Our Foes at Home

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Contents

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. On the Threshold of the Future, . . i

II. A Century of Progress, . . . .15

CHAPTER I. On the Threshold of the Future

It is just a hundred years since George Washington died. The century has been remarkable in the history of the world, and most remarkable of all in that of the country and people with whom his name is inseparably connected. To the civilized nations of the Old World it has been a period of change and of progress. It has seen the abandonment of long-accepted ideas of government and social order, and the more or less complete substitution of new ones: it has witnessed the amazing increase of knowledge, and its wider diffusion among all classes of society, and the consequent impetus given to every department of human energy : it has experienced an unprecedented development of wealth, and on the whole a great betterment of the condition of the masses of the people. To America the century has been an age of miracles. Every influence which affected

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H natural wealth, the hitherto undreamed-of rewards that attended its development, have each had their share in perverting the popular mind from the legitimate objects of ambition, and from the lawful means for their attainment. It is not wonderful that energy developed into restlessness, and enterprise into gambling, or that success in the pursuit of unlimited wealth became the object of national worship.

A hundred years ago the American people were a frugal race, living, for the most part, on and by means of the land. Great cities — great even in proportion to the modest population — were unknown in the country ; great riches in the hands of the few were as rare as great poverty at the hearths of the many ; and the community could justly be described as the example of an all but universally prosperous, contented, law-abiding, and well-governed people. A single century has gone far to reverse the picture. In but few civilized countries to-day are the mass of the people less really prosperous, in hardly any are they less contented, and in none at all are they less honestly governed or generally less law-abiding than here.

Americans, while not unwilling to criticise their own social and political conditions, are almost universally disposed to deny that any other part of the world has anything better to show. They are more than ready to admit that other and older communities are greatly in need of reform in many directions. The stagnant millions of Russia, or the poorly paid operatives of Germany and

France, crashed by taxation and military conscription, seem to Americans the natural subjects for reform, and they are ready to express themselves thankful that, whatever its defects may be, their own country compares favorably with these. The popular mind of America has been fed too long with the unwholesome food of comparisons like these, which serve no better purpose than that of reconciling the people to abuses which in this young country have none of the excuses which exist in the old world, bending under the load of the social inequalities of fifteen hundred years. What ought to interest the American of to-day is not the question whether the people of his free republic, living in a new land, rich beyond the experiences of older countries, are as well or even a little better off, both socially and politically, than those of empires and kingdoms grown old under oppressive conditions; but how their conditions here compare with what they have been in the past, and with what they should be to-day. It is time they should ask themselves, not what are the social injustices and governmental defects of other nations, but what are their own? It is time they should inquire what the century just ending has done for the people of America: how far, with all its material development, its increasing riches, and the enterprise and ingenuity of its inhabitants, the people — the mass of the people — are wealthier, happier, or better governed than they were a hundred years ago? If they find that the people — that is to say, the vast majority of the people, and not a small and chosen class — have more comfort and prosperity in their lives ; if they live under better laws that are more equally administered ; if their lives are better worth living, and the outlook for their children is a better and a happier one, then they may be content to believe that the century has been one of real progress ; but if not, then, in spite of added millions of population, of ten thousand inventions and discoveries, of the increasing riches of the nation as a whole, the country has gone backward and not forward.

This is no question of curious speculation ; it is of all questions the one most important to the American people to-day. The conditions of the present, which are built upon the past, are themselves the inevitable foundations of the future. In the life of nations, as surely as in those of individuals, evil and corruption do not cure themselves, but their tendency is to increase as time goes on. History, while on the whole it is a long record of progress in human affairs, is also the record of a hundred national failures, ending in national disasters. Progress, whether it be social, political, or religious, has been no great steadily rising flood, but rather a tidal wave with constant ebb and flow. Nation after nation has become the leader in the development of the world's thought; race after race has carried a little farther the torch of human enlightenment and well-being; to no one race or nation has it been given to lead the way for any very long time. In their turn they have been tried, and in their turn they have failed. The work of human advancement, indeed, has on the whole gone on, but the task has been passed from hand to hand, as one nation after another has undertaken it and has fallen short. Looking back on the records of history it is easy, as a rule, to understand the causes that have placed one people after another in the van of human progress, and not less easy to see the reasons for their successive degradation. The circumstances of their countries and the conditions of their age have given an appearance of variety to these, but the main features in all have been the same. The career of each leading people has begun in simplicity, frugality, and freedom ; it has gone on to wealth and luxury for the few, and suffering and want for the many. Personal advantages have crystallized into social inequalities, and these have grown into class distinctions, until at last despotism, in one form or other, has arrived and the race or the nation has lost its position of leadership in the great campaign of the betterment of mankind. The conditions that surround humanity are forever altering; the principles that underlie those conditions suffer no change. So far as these go, there is, indeed, no new thing under the sun. The fate which befell the hardy Persian, the keen and subtle-minded Greek, and the free Roman, has been exemplified more than once among the nations of modern Europe, and will yet be repeated in the future on a scale commensurate with the vast increase of the human family.

io Our Foes at Home

No time could surely be more suitable for an inquiry into the conditions and tendencies of any people than the present, when v e stand at the close of the great climacteric century of human experience ; and if this is true of older nations it is doubly true of America. Her history, unlike those of other nations, is a short one, and its record lies open to be read by her people. They can readily compare her present with her past conditions, and from the comparison they may easily forecast her future. For a century her people have been hurrying along in a headlong race of material development wholly unexampled in the life-history of any nation ; it is not surprising that they have lived mainly in the present and taken little thought for the future. From a small and little-regarded nation the century just closing has developed one that is great and rich and powerful. Her progress has made her the wonder and envy of other nations; her material success has made each step in her development an object-lesson for good or evil to the rest of the world. To-day the American people stand on the threshold of the new century, in which the results of what has been done, and of what is yet to do in their social and political development, must make themselves widely felt. Already America has taken the first steps in her new career: already she has abandoned her first-century policy of exclusively American existence. She is offering to enlighten the world by her methods ; she is proposing to civilize new races by teaching them her laws and instructing them by her example ; she is preparing to supply the markets of the world with her manufactures, and to show other nations the example of a commerce which is to make her the business centre of the globe. That all this may be done hardly admits of a question. With her resources which are already developed and those that still await development, it is more than possible that the time has nearly arrived when America may lead the world; the question which faces her people now is, whether that leadership will end in failure.

The century just ending has been an era of many problems. There can hardly be a doubt that the problems of the century about to begin will centre more clearly than ever before around the questions of human well-being. For the very first time in the history of the race the question of population is about to take precedence of every other. The nineteenth century has seen the multiplication of the human family beyond the wildest conceptions of past ages. Not one alone, but almost every nation has shared in this gigantic increase of numbers. In the Old World it has led to new conditions of life for those who stayed at home, and it has caused a vast overflow of population to new and as yet scantily peopled countries. It has brought to America a population as great in numbers as any but the largest nations of Europe, and the end of the influx is not in sight. Looking to the experience of the past, it is probable that in this country population will for a century to come double its numbers in each period of twenty-five years. If there are now — and the estimate seems moderate — seventy-five millions of people here, it follows that there will almost certainly be a hundred and fifty millions by the year 1925, and a population of three hundred millions of human beings before 1950 is reached — two persons for every one now in the country in twenty-five years, and four for every one within a period which every boy and girl in America to-day may expect to see. Let Americans ask themselves what this means. Two persons to be fed for every one fed to-day ; two workers to be supplied with profitable employment for every one now employed within the time it takes the children born to-day to come to the full age of man or womanhood; four — nay, at the present rate of progress ten or twelve — inhabitants of great cities for every one there is now in America before the children born to-day shall have had time to grow gray with years. How are these multitudes to live? How is employment to be found by which they can hope to live well? How, above all, in the face of such an increase, are the masses to be arrested on the downward slope that leads to utter dependence and degradation?

In the presence of a problem like this most other problems sink into insignificance. Problems of science, researches and experiments in art, the wonders of invention, even now derive all their importance from their bearing on human happiness, comfort, and advancement ; but face to face with the fast-rising flood of human population all will receive a new significance. The science of living will, under these conditions, be the one to be studied most eagerly ; the art of living in decent comfort and peaceable association will be the fine art most in demand. It will not be the nation that manufactures most goods for sale; not the people that can point to the largest exports, or show the most satisfactory balance of trade, that will best stand the ordeal of the new population conditions. It will, on the contrary, be the people that can best solve the problem how their country can be made to yield wealth to the producers of wealth ; which can find reasonable and profitable employment for its own teeming millions, in the presence of other populations that are teeming also ; the country, perhaps above all, which can best contrive a way to utilize the superabundant labor of its people, and devise a means, by which the wealth they produce can be most equally and fairly distributed.

Problems such as these have not engaged much attention in the nineteenth century, but it will be no longer possible to avoid them in the twentieth. America especially has let social and political questions take care of themselves in pursuance of the " devil-take-the-hindmost " policy. The struggle to be first in the headlong race for riches has engrossed her people's attention so that they have had little thought to spare for the case of the millions who were not in the running. The few hundreds at the top, and not the many thousands at the bottom, of the social ladder have engrossed the attention both of the people and the rulers, and the result has been a hundred evils that are to-day undermining the social and political life of the nation. It is late, but it is not yet too late to reverse the process. The new era is already upon us with its problem of population for which no preparation has yet been made. The millions are already flocking into the cities to add to the social mischiefs that already abound and the political corruption which already threatens the liberties of the nation. Already the evils of riches and luxury, exaggerated beyond the experience of the oldest and most class-ridden countries of Europe, and of poverty, hardly exceeded by the slums of the most overcrowded cities of the Old World, are presented in America in hideous contrast, where neither extreme could be found a short half-century ago, Already the political life of this country, which still boasts itself as free, has become a byword among the nations for its widespread corruption, and the liberty and self-government of the masses of its people have become to a great extent a sham and a delusion. If these things are true now, what is the outlook for the future? If seventy-five millions of people are already trampling on one another in the struggle to live, what of the hundred and fifty millions twenty-five years hence? What of the three hundred millions which every American boy or girl may expect to see?

CHAPTER II. A Century of Progress

The development of the United States has been the most important political event of the nineteenth century. A hundred years ago the American republic was an experiment which the political thinkers of the Old World considered at the best a doubtful one. Those who looked upon it hopefully trusted to its isolated position and the probable slowness of its development as its safeguards, while the majority, who regarded the experiment as doomed to disaster, looked to the same conditions as likely to prevent any widespread danger or inconvenience from the inevitable disorders that must attend its ultimate failure.

Even a hundred years ago the territory of the newly established nation was not a small one, though it did not greatly exceed the area of Austria or France at the time. When the century opened there were sixteen States in the Union, and their area amounted to 287,000 square miles — a territory but little larger than that embraced by the single State of Texas to-day. The area of the islands of Great Britain was not much less than half as large as the new republic established by her emancipated colonies, while the European territories of Spain were more than two-thirds as great. But while the territory of the new nation of the western world was something more than respectable, neither her population nor her wealth seemed to entitle her to consideration as in any sense a possible rival to the nations of Europe. Her successful struggle for liberty had, it was said, been the result rather of her remoteness from the mother country and her small intrinsic value than of any other cause, and no dream could have appeared more exaggerated than one which pictured her as superior in population, resources, and wealth to nearly every nation of Europe within a single century. Her five millions of people seemed then but a handful, scattered over the territory she possessed ; her resources were hardly suspected by her own people and undreamed of by the rest of the world ; her wealth was undeveloped, and her trade, manufactures, and commerce were still in their infancy. It was no wonder that even the most sagacious thinkers of Europe looked on the new republic as a political freak which might be lightly disregarded.

Yet from almost the beginning the new nation was a surprise. Its remoteness from the markets of the world ; its distance from countries whose surplus population might be tempted to throw in their lot with the republic which professed, and even practised, a freedom unknown in Europe — these and many other drawbacks melted away before the energy of the people and the rapidly changing conditions of the time. While Europe was locked in the deadly grapple of the great Napoleonic wars the new land of the West was engaged in doubling its population and more than doubling its wealth. Taking advantage of the exigencies of France, it had by peaceful arrangement greatly extended its territory till it offered a field for enterprise and expansion which began to attract the wondering attention of European nations. Even then, indeed, nobody dreamed of what the future had in store. It was true the western republic had doubled its population in twenty years ; but the populations of Europe, in spite of wars, were greatly increasing also. It had added vast and unexplored territories to its area, but in all likelihood most of it would prove useless, and for centuries to come at least it could not be occupied. As to its wealth, this was still mainly a question of the well-being of the people at large, and to the eyes of foreigners it made but little show. There were no great cities, no merchant princes in the new land, no palaces or castles to attract the eye or impress the imagination with the vision of great riches. It was so much the better for the people indeed, but it was not so impressive at a distance.

One, and perhaps the greatest, element in the phenomenal development of America had necessarily been hidden from those who attempted to foresee the development of the new republic. That element was immigration. When the century began the voyage from Europe to America was a long and costly one. It was supposed, indeed, that from the date of independence down to 1820 more than two hundred thousands of settlers had crossed the ocean and thrown in their lot with the new nation. This was unprecedented indeed and remarkable, but after all it amounted to little more than six thousand persons a year and could do little to change the face of a continent. But with the close of the first quarter of the century a new era set in, and the westward migration, which had ceased for so many centuries while the Aryan race halted at the shore of the Atlantic, began once more. From 1827 the wave of migration rose steadily year by year, till in the year 1847 more immigrants reached America than had crossed the Atlantic in all the thirty years that ended with 1820. In that one year nearly a quarter of a million of the people of the Old World joined that of the New, marking the second stage in the great social phenomenon of the century : the migration of the poorer classes of Europe had begun.

It may be said without exaggeration that steam was the great material factor in the progress of the country. It was steam which rendered possible the vast influx of population to the country from Europe ; it was steam no less which made it possible for America to dispose to advantage of the new population. So long as the Atlantic voyage required from four to seven weeks it was impossible that any large immigration of the poor and dependent classes of Europe could take place.

The farmer could come indeed, but not the cotter ; the master workman might remove his family, but it was beyond the means of the laborer. And the revolution begun by the steamboat was completed by the railroad. But for the former the seventeen and a half millions of Europe's surplus population who came to America between 1820 and 1898 must have been reduced to three, or at most four, millions ; but for the latter even three or four millions of new population, with their natural increase, would have proved fully sufficient to fill up that part of the country which could have been occupied with profit.

Wonderful and even incredible as the story of America's progress would have appeared to the men of any previous age, it was entirely natural throughout. The time had arrived for a development for which the materials had been long preparing. Not only did the nineteenth century find America ready; it found also the peoples of Europe increasing in numbers far beyond all the experience of the past and ready to burst the narrow bounds of the states of the Old World and overflow the lands of the New. It found new ideas of liberty and of the right of humanity to enjoy life seething in the minds of the nations that had long been strangers to the blessings of personal freedom and personal well-being. To these populations America offered a new home of opportunities apparently boundless, a new prospect of well-being hitherto unattainable. The message of liberty and the gospel of equal opportunity found a response which would have been impossible at any earlier period, and when these coincided with the new means of transport it was natural that a migration such as had never before been even dreamt of should have set in with irresistible force.

The nineteenth century has above all that went before it been the century of increase. Its knowledge has increased beyond the conceptions of past ages ; its inventions and discoveries have crowded the experiences of former centuries into the space of single years; its wealth, in all that goes to make life enjoyable, has accumulated with a rapidity which is bewildering ; and — most important fact of all — its population has multiplied very far beyond the limits of all experience. On the threshold of this marvellous period the door of America stood open. To the gathering millions, to the new energies, to the jostling crowd of new ideas and discoveries the vast country offered such a field as the world had never seen. The great continent, with its virgin soil, its untrodden forests, and its unexplored mineral treasures, lay open. The time had come, and the men, to work the miracles of progress and development which have crowded into a single century of the life of America the results of a thousand years elsewhere.

So much for the story of the past. A century of exceptional human effort, applied under conditions of untrammelled liberty to circumstances of unexampled opportunity, has given America the development and success of which she is proud to-day. It found her a small and scattered community occupying the eastern fringe of an unexplored continent, poor in realized wealth, inconsiderable in commerce, little advanced in manufacturing skill, but a simple and contented people, possessed of much individual well-being, honestly governed, and ready to obey the laws. It leaves her at its close in possession of half a continent, owner collectively of the greatest share of the world's realized wealth, with a trade, commerce, and manufactures which rival those of the richest nation of the old world and leave all others behind. It leaves her also one of the most populous of nations, but it does not leave her well governed, nor does it leave her people as a whole prosperous, contented, or loyally obedient to the laws they have made. The record is a strange and suggestive one — not less suggestive in its bearing on the future than the past.

The experience of the past is the teacher of the present, and it is not less the prophet of the future. America's first century of national life supplies a record of achievement so brilliant as to be full of danger to herself. In events of unusual greatness our faculty of comparison is apt to fail us, and this could not but be true of such a record as that of America during the past hundred years.

To the outside world it has seemed one long series of almost unbroken successes; it is not strange that its own people have been only too ready to accept the flattering verdict. That America is the greatest country on earth is the natural conviction of those who in so short a time have done so much with the country ; that Americans have whipped creation is the natural and pleasant conclusion of a people who have found themselves for fifty years the subject of envy to most of the nations of Europe. In all this there has been danger. Neither man nor nation was ever reared to greatness on the food of flattery, and of all the tempers that can threaten the future of a people that of easy self-satisfaction is the most certain forerunner of disaster.

A glance at the past and the present, if clear and honest, should serve Americans as an antidote for this danger. Let them but glance at a newspaper of their country published a century ago and then at one of to-day, and from these they may gather some idea of the change that has taken place. They will find in the first the record of a national life that was simple, natural, and healthy ; in the second a record of existence full of feverish excitement and all the evils that attend it. They will find that while the language is the same, the very words have changed their meaning, and always for the worse. '* Equality,** it will be found, meant the acknowledged dignity of man as man only a hundred years ago ; to-day it will be apparent that its only meaning for American citizens is the right to give a vote. "Politics" a century ago meant the process of making good laws and providing for their honest and impartial execution ; to-day — as every newspaper bears ample witness — the word has been degraded till it signifies the fierce scramble for office and for the thousand dishonest advantages which the possession of office gives. And so with a hundred words, and those the words of most importance to the social and political life of the people. Words familiar to the newspaper of to-day, indeed, will be looked for in vain in its predecessors of a century ago. In politics there were no " ward-heelers," no '* machines,' 1 and no " bosses , " and in the record of industrial existence there were no references to the " tramp," the "sweat-shop/' or the "strike." The record will show that there was wealth in the country then, but it will also show that it was wealth which ministered to comfort and sufficiency, that it was widely distributed, and that therefore it had little to spare for luxury and still less for ostentation and display. It will show indeed that there were grades and classes in society then, as there have been at all times and in every land ; but the classes of the luxurious and all-powerful rich and of the helpless and down-trodden poor were a century ago unknown in America.

The people of America have in many ways been the victims of their own prosperity and success. Never before in all the course of human history has either a people or its institutions been exposed to such a strain as that which has fallen to the lot of the United States during the last fifty years. The current of headlong progress has been one of unprecedented strength, and it is little wonder if it has carried down with it in its course some landmarks that could ill be spared. Her people have not had leisure to consider their true position, nor, in the presence of such apparent advancement, to ask themselves where they were really going. The vast increase of the country's wealth has naturally enough led its people to regard riches as the highest object of ambition and to look on almost any means that secured them as venial, if not absolutely praiseworthy And thus the success which here more than elsewhere has waited upon energy and crowned perseverance and foresight has become the idol of the people, claiming at their hands the sacrifice of many of the things which their forefathers held most dear. And now America stands on the threshold of the new century — the second of her existence as a country entirely self-governed. There rests on her the responsibility of natural endowments greater than were ever bestowed before on any nation, of institutions designed with no ordinary skill to secure to each citizen the greatest amount of individual liberty consistent with the well-being of the community, and of a past free from the social and political evils that have weighed heavily on older nations. We need not go far to find many indeed who will assert that America has borne her responsibilities well and will enter on a second century under fairer conditions than those that met her a hundred years ago. They will point to her accumulated riches, to her gigantic enterprises, to the increase of her exports, and the activity of her manufactures ; they may even refer to the fabulous wealth of her millionaires, and ask whether such results as these are not worthy results of a century of effort. The question is one which vitally concerns the people of America, and no time could be more opportune in which to find an answer.