Standards of public morality

Front matter

H

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

RAILROAD TRANSPORTATION: Its History and Its Laws. $1.50.

Preface

The five chapters of which this book is composed were delivered as lectures on the John S. Kennedy Foundation in New York in November and December, 1906. The manner of treatment and choice of illustrations show that they were originally intended for the platform rather than for the printed page. It has not, however, been thought wise, in so short and unpretending a book as this, to make any serious change in their form.

Should any one take up this book a few years hence, the author hopes he may find that, though the events in the foreground have changed, the underlying principles yet remain of value.

New Haven, May, 1907.

vii

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Formation of Public Opinion . . 1

II. The Ethics of Trade 31

Chapter I *

CHAPTER I

ONE of the strangest features in the life of the American people at the present day is the contrast between its standards of private and of public morality.

In private the typical American citizen bears an excellent character. With the weak he is courteous ; with the strong, self-respecting; with all, helpful. He uses his powers and advantages unselfishly. He does not employ his strength to elbow his way to the front through a crowd of women and children. He does not employ his cunning to overreach his neighbors and friends. In great emergencies, like fire or flood or railway accident, it is not the mean and selfish side of human nature which comes prominently to the front in the conduct of our countrymen, but the large and helpful side. We are glad to believe that the heroism shown at these times of crisis is but a manifestation of the ordinary intentions and ideal- of our American

men and women, wliieli they are showing in thousands of

little acts of daily self-sacrifice of which we never hear.

But with our public moral- the case i- different. In each of our two chief form- of organized social activity — business and politic- — we have to record a different

Story. The man whom you could trust to help a weaker neighbor will nevertheless go to all lengths to hurt a weaker competitor for money or for office. A man who in private life would despise snobbishness and servility of every kind will in business or politics cringe to the stronger power for the sake of hi- own persona) advan- The instinct to serve others which we feel in our private relations gives place to an instinct to serve ourselves in commercial or political ones. And when some special emergency draws puhlie attention to the real method- which men are using and the real standards to which they hold, like the insurance investigation in New York or the political upheaval in St. Louis, we find ourselves confronted, not with unexpected ts of self-sacrificing heroism, but with unexpected

deptl Ifish deceit.

The man who hears the results of recent ir tions is apt to exclaim against the depravity of the men who manage oar business or oar politic. This is a very superficial way of looking at the matter. If hone

and there some individual misuses his monev or his office, we are justified in patting the blame upon him individually. But if a laige number of people are misusing their money or their offices, the fault cannot be theirs alone. The community is a partaker in that fault. The chief trouble lies in the public standard of morals. A great majority of the industrial and political leaders who have done the most harm are very excellent men according to their lights. They are kind to zh~ : .r :\\z::ots. :r.:i :: :z.- : .z iririi.Is. :.-i r-rA;;" to make almost any effort to help those to whom they deem jhcmsribes inder obligation. Bfosl of them would scorn to tell a He except in the way of business, as the old proverb runs. If an investigation shows them the real character of the things they have been doing, they die of broken hearts — not, as people commonly think, because they are afraid of going to jail, but because they are honestly ashamed and repentant.

[5]"

The blame for misuse rf industrial or political power i-, I repeat, ours jusl as much as theirs. Por it is the standards that arc at fault, and we as well as they have

a -hare in untiring the standards.

"What!" you will say, "are we, who never owned a share of railroad stock in our lives, to blame for railroad rebates? Are wc, who pay the prices charged by monopoly, to blame for the abuse of the power of industrial combination?" Yes. The man who in his <>wn grocery store encourages his clerk to let the Scales Weigh a little too heavy for the customer who not notice or is too self-respecting to make a fuss about it, ha- deprived himself of the chance of saying anything effective against railroad rebates. The man who ha- tried to create^ an artificial demand for labor by -low work or unfinished work, or any other of the device- known to the trade, has become a partaker in the responsibility for all the worst evils for which he has upbraided the great monopolists. Any condemnation of trusts on his part i- a mere matter of word-. He i- abusing them for doing on a large scale what he ha- been trying to do on a -mall scale.

In like manner, the man who contributes to campaign funds because he regards such contributions as good investments has deprived himself of the chance of criticising corrupt politics. The man who in the choice of representatives or advocacy of measures looks to his own interest instead of the interest of the body politic is a partaker in the political sins under which we suffer.

The chief cause of difference between our private and our public morality is that public sentiment is clear in one case and obscure or self-contradictory in the other. In private life we despise in ourselves and our friends the things which we condemn in our enemies. This makes our condemnation effective. In public matters, whether of business or of politics, our judgment is too often that of the lips rather than of the heart. We condemn a man for succeeding when his success is detrimental to us; but for the most part we have allowed ourselves to get a little money or a little political influence by methods which are so much like his that it takes all the force out of our condemnation. No wrong was ever stopped by the talk of men who objected to that wrong chiefly because somebody else gol the benefit of it. No legislation ever did much real good when the people who made (lie laws were not ready to apply the underlying principles of those laws against themselves.

A few years ago the legislature <>f <>ne of our southwestern Mate"- passed a most stringent act punishing commercial combination by line and imprisonment; providing, however, that nothing in that law should apply to combinations of cattlemen. A law against the stranger, an exception in favor of one's self and one's

friend- ! Unfortunately this is a type of commercial statute and commercial morality which is all too prevalent to-day.

We may prevent certain specific practices by statutes which make them misdemeanors; but in so doing wo have -imply cut off one way of reaching an end. Men will get the same result by another route. It is not enough to hinder men from obtaining money or office in certain specified ways. We must so shape their ambitions that they do not wish to obtain money <>r office by means that injure the community. We must get them to consider public selfishness as dishonorable a thing as we now consider private selfishness. If a man to-day crowds himself out of a theatre, leaving behind him a trail of bruised women and children, the very newsboy in the street will hiss him when he gets to the door. Such a man will be despised by the public, and in his heart he will despise himself, for taking advantage of his strength to crush others. But if a man gets money or office by analogous processes, the world is inclined to admire the result and forgive the means ; and the man, instead of despising himself for his selfishness, applauds himself for his success. He applauds himself because others are in their hearts admiring him ; and as long as he has this admiration he cares not for editorial attacks, or denunciatory sermons, or even laws to restrain his activity. He takes these things as tributes — inconvenient but inevitable tributes — to the magnitude of his own success.

The thing that governs us is public opinion — not the nominal public opinion of creed or statute book, but the real public opinion of living men and women. Whatever the intelligent and influential world regards

ICOeSS, ambitious men will try to achieve. Whatever means the intelligent and influential world condones in its work, the ambit ions man will practice in his. On the other hand, whatever ends the world regard- a-- dishonorable, strong men will refuse to pursue; and whatever means people disdain to use in their own interest, the strong man will reject and spurn. This dependence upon public opinion is not simply a present fact; it is a necessary basis of all free government. Unless the strong men are bound by public opinion and can 1 for the approval of their fellow-men, civil liberty is impossible; people can only be held in their places by a system of tyranny. It is because men want to do what Others approve, and because they despise themselves unless they conform their own conduct in some measure to the standards and needs of those about

them, that constitutional government is possible.

J 'his common sentiment or sense of the 4 community, of which each man is the trustee, IS the 4 really active agenl in free government. Legislatures and courts,

police and armies, may supplement its behests; they

aever can take the place of them. The police 4 may occasionally arrest an individual ; the courts may sometimes punish him ; but they cannot make a law sacred unless the majority of people acquiesce in its wisdom without waiting for the police to arrest them and for the courts to punish them. Legislation may render public opinion effective in some cases where its application would be obscure ; but legislation which attempts to anticipate public opinion instead of defining it becomes a dead letter or a laughing stock. The boy at school recognizes the obligations imposed by the public opinion of his fellows far more clearly and consistently than he obeys the rules imposed by the master. The professional man will hold to his code of professional ethics after he has let all other ethics go ; for to forfeit the opinion of those with whom he is associated is a greater evil than to lose life or liberty or chances of eternal salvation. Once let public sentiment be clear on a certain point, so that a man will enforce it against himself just as much as he does against others, and public sentiment can accomplish anything.

But why is there this difference in the way we enforce our standards of public and private morals ? Why do

in]

we apply our rules of private morals strictly and our rules of public morals loosely? It is because our experience in the one case bas been mucb longer than our experience in the other. Men have been trying to live in peace and harmony with those about them for bo many thousand years, that we know what is needed to keep the peace. But there have been so few hundred years since we began experimenting with the present commercial and industrial system, that we do not yet know what virtues are needed for its maintenance. We know pretty well what sort of duties a man ought to perform toward himself and toward his neighbor whom he can see. We are not sure what sort of obligations lie should recognize toward the larger world which he cannot see.

Centuries of experience have made it perfectly obvious to us all thai intemperance is bad, that cruelty is bad, and that breach of personal trust i- bad; that a man should support his family, stand by his friends, and help those about him whim they are in trouble. These rules have become so well established that we apply them impersonally. We not only condemn our enemies for breaking them, but we condemn our friends and ourselves with equal sharpness. In the field of private morals we have little difficulty in dividing people into good and bad. The good are those who fulfil the obligations and meet the moral standards which public opinion has set; the bad are those who repudiate the obligations and fall short of the standards. The ethics of the situation are generally clear.

But in public morals, whether commercial or political, the case is quite different. The ethics of the situation are not generally clear. There is no such consensus of public opinion as to the obligations which a man ought to assume. Society, as I said a moment ago, has not had time to watch the consequences of selfishness in politics as it has watched the consequences of selfishness in private life. In private matters we have a definite code which meets certain clearly understood needs ; and we can say of the man who fails to meet its requirements that his morals are bad. In public matters our code is indefinite, and our understanding of what we really need is often obscure. Even if a man is doing great harm to his fellow-men through his blindness to public wants or his selfish administration of public trusts, we cannot be quite certain that he is morally bad. His fault may be due to

defective ethics rather than to had morale He is not

necessarily defying an obligation which he, in common with all other men, understands and recognizes; he may he failing to recognize an obligation because he does not understand it.

We have no universal public opinion on these questions. We have sections of public opinion, working separately and often pulling apart. The Tribune appeals with confidence to the public opinion of one set of people ; the Post to the public opinion of a somewhat different set; the Journal to the public opinion of a set far different from either. The facts, views, and motives which are familiar to the readers of one of these papers arc unfamiliar to the others. Each group believes that its opinion represents a real understanding of the needs of the people, and that the views of the other groups represent the arguments ^i selfish hypocrite-, doubly detestable because they take the form of an appeal to public interest. In the face of difficulties and schisms of this kind, it sometimes seems as if there were no common ground to which to appeal ; no set of facts sufficiently known to all men to serve as a starting-point in the discussion of public affairs; no opportunity for getting on to a universal basis of sympathy in the domain of public morals corresponding to that on which we stand in our private morality.

One of the great difficulties which beset the newspaper editor when he tries to discuss public questions is the fact that most of his readers have a strong pecuniary or personal interest in having them decided in some particular way. The man who owes money likes all the arguments in favor of a depreciating currency, and is suspicious of those on the other side. With the man who has money due him the case is reversed. The man who employs labor feels the need of giving the largest amount of control to him who risks his capital. The arguments in favor of the rights of the capitalist employers seem to him strong ; all efforts to limit those rights savor of immorality. The laborer, on the contrary, who works for another man, feels that he, in giving his effort and perhaps risking his life, has far more to do with the product than the man who has simply invested his money. He looks with favor at every argument concerning the rights of labor, and with disfavor at any argument or precedent which seems to support the claims of capital. If an editor wishes to make his paper popular with a certain class, he lays stress on the arguments which that class likes and feeds them with the facts which they want to believe. His readers gradually get into a position w T here their prepossessions have been strengthened until they become prejudices, and where misinformation has been added to prejudice until it becomes almost irremovable.

There are right w T ays and wrong ways of getting at economic truth. If we start from discussion of those present-day problems where people are most prejudiced, I think we are adopting the wrong way. A few years ago, when I w T as receiving final instructions for a somewhat delicate negotiation, I said to my chief, "If the issue is forced upon us, there is, I think, nothing to do but to tell the truth;" and my chief, with the wisdom born of many years' experience, replied, " Even then, not butt end foremost" As long as we present truths concerning public policy butt end foremost to people who have an interest in not accepting them, we shall never carry conviction with us. But if we start from past history and study the development of the various rights and usages, we have a far better chance of arriving at a common understanding. People can look at the contests of past generations more dispassionately than at their own; and they are more ready to accept a legal or moral principle which bears a little hard upon their own interests if they see that it resulted from public necessities in the past than if they think it was specially trumped up for the occasion by some personal enemy of their own. I may be oversanguine in my confidence in what this historical study will do ; but I have generally observed that when a man sees that a measure has been framed in the public interest he accepts its consequences, even when they hurt him personally; and that if he once believes that a general rule is a general rule and not a piece of class legislation directed against him and his friends, he will lend his aid in its enforcement. This way of looking at things is known as public c [17]

spirit; and it is because the American people has, at the bottom, a great deal of this public spirit, that it

has been able to enjoy freedom for more than a century. If here or there this spirit to-day seems dormant, I

believe that this is due more to the lack of clear understanding of the problems at issue than to any deterioration in our moral fibre which unfits us for the exercise

of freedom.

Therefore, when one man makes liberty his watchword, and another democracy, and a third relies on constitutional safeguards; and when the three men, starting with these different premises of political ethics,

reach diverse and irreconcilable conclusions ; — the only way of bringing them together is to trace the origin of liberty and of democracy and of constitutional safeguards. When we look at the matter in this way, we shall see that not one of the three represents a fundamental principle of morals or politics; that each has been adopted and accepted as a means to the strength and progress of the community, rather than as an end of strength and progress; that when any one of the three is thus made an end instead of a means, or regarded as a postulate of right thinking instead of an incident of right living, it fails of the very purpose for which it exists.

Five hundred years ago our ancestors had a coherent and well-defined system of public opinion on public matters as well as private ones. It was not what we should call a good system; but, such as it was, it commanded almost universal acceptance. The public opinion of those ages held that each man was born to fill a certain niche or place in society. His duties as a member of the body politic were sharply defined for him by a series of traditions. He was to take the same trade which his father had before him; to make such goods and charge such prices as were fixed by tradition and enforced by the magistrates ; to perform such part in public affairs, and only such part, as belonged to his station. At all points which the law could reach he was closely hedged about; and where the law could not reach him, public sentiment compelled him to accept the dictates of the Church as to what he should think and believe. Each man was but one very small wheel in a laige machine. Unless t licit wheel ran as had been

ordered, men thought thai the whole machine would

- fall out of gear. This was the essence of the feudal

system. The codes of law with which we identify that system were but its externals. The real heart was found in its dominant public opinion, that kept each man in the place where he was born and set rules for all his actions as a member of an industrial and political community.

But there came a time when people ceased to be content with the dictates of this inherited opinion — a time when they wanted to make their own place in society, and serve the community in their own way instead of the way which tradition prescribed. Such men were at first treated as heretics and reprobates. But the communities which gave ear to the new doctrines and tolerated the new methods prospered, while those which altogether strove to repress them fell behind. The new methods began to displace the old by a process of natural selection.

At the end of the fifteenth century two events occurred which gave the death-blow to the old system of authority, and paved the way for the development of the new system of liberty. One was the invention of printing; the other was the discovery of America. The former gave every man who had new truth to preach an opportunity to spread it abroad, whether the authorities liked it or not. The latter gave to every man who had new modes of action to suggest a chance to try those modes on a large scale, free of the interference which he would have had at home. Slowly but surely the printed book had its influence in unsettling old methods of thought; slowly but surely the New World experiments had their influence in readjusting and reorganizing Old World methods. There is no time to trace in detail the history of this change. Suffice it to say that in the course of four centuries we passed from a system of status, wherein each man was born into a set of rights and obligations which he could not change, to a system of liberty under which each man was encouraged to serve society in his own way for better or for worse.

Speaking broadly, there is no doubt that this system has justified itself. " It reposes," to quote the admirable words of John Morley, "on no principle of abstract right, but on principles of utility and experience. Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell us.

"Now Mr. Mill's doctrine [of liberty] laid down the main condition of finding your hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man, nor majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves. Wits have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares to grow, you give the wheat a better chance. This is as misleading as such metaphors usually are. The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of assuring ourselves. If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing wheat as well. The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience of mankind."

This is the true doctrine of liberty. But there are a great many people who, seeing the truth of this doctrine, have taken a further step that converts its truth into falsehood; who believe that because we have found it wise to let individuals serve society in their own way, we may therefore let them have their own way in everything, with the assurance that they will serve society in spite of themselves ; that the selfishness of all men, pulling apart and working for their own interest, can by some occult process be trusted to promote the common interest. For this extreme theory there is not one shadow of justification in human history. But in these days true and false doctrines of liberty are so interwoven that the men who see the good of the right kind of liberty are prone to shut their eyes to the evils of the wrong kind; while those who see the evils of the wrong kind of liberty arc equally blind to the inestimably great good which the right kind of liberty accomplishes. To kings and nobles and prelates, and other beneficiaries of the feudal system, the doctrine of liberty in it- true form, no less than in its false one, was a very

unwelcome thing. As a matter of course, they resisted

it. In some countries, notably in Spain, they were successful, and succeeded in checking the growth of liberty at the loss of national vitality and national progress. But in England, in France, and in Germany, the forces on the two sides were more evenly balanced. There was a conflict which lasted for centuries between the feudal governments on the one hand and the champions of liberty on the other. Out of the resistance of these governments to liberty grew the modern system of democracy. The people as a body tried to take the business of governing into their own hands, as a means of preserving liberty against the encroachment of privileged classes. The fundamental theory of this democratic movement was that all just government was based on the consent of the governed.

This underlying theory of democracy was as sound as the underlying theory of liberty. Unfortunately it was just as easily subject to perversion. Not content with saying that all just government was based on the consent of the governed, the enthusiastic advocates of democracy held that if you could only find what a majority of the governed wanted, you could wisely incorporate it into law. Never was there a greater practical error. Public law, to be effective, requires much more than the majority to support it. It requires general acquiescence. To leave the minority at the mercy of the whims of the majority does not conduce to law or good government or justice between man and man. Even Rousseau, the leading apostle of modern democracy, saw this most clearly. He said in substance: "A majority of the people is not the people, and never can be. We take a majority vote simply as the best available means of ascertaining the real wishes of the people in cases when it becomes necessary to do so." But Rousseau's followers, who believed in the infallibility of majorities, did not stop short in the application of their theory until they had produced the helpless anarchy which preceded the

adoption of the Constitution of the United States, or

the reign of terror which preceded the reestablishment of a strong persona] government in Prance. For the principles of extreme democracy and of extreme liberty, though often proclaimed by the same persons, are inconsistent in practice and in theory. The right of each man to consult his own interests and the right of a majority of men to sacrifice the interests of the minority are absolutely irreconcilable with one another.

The people who were charged with the practical work of governing democratic countries saw this difficulty; and they tried to provide against it by the adoption of constitutions. These constitutions erected traditional or vested rights as a bar against the e\< of individual liberty on the one hand; and. still more important, against the excesses of unrestricted powers of the majority on the other. The Constitution of the United State- is perhaps the best example of a practical instrument of this kind. The preamble indeed asserts unqualified rights to liberty and unqualified adherence to the principles of democracy; hut the instrument itself is occupied with establishing safeguards for property and contract against the violence of liberty, and for orderly development of the law against the disorderly demands of majorities. The success of our Constitution has been so great that a very considerable proportion of our people make it the starting-point of their reasoning on industrial and political morals. But the theory of the sovereignty of the Constitution is in effect a denial of the principles both of liberty and of democracy. There is nothing self-evident or axiomatic about the Constitution of the United States. It was adopted because the public opinion of Americans at the end of the eighteenth century acquiesced in the practical wisdom of its provisions. Those who take their stand on the letter of these provisions to-day are bound to take pains to keep public opinion of the twentieth century behind them — not simply their own public opinion and that of their friends, but of the great body of the governed on whose consent constitutional government must rest.