older world on our West. We are the Mecca to which the tribes of the earth have come up. Jerusalem in her day, situated similarly in her relation to surrounding nations, was far less cosmopolitan when the gift of tongues was necessary to publish the glad tidings to the masses flocking to her feasts for worship and for gain, than are we of the Yankee land and the Yankee times.

The same is true of our arts and of many of our inventions. They are contributed often by other ages and peoples In the germ at least and we evolve them. Roger Bacon claims the discovery of our gunpowder. The magnetic needle guided the mariner centuries before we became a colony even and

Solomon De'Caus would doubtless have anticipated our locomotive had not the ignorance and superstition of that time flung him into a lunatic asylum for his advanced thinking.

You see that our times are inventing the old times over again. Shall we not say that this is true of philosophy, of science, of art, of poetry? while our religion is that which was from the beginning, bloomed out into beauty in the gospel of the new commandment and the beatitudes.

This is an explanation of the conflict of our times, the all kinds of theories, professions, and claims, inventions praised and inventions jeered, philosophies accepted as practical and philosophies pitied as chimerical, religion venerated and religion branded as the reproduction of forms of superstition, men called original and more men accused as imitators as men may or may not discover the old in the new form.

But if our times are made up of the olden times, we put our mark upon the age so indelibly that the thought, the distinctive character of these times will be borne down to the latest limit of human existence and our times will be an epoch in the world's gray centuries. As the drift has scratched and marked every eruptive rock which has presumed to push up into the sunlight, so the nineteenth century has stamped her mark on all of the past that has crowded in upon these modem times and these lines are laid so deep, these forms are so recast that the crashing events of coming ages can never destroy them.

We are chiseling the nude out of the marble, we are painting the lewd out of the canvas, we are writing the obscene out of literature, we are lifting the vapors from philosophy, we are letting the inventors out of the lunatic asylums, we are stripping the husks from religion and discovering in it the finest of the wheat, we are breaking through the guesses of life into life's sublime realities, and these imprints, like the fern marks in the rocks, shall go with this century into its future and tell to other generations the manner of people we are.

We have doubtless been impressed with the intensity of our times. This intensity is perhaps the type by which we shall be distinguished. The materials of the structure have been furnished largely by the times preceding us, but their adjustment and their employment are discovered in the spirit of our age. The different parts of the engine have been brought up from the four corners of the earth. Our times have set them up, utilized them, and put on steam. And this genius and power are the peculiar property of the times. Had the centuries sent up on the shores of any other continent or peoples the treasures which their tides have borne to us, results would have been far different. But we contemplate nothing with indifference. Our age and our people burn with an unquenchable spirit. Our whole age is vital with activity. The air we breathe is spirit force. Never before have men lived so fast. We are impatient with space and time.

It is said that not long since a man rushed into a telegraph office in Boston and inquired how long it would take to send a telegraph dispatch to San Francisco. " Twenty minutes," was the reply. " I cannot wait," he answered, and hurried out again. This incident illustrates the age. Comfort, life, safety, composure, morals are often sacrificed to speed. When a railroad train rushes over an embankment and hurls a score of souls into eternity, men invent another danger signal and crowd on steam. Men used to send men with their messages, but now they send lightning. Men once lifted heavy weights with lever and windlass, but now they lift them with dynamite and the electric spark. If by tunneling the mountain a given point may be reached a few minutes sooner than by going around, a million of money is no consideration. The mountain is tunneled. To conquer time is the master passion of the hour. As the years fly by, the head is constantly taxed to add another mile to the schedule, to take another minute from the time-table.

This intense passion is both fortunate and unfortunate. It becomes a part of the man. It is discovered in something more than his conquest over physical obstacles, time, and space. And this comes about by the slave becoming the master. By his own inventions man is made a slave. When he invented the railway plan of travel and the telegraphic

lO method of doing business he levied upon himself an enormous tax of haste and speed, for the maker must keep up with the thing made. Much is said about labor-saving machines. They are called man's tireless servants. This is true in part, but they are also his taskmaster, so that where they lift from him toil they add friction, when they lighten burdens they bring wear and tear.

The excitement and rush of these times with their inventions, political agitations, money-getting fevers, and jostle for fame are a terrible strain upon human endurance. The effects are visible. We wonder at so many sudden deaths and shattered constitutions and business failures and moral lapses. It is largely because these human engines are overcrowded. Nerves that are always on the tension must some time snap. If men will go fast they must arrive sooner. If men drive with loose rein, it will not be strange if the stop is sudden, startling, and fatal. It will not be surprising if the old man with whitened locks, the village patriarch, becomes unknown to future generations if this lightning life is to be the leading characteristic of our times.

This leads to the thought that these are times of great possibility. To the intensity of the age is due this fact. Our impatient, energetic life renders perhaps some things impossible. We do not take the time to do patient, plodding work. Rare, indeed, are the instances among us of a man giving himself to one thought for a lifetime. Our thinkers

II seem more inclined to be superficial with many things than profound In one. We will not let men alone long enough to become philosophers, to become great In literature, science, or art. Our times tend to make smatterers. Our authors, Instead of sending down a great book at distant Intervals, are scattering their volumes and pamphlets as the deciduous trees drop their leaves, so that our creations lack the giant strength of the slow-going German's exhaustive book and the thoroughness of the English essayist's production.

We sparkle like wine. We lack the deep, broad channel of the patient river. Our times will scarcely permit that yet. Push and eagerness still make our school curricula summer days and hurry our students out of their novitiate Into the spheres of active, crowded life before the spring morning of character has fairly dawned. Our apprentices are turned out workmen in three years. Our brothers across the waters work seven. Our student is a savant in four years. Our cousins over the way study half a lifetime preparatory to some one work that shall occupy the next half of life. In our chase for the West we cannot afford such waste. With our face toward the mountain and our rush for the summit we lose the fairest visions of life. But we gain also. And perhaps we can afford to go faster since our cousins are willing and positioned to do the slow work. We can let them sit In the dust and knock the mortar off the old bricks and clear away the rubbish since we are permitted with clicking trowel and hopeful hearts to rear the lofty walls of a new civilization of symmetrical and astonishing proportions.

Our physical achievements, our inventions, our useful arts, our conquerors of material force, these are our philosophies. Our telegraph, whose mysteries flash through the hidden deeps of the sea and sing on the mountain tops, is our latest metaphysics. Our telephone, whose numbers vibrate along the subtle paths of natural force, is our last poem. We are intense, but we are making swift strides into the kingdom of conquerable mysteries.

Our possibilities are found in the wonderful physical development of the age. Because of conquered space and time we can accomplish in a day what our fathers could not do in months. In that time a man might have grown old in an attempt to circuit the globe. We circle the world in a summer vacation. Look at the possibilities of travel. How long and tedious journeys were ! Men spent weeks in going a few hundred miles and back. And there was no hurry or impatience. They had the time, for nobody else could go quicker. You have been interested doubtless in reading of the composure of those good old days when men never knew what day they would start or when they would come back. One wrote of those times: " Here one may be transported without overviolent motion and sheltered from the influence of the air, with so much speed that some of these coaches will go above fifty miles on a summer day." And another wrote: " The like of it hath not been known in the world."

That was all the speed they wanted in those days, for when over there in England George Stephenson, within the memory of some men now living, began to talk about the railway, pamphleteers were hired to ridicule railroads. It was said they would prevent the cows grazing and hens laying! The poisoned air from locomotives would kill the birds as they flew over them and it would no longer be possible to hunt foxes and pheasants. There would be no more use for horses, and oats and hay would not be salable. Country inns would be deserted and the boilers would burst and blow things up generally.

Men of science declared that people could not travel at the fearful speed of fifteen or twenty miles an hour and keep their heads !

In Nuremberg, that famous city of brains and progressive ideas, the physicians met and formally protested against a proposed railway. They declared that it should be prohibited in the interest of public health, for the rapid movements could not fail to produce in the passengers the mental ailment known as delirium furiosum! They further said: " If the passengers will run the risk, the State can do no less than protect the bystanders. The sight alone of a locomotive passing at full speed is sufficient to produce this frightful malady of the brain. It is therefore indispensable that a barrier six feet high be erected on both sides of the track."

That was the measure of those times physically. We are In another world and another age. Fifty miles a day then. The like had not been known since the world began. Now sixty miles an hour. Now the business man gets into his car In the morning, rushes away three hundred miles, transacts important business, and Is home for the evening with his family. We set our watches by the mile posts of the great railways.

We need not remind you of the wire that speaks with a tongue of lightning. How a merchant may sit in his office In New York and order a cargo of figs from Smyrna or a cargo of tea from China or a cargo of laces from Belgium or a cargo of silks from France or a cargo of ship spars from Victoria or Seattle and receive an answer that same forenoon. By these physical possibilities man accomplishes a thousandfold more than in ancient ages. You lament that you have not Methuselah's age. You have it multiplied by lightning and steam. He had none too much time at the gait he had to go.

Man's life the Bible says Is not In years but In deeds. Measured by events, none have ever lived so long as we are living. If man has not been able t^ push forward the length of human life to patriarchal age or to make enduring the fragmentary years, he has scored against the flight of time a life mammoth In the magnitude of Its scenes and events and achievings. He is old in conquered worlds while he is young in years. There is more in a year of a young man's life than in a generation of his patriarchal ancestors.

Man molded matter into various coarse and tangible forms. The seven wonders of the world wrought from it were statues, pyramids, and hanging gardens. Men brought from crude materials crude works. They endure as mountains endure. They are heaped-up rocks and sand. They are monumental to muscular strength and expenditure of physical resources. In our age the clay has become a living soul. The angel has broken into pieces the marble and escaped. Magnitude, weight, distance, physical conflict, the end and glory of ages gone are but the shaftings and pulleys of our vast movements and power.

We use the forces that sent the worlds forth upon their eternal pilgrimages and kindled the fires of the unfading stars and set the seas to throbbing with their mighty, ceaseless heartbeats. Man stands now with his hand on the lever and with steam at his command he rushes across the continent of sea or land with a whole community of fellow beings committed to his trust. He calls the lightnings out of their infinite mystery and they obey him. One day at Hell Gate in New York I saw them. Obeying the touch of a child's tiny finger, they lifted an island of rock out of the tides whose assaults it had resisted for untold ages, and before

i6 the smoke cleared away published the news in every quarter of the globe.

Amazing forces! Man is filled with gaping wonder over his own works. It is the gods whom he has enslaved and set grinding at his mills. He gazes at them at their toil with ever unanswered queries upon his countenance. Every day from St. John to Puget Sound he puts ten hundred thousand heads out of factory and home windows and stops millions of people in village streets and country roads and in the fields to look upon the palaces of the gods as they roll by at fifty miles an hour, and every evening he calls the populace of every considerable town and city to wonder at the earth's new satellites burning with the luster of the North star.