Chapter XXXII…

Chapter XXXII

"NOT BUSINESS"

This "business success" is the greatest commercial and financial achievement of history. Its broad foundation was laid in the years from 1872 to 1879, the severest time of panic for others the world has known. A universal jaundice of ill-fortune has given its sallow complexion to every one else. From the Alleghanies to the Caucasus thousands of men have been somehow thrown out of work because so much new work has come to the world. "At the flash of a telegraphic message from Cleveland, Ohio," said the people of the oil regions in their appeal to the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1878, "hundreds of men have been thrown out of employment at a few hours' notice, and kept for weeks in a state of semi-starvation." These men filled up many of the insurrectionary ranks of the great railway strike of 1877, as the employés of the Pennsylvania Railway declared in a public communication at that time. The eight oil-producing counties of Pennsylvania were said by the general council of the petroleum producers, in a public address in 1879, to be "fast sinking beneath such financial distress that resistance to threatened bankruptcy or servitude could not long be made." They grew too poor to pay the counsel they employed to help them in the courts, the legislatures, and before the executive of Pennsylvania and Congress. "The universal complaint we find is the poverty of the people, not their unwillingness to give." "I am ashamed," said one of them in court, "to see our counsel every day on account of the beggarly amounts I have paid them. A large number of producers have subscribed that have not paid."[653]

Men who were "frozen out" of their occupation in transporting or refining oil took to digging wells. "That is the only thing they have been allowed to do. They went on in a wild way, hunting new oil, and when they found it they would develop it rapidly." This made oil fall in price, and the more they produced the more they had to produce. The wages of labor kept going down. They were lower in 1888 than they were twenty-four years before. "A well-digger that I paid $6 a day and his expenses twenty-four years ago is now working for $40 a month. That is true of every department of the oil business so far as the wages of workmen are concerned." "We were $10,000,000 poorer at the end of 1887 than at the beginning," said the association of oil producers of Pennsylvania. Their executive committee the next year said the people were on "the verge of bankruptcy."[654]

The railroads were no happier than the laborers, the producers, the manufacturers, or the merchants. As early as 1879 Vanderbilt II. declared that the oil business of the railroads--worth $30,000,000 a year--had been destroyed.

"I think the business is gone."[655]

In 1892 a number of refiners and producers of Pennsylvania, in a formal appeal to Governor Pattison, asked him to investigate the causes which were working "to the injurious depression if not the ultimate destruction of a great industry." In the same year mutterings of a turbulent discontent and threats of violence and the destruction of property, repeating those of 1872, were heard again in Pennsylvania and in Ohio, which had become an oil-producing State. "Many of the oil producers," a member of their protective association in Ohio said, in the spring of 1892, "are in a bad way. They are at that point that they don't know just where their next sack of flour is coming from, and I am not surprised at anything they may do."

This area of low pressure, following the habit of American storms, made itself felt abroad in bankruptcies and falling wages from Scotland to Baku and beyond. Meanwhile the little nest-egg of nothing of the group which came into the field in 1862 grew to $1,000,000 in 1870; to $2,500,000 in 1872; to $3,500,000 in 1875; to $70,000,000 in 1882; and in 1887 to a capital of $90,000,000, which the New York Legislature reported in 1888, "according to the testimony of the trust's president," to be worth "not less than $148,000,000."[656] Before the trust was dissolved in name, in 1892, and the "trustees" betook themselves to the greater seclusion of separate corporations, acting in concert, its stock sold as high as 185, a valuation of $166,500,000 for the whole.

Its dividends had been $10,800,000 a year for several years. These ducal incomes and the vaster sums accumulated as undivided profits made themselves visible in the progressive embonpoint of the capitalization. In the six years (1876-81) preceding their taking the veil as trustees their net earnings added up the total of $55,000,000. In the next six years (to 1888) the dividends alone--not the net earnings--were more than $50,000,000.[657] These did not absorb their profits. In one year they spent $8,000,000 out of their profits for construction, besides making the regular payments to stockholders.[658]

"All this vast wealth," the New York Legislature said, "is the growth of about twenty years; this property has more than doubled in value in six years, and with this increase the trust has made aggregate dividends during that period of over $50,000,000. It is one of the most active," the report continued, "and possibly the most formidable moneyed power on this continent."[659]

"This is an immense property," says the Interstate Commerce Commission," ... and it gives an immense power which is capable of being so employed as to put all competitors at a great and perhaps ruinous disadvantage."[660]

For the first time the New York investigation of 1888 revealed that it was only the beginning of the truth that these hundreds of millions were controlled by "trustees." It now became known that some one or more of the trustees owned personally more than half of every concern in the trust, and of the best ones owned all.

"These eight trustees control all these ninety millions of property scattered over the United States?" the president of the trust was asked.

"They have as trustees, and they have as individual owners both."[661]

In corroboration of this testimony the trust furnished the New York Senate Committee of 1888 a "list of corporations, the stocks of which are wholly or partially held by the trustees of the Standard Oil Trust." In this list, under the head of "New York State," appears this: "Capital stock, $5,000,000. Standard Oil Company of New York, manufacturers of petroleum products. Standard Oil Trust ownership, entire."[662] But when the company was threatened with the forfeiture of its charter by the proceedings before the Attorney-General in May, 1894, its president made oath as follows: "The Standard Oil Company of New York never permitted its stock to be transferred to trustees."[663]

Even this ownership by eight men is not the whole of the truth. The eight trustees have a ruling power within themselves. An examination of the personnel of the board at the beginning, middle, and end of its career as a board shows four men always there. This agrees with the remark reported in the press to have been made by the solicitor of the trust upon its ostensible dissolution in 1892: "A majority of the stock being held by four men."

A friendly journal, the New York Sun, of April 25, 1889, in an editorial paragraph concerning the wealth of one of the trustees, said: "His regular income is twenty millions of dollars a year. That makes him the richest man in the United States--perhaps the very richest in the world." This is nearly three times the dividends paid in 1892 to all its stockholders by the Bank of England. The Bank of England has built up this earning power by two hundred years' work at the head of the finances of the greatest empire of history. This American wins thrice its dividend capability in less than a generation by contriving and managing an institution which he says does not do any business. Another entirely friendly paper, with sources of information of the very best, put his income two years later at $30,000,000 a year.[664] No denial of the Sun's statement was attempted, and the Sun never withdrew or modified its figures. Shortly after the secretary of the trust gave, in a public interview, a statement of the income of its principal members. That of one of them he put at $9,000,000 a year; his own at $3,000,000.

This wealth is as much too vast for the average arithmetical comprehension as the size of the dog-star, 400 times larger than the sun. These incomes are sums which their fortunate owners could not count as they received them. If they did nothing but stand all day at the printing-presses of the Treasury Department while the millions came uncrinkled out in crisp one-dollar greenbacks, or worked only at catching the new dollars as they rolled out from the dies of the Mint, they could not count them. If they worked eight hours a day, and six days a week, and fifty-two weeks in the year, they could not count their money. The dollars would come faster than their fingers could catch them; the dollars would slip out of their clutch and fall to the floor, and, piling up and up, would reach their knees, their middle, their arms, their mouth, and Midas would be snuffed out in his own gold.

Commodore Vanderbilt, Parton tells us, was forty-four years old before he was worth $400,000. In the next thirty years he increased this to over $100,000,000--perhaps twice that; no one knows. Vanderbilt had to multiply this nest-egg of his forty-fourth year 250 times, but one of these "trustees" will be a billionaire when he has turned himself over only ten times. Poor's Railroad Manual shows these men and their associates to be presidents or directors in thousands of miles of railroads, valued at hundreds of millions. Their names were prominent in the railroad "deal" of 1892 and 1893, which had for its end to put the whole of New England under one hand, controlling both its land and water connections with the rest of the country. They stand at the receipt of custom at the railroad gates to the oil regions; to the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois; the copper, gold, and silver mines of the West; the iron mines of the West and South; the turpentine forests and the lumber regions and cotton fields; the food-producing areas of the Mississippi basin; the grazing lands of the plains. They are owners in the principal steamship line between America and Europe, and in the "whalebacks," which appear destined to drive other models out of the freight traffic of the lakes, and have begun to appear on the Eastern and Western oceans, to capture the carrying business of the world. Every dollar for the construction of a State building at the World's Fair was advanced by one of them, as the principal journal of the State announced, and it referred to him as "the man who breathes life into its East coast towns, and the lifting of his pen by his hand is like turning upsidedown the horn of plenty." They are "in" the best things--telegraphs, the gas supply of our large cities, street-railways, steel mills, ship-yards, Canadian and American iron mines, town sites. Ore dug out of their own iron mines at the head of Lake Superior is carried over their own railroad to their own furnaces and mills. It rolls along until that which began to move as ore lies at the docks of their ship-yards as a finished vessel, cut out of the mountains, as it were, at one cheap stroke, or is loaded in the cars in some perfected shape of steel, as steam radiators or what not. They feed entire mountain ranges into their mills with one hand, and with the other despatch the product in their own cars and ships to all markets. Betrayal, bankruptcy, broken hearts, and death have kept quick step with the march of the conquerors in iron as in oil. They are in the combination in anthracite coal, with which the acquisition by an American syndicate of the Nova Scotia coal deposits is closely connected. Theirs is the largest share in the natural-gas business in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Indiana, Illinois. They are in the combination which controls lead, from pig to white lead, and turpentine and linseed-oil and paints.

"Its members," it was said in the application to the Attorney-General of New York, in 1894, for a forfeiture of one of their charters, "are now presidents and directors in 33,000 miles of road, one-fifth of the total mileage in the United States. Its surplus is invested in banking, in natural and manufacturing gas companies, in iron ore beds and coal beds and crude-oil production, in lead and zinc, in turpentine and cotton-seed oil, in steel, in jute manufacture, in ocean steamships, in palatial hotels, in street-railroads."

Most of their interests are in public functions, railroads, pipe lines, telegraphs, postal contracts, steamers, municipal franchises, and the like; but it is impossible to know their full extent with our present crude means for enforcing the truth that property is power and that civilization endures no irresponsible anonymous power. The corporation is an agency by which the capitalist can do business in ambuscade. "They are all in our company," said the manager of a very important public agency, "but their names do not appear." It is not out of deference to the obsolete idea that such matters are private business that all the details of their possessions are not given, but only because they are not known.

"There is no such thing as extemporaneous acquisition," Daniel Webster said; but he spoke of eloquence, not of the perfected modern commerce. Selligue, the French genius to whose discoveries nothing of equal importance has been added, is not dignified with an entry in the encyclopædias or biographical dictionaries. For "Colonel" Drake, who struck oil, a pension had to be provided by his friends in the regions which he had filled with fountains of wealth. Mr. Van Syckel, who first proved the pipe line to be practicable, died in Buffalo, paralytic, helpless, and poor.

The "age of oil" could not have come without the oil well and the drill and derrick, and these in America are the lineal descendants of the first salt well, drilled and whittled out of the rocks by the Ruffner brothers, in 1806, in the "Great Buffalo Lick" of the Kanawha. Their first "drill" was a great sycamore-tree, four feet through, hollowed out, set on end on the ground in the lick, and gradually lowered as the earth and stone within were dug away by a man inside. When they came to the rock, which they could not blast because it was under water, they hung a roughly-made iron drill by a rope to a spring pole and went inch by inch through the rock, "kicking down" the well. Metal tubes were not to be had, but the Yankee whittler solved the problem of tubing the well. Two slender strips of wood were whittled into two long, thin, half tubes, and tied together. This is the genesis of the bored "well" and the "drill and derrick."[665] It took eighteen months to accomplish this, but the wonder is that it was done at all "without preliminary study, previous experience or training, without precedent, in a newly-settled country without steam-power, machine-shop, skilled mechanics, suitable tools or materials."

These almost-forgotten men, shrewd, patient, undauntable, were the pioneers of the skilful well-borers who have gone forth from the Kanawha wells all over the country to bore wells for irrigation on the Western plains, for cities, factories, and private use, for salt, for gas, for geological and mineralogical explorations, and for oil. "Billy Morris," of the Kanawha borings, invented a tool simple enough, but not so simple as to be described here, called the "slips" or "jars," which has done more for deep boring than anything except the steam-engine, and for which, considering the part played in the life of man by oil, gas, water, brine, and other wells, we are told he "deserves to be ranked with the inventors of the sewing-machine, reaper, and cotton-gin."[666] But "Uncle Billy" made a free gift to the well-diggers of the world of his invaluable "slips," and slipped into poverty and an unknown grave. To Joshua Merrill, more than to any one else, belongs the honor of bringing the manufacture of oil in America to its perfection.[667] He made better oil than any one else, and he loved his work. "I was thirty-two years in the oil business. It was the business of my life."[668] But he had to dismantle his refinery, and join the melancholy procession of two thousand years of scouts, inventors, pioneers, capitalists, and toilers who march behind the successful men.

Yet, strange to say, these successful men did not discover the oil, nor how to "strike" it. They were not the lucky owners of oil lands. As late as 1888 they produced only 200 barrels a day--about 1 in every 3000--"an infinitesimal amount," their president said.[669] They did not invent any of the processes of refining. They did not devise the pipe line, and they did all they could to prevent the building[670] of the first pipe line to the seaboard, and to cripple the successful experiment of piping refined oil.[671] They own all the important refineries, and yet they have built very few. They did not project the tank-car system, which came before them,[672] and have used their irresistible power to prevent its general use on the railroads, and successfully.[673] They were not the first to enter the field in any department. They did not have as great capital or skill as their competitors.[674] They began their career in the wrong place--at Cleveland--out of the way of the wells and the principal markets, necessitating several hundred miles more of transportation for all of their product that was marketed in the East or Europe.[675] They had no process of refining oil which others had not, and no legitimate advantages over others.[676] They did not even invent the rebate. They made oil poor[677] and scarce[678] and dear.[679]

The power to chalk down daily on the black-board of the New York Produce Exchange the price at which people in two hemispheres shall buy their light has followed these strokes of "cheapness":

1. Freight rates to the general public have been increased, often to double and more what is paid by a favored few.[680]

2. The construction has been resisted of new lines of transportation by rail,[681]

3. And pipe.[682] This has been done by litigation,[683] by influence, by violence,[684] even to the threatened use of cannon,[685] and by legislation, as in Ohio and Pennsylvania, to prevent the right of eminent domain from being given by "free pipe-line bills" to the people generally.

4. The cost of pipeage has been raised.[686]

5. Rivers and canals have been closed.[687]

6. Oil has been made to run to waste on the ground.[688]

7. The outflow of oil from the earth has been shut down.[689]

8. The outflow of human energy that sought to turn it to human use has been shut down by restricting the manufacture by the combination and by others, by contract,[690] dismantling,[691] and explosion.[692]

9. High fees have been maintained for inspection,[693] and the inspectors have been brought into equivocal relations with the monopoly.[694]

10. The general use of tank-cars and tank-steamers has been prevented.[695]

11. The people have been excluded from the free and equal use of the docks, storehouses, and other terminal facilities of the railroads in the great harbors of export.[696]

12. Inventors and their better processes have been smothered.[697]

13. Men have been paid more for spying than they could earn by working.[698]

14. "Killing delay" has been created in the administration of justice.[699]

All are poorer--oil-producers, land-owners, all labor, all the railroads, all the refiners, merchants, all the consumers of oil--the whole people. Less oil has flowed, less light shone, and there has been less happiness and virtue. In every one of the few intervals, says Hudson, during which oil could flow freely to Pittsburg, all the businesses connected with it were active and expanding.[700]

When the trust's secretary was asked for the proper name of the combination, his reply was: "The Lord only knows; I don't." "An indescribable thing," he said again.[701]

"Do you understand the practical work of refining as a refiner?" he was asked.

"I do not.... I have not been inside a refinery in ten years."[702]

"Two mills a ton a mile for five hundred miles would be a dollar a ton?"

"I am not able to demonstrate that proposition."

"You have some arithmetical knowledge?"

"I cannot answer that question."[703]

He could not state what proportion of the oil trade is now controlled by the trust. He had never looked into that question. He did not know who knows these things.[704]

"You own the pipe line to New York?"

"Yes, sir."

"What does it cost you to do business on that pipe line?"

"I do not know anything about it.... I have never been in the oil regions but once in my life.... I am not a practical oil man.... For perhaps eight years I have given absolutely no attention to the details of our business."[705]

Asked upon another occasion, before the Pennsylvania Legislature, about the accounts of the company when he was its secretary, he said:

"I am not familiar with the accounts."[706]

"I am a clamorer for dividends. That is the only function I have," said another trustee.[707]

"When was your last rate given you, the rate at which you are now being carried (on the New York Central)?"

"I could not tell."[708]

The secretary had testified that this associate attended to getting the rates of freight; but the latter avowed that he could not remember "any rate" that he had paid "at any time." But a little later he who could not remember any rate he had ever paid was able to tell the committee, off-hand, the exact rate of freight on oil by steamer from Batoum in Russia to Liverpool, and knew the rate from the wells at Baku by rail to the sea at Batoum![709]

"Had you ever been interested in the refinery of oil in any manner when you first became connected with the oil business?" another trustee was asked.

"Never."

"Or the production of oil?"

"Never."

He was a railroad man, and had been taken into the combination for his value as such; but when he was asked if he could tell any of the rates of freight his company had paid, he said:

"I cannot."[710]

"What is your business and where do you reside?" another of the trustees was asked by the State of New York.

"I decline to answer any question until I can consult counsel."[711]

"What is the capital stock?" was asked of another.

"I do not know."

"How much has the capital been increased since?"

"I don't know."

"Where are the meetings of the Standard Oil Company held?"

"I don't know."

"How many directors are there?"

"I don't know."

"Do they own any pipe lines?"

"I don't know."

"I don't know anything about the rates of transportation."[712]

"What quantity of oil was exported by the different concerns with which you were connected from the port of New York in 1881?" the president was asked.

"I do not know."

"How many millions of barrels of oil were refined by such concerns in the vicinity of New York in 1881?"

"I don't know how much was refined."

"Did not the concern with which you were so connected purchase over 8,000,000 barrels of crude petroleum in 1881?"

"I am unable to state."

He was asked to give the name of one refinery in this country, running at the time (1883), not owned or substantially controlled by his concern. "I decline to answer."[713]

He was asked if he would say the total profits of his trust's companies for the last year (1887) were not as much as $20,000,000.

"I haven't the least knowledge on that subject."[714]

Phrenologists are right. Memory is not to be ranked with the mental attributes of the highest importance. The head of the New York Central could not tell when a stock dividend of something like $46,000,000 had been declared on one of his railroads--and a $46,000,000 dividend is something worth remembering. "I don't know.... I don't remember."[715] It is lucky for the rest of us that these great men forget something.

One of the chiefs of the oil combination was a witness in Cleveland in 1887 in a suit by the State of Ohio against certain railroads.

"What business in connection with the oil business is done in the building in which the oil trust has its office in New York?"

"I do not think I could state just what business is done in that building, I am sure."

Asked on the witness-stand in the Buffalo explosion case when it was he formed the "trust" with $70,000,000 of capital, the president replied: "I am unable to state," and he could not say where its articles of agreement were, nor who has control of it. When questioned before the Interstate Commission he could not tell within $25,000,000 how much business they were doing a year.[716]

These men keep no books. The whole arrangement is just a happy family, like Barnum's monkeys, birds, cats, dogs, and mice in the same cage. "It is a business of faith," one of the ruling four puts it. Another was asked about the by-laws under which he and his associates transacted their business. "I don't know that I have seen a copy," he replied, and as to where it was he was able only to "suppose."[717]

When the committee of the Legislature called for the books recording the transactions of the trust and its attorneys and committees, there were practically none to produce. All there was in the way of a record of transactions of a magnitude beyond those of any other commercial institution in this country or the world were a few pages of formal entries from which nothing could be learned. The executive committee received and passed upon the disbursements of money by the treasurer, and the reports of sub-committees and of members, who had sweeping powers of attorney, by which these countless millions were kept rolling themselves up into more, but it never kept any records.

"I have no knowledge of any formal record having been made," one of them said. The reports were "either verbal or on pieces of paper.... I think it was memorandums," he continued, and the memorandums were "undoubtedly destroyed." They were transcribed into the records of the trustees, he said, but the search of the committee showed that the transcription was a "skeleton," consisting mainly of the mere phrase, "Minutes of the executive committee approved." "The real minutes do not appear upon the book," Senator Ives, of the committee, said.

"There is no book to produce?"

"There is no book."

"And there is no memorandum?"

"There is no memorandum."[718]

"Does the trust keep books?" the "president" was asked by Congress.

"No, we have no system of book-keeping."

On further pressure he said that the treasurer had "a record to know what money comes in."

"You have never seen those books?"

"I do not think I have ever seen those books."

"Has any member of the nine" (trustees) "ever seen those books?"

"I do not know that they have."[719]

Simplicity is said to be always a characteristic of greatness. What could be simpler, and so greater, than this? The elements of success are only--

1. Not to know anything about the business.

2. To keep no books.

3. To have "a record to know what money comes in," and

4. Never to look at it.

Finally, the operations of these men have, in their own language, not been "business." Its secretary told Congress that the "trust" was "not a business corporation,"[720] and an associate declared in court that it "cannot do business." The report of the New York Legislature shows that on October 3, 1883, the president had by a formal instrument been made the attorney of the trust to sign and execute all the contracts made by it. The same instrument in express terms confirmed the execution of contracts heretofore signed by him, showing that he had been making contracts.[721]

"Those gentlemen" (the members of the trust who hold its power of attorney) "do actually execute contracts involving pretty large amounts, sometimes without a formal resolution of the Board of Trustees, do they not?" one of them was asked.

"Undoubtedly they do."[722]

Following their employers, the lawyers in the Pennsylvania Tax case for the oil combination argued that its operations were not business within the meaning of the tax law. If the "no money" of 1862 has become the control, in one industry alone, of $160,000,000 in 1892 by methods that are not "business," what are they?

NOTE.--The principal members of the oil combination were heard at great length in its defence before the committee of Congress investigating trusts in 1888.[723] Their testimony has been frequently used in our pages. But they felt that their case needed further elucidation, and asked the committee to hear them again. The committee declined to hear them again "explain or contradict," as they offered to do, but by printing their communication gave them the benefit of their denials and explanations.[724] Their offer was mainly to go again over the ground that the "South Improvement Company never did any business," that the combination "obtained no preferences" on the railroads, that they had cheapened transportation, improved machinery, made better oil at less cost, and so on. The chief officers and owners had been heard on all these points to the extent of hundreds of pages of testimony. But though it did not recall them to the witness-stand, the committee, in addition to printing their communication, printed most of the documentary evidence they desired to submit. This covered nearly two hundred pages more.[725]

The examination, which any one can make, of this record discloses an interesting fact concerning the proof, and the trust's offer to prove, which can best be shown in parallel columns:

TRUST'S OFFER TO PROVE. | THE PROOF. | It offered the evidence of the third|But the testimony of this witness vice-president of the Pennsylvania |states that his connection with Railroad to "show the South |the oil business of the Pennsylvania Improvement Company never did any |Railroad--the principal railroad in business, and its charter was |that scheme--did not begin until repealed in 1872." |1873.[726] | It offered the same evidence to |But this witness stated that his prove that the same rebates granted |road would give other shippers as it by the contract of October 17, |low rates as to the oil combination, 1877, "were also granted to every |"if they would guarantee the same shipper who contracted to do all |quantity--not otherwise--under that his business over the Pennsylvania |contract";[727] and the contract Railroad." |itself states that no other shipper |should have the same rebate |--"commission," it is called--unless |his business gave the road "the same |amount of profit you realized from |our trade."[728] No shipper could get |the same rates by giving "all his |business." He must give "the same |quantity"--a totally different |proposition. | It offered the evidence taken in the|The evidence shows that this was Buffalo Explosion case, to show that|what was sworn to: "I have now a "C.B. Matthews testified falsely" |detective agency here" (Buffalo). "I in testifying that it was sworn to |employed L---- B----. At the time that the members of the oil |he was in my employ he was employed combination on trial employed |at the works of the Buffalo detectives in Matthews' refineries, |Lubricating Company" (Matthews' and that the detective was some time|company). "He made reports to me.... in Matthews' employ, and made his |I forwarded copies--one to New report to the lawyer of the trust, |York, one to Rochester.... The one and he got his pay from this lawyer.|forwarded to New York was addressed |to" (the lawyer of the oil |trust). "I met" (this lawyer, naming |him) "at New York City, at No. 44 |Broadway, which is the office of the" |(oil trust). "I received my pay from" |(him). "My instructions from" (him) |"were in writing."[729] | It offered "to prove that C.B. |This was what "was proved by a Matthews testified falsely in saying|witness," and referred to by that it was proved by a witness" |Matthews. that the Rochester representative of|"He" (the Rochester representative the oil combination said that the |of the oil combination) principal company in it "would sue |"said he thought they" (Matthews' Matthews once a month, or once a |company) "would not survive.... By week, if necessary, to squeeze him |the time they got through with all out." |the suits that they" (the oil |combination) "would bring, the |Buffalo Lubricating Company would |be pretty much used up.... He didn't |know as they would gain anything |really, but they would embarrass them |by bringing these suits, and if it |was necessary they would bring them |once a month--yes, they would bring |them once a week."[730]

Similarly, throughout, the trust's offer to prove falls when confronted with its own proof. Many more instances could be given, but more than one instance is not needed.

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XXXIII. THE SMOKELESS REBATE

With searching intelligence, indomitable will, and a conscience which makes religion, patriotism, and the domestic virtues but subordinate paragraphs in a ritual of money worship, the mercantile mind flies its air-line to business supremacy. That entirely modern social arrangement--the private ownership of public highways--has introduced a new weapon into business warfare which means universal dominion to him who will use it with an iron hand.

This weapon is the rebate, smokeless, noiseless, invisible, of extraordinary range, and the deadliest gun known to commercial warfare. It is not a lawful weapon. Like the explosive bullet, it is not recognized by the laws of war. It has to be used secretly. All the rates he got were a secret between himself and the railroads. "It has never been otherwise," testified one of the oil combination.[731] The Chevalier Bayard declared proudly, as he lay on his death-bed, that he had never given quarter to any one so degraded and unknightly as to use gunpowder. Every one would close in at once to destroy a market combatant who avowed that he employed this wicked projectile.

The apparatus of the rebate is so simple that it looks less like a destroying angel than any weapon of offence ever known. The whole battery consists only of a pen and ink and some paper. The discharge is but the making of an entry--but the signing of a check. But when the man who commands this simple enginery directs it against a business competitor you can follow the track of wreckage like the path of a cyclone, by the ruins which lie bleaching in the air for years. The gentlemen who employ it give no evidence of being otherwise engaged than in their ordinary pursuits. They go about sedate and smiling, with seemingly friendly hands empty of all tools of death. But all about them as they will, as if it were only by wish of theirs which attendant spirits hastened to execute, rivals are blown out of the highways, busy mills and refineries turn to dust, hearts break, and strong men go mad or commit suicide or surrender their persons and their property to the skilful artillerists.

"And in the actual practice of daily life," says Ruskin, "you will find that wherever there is secrecy, there is either guilt or danger." "When did you discover the fact that these rebates had been paid?" one of the victims was asked.

"We never discovered it as a fact until the testimony was taken in 1879.... We always suspected it; but we never knew of it of our personal knowledge, and never would really have known it of our personal knowledge.... I had no idea of the iniquity that was going on."[732]

Nothing so demolishing was ever so delicate and intangible as this, for its essence is but a union of the minds of a railroad official and some business friend, perhaps a silent partner, bent on business empire. The model merchant, fortunate in having a friend willing so to use a power sovereigns would not dare to use, walks the public way, strong in his secret, and smiles with triumph as all at whom he levels his invisible wand sicken and disappear. "He has the receipt of fern-seed. He walks invisible."

Men who hunt their fellow-men with this concealed weapon always deny it, as they must. To use it has always been a sin, and has been made a crime in every civilized State. Under United States law it is, since 1887, an offence punishable with imprisonment in the penitentiary.[733] Moral ideals are not born in legislatures. When an act attains by a law the distinction of being made a crime, it is already well on its way to extinction. It is made infamous by law, because it has already become infamous before the conscience and honor of men. It was not the prohibition of highway privilege by the Constitution of Pennsylvania or the laws of the United States which made the rebate an iniquity. This legal volley is but a salute to the established conscience.

The question most often pressed before all the many legislative and judicial inquests held upon the dead bodies which strew every field of the oil industry has been whether the extraordinary powers which the invention of the locomotive and the transformation of public highways into private property had given railways over the livelihoods of the people had been used to make it impossible for any but a preferred few to live.

One of the successful men disposed of the evidence that these powers had been so used by styling it before the committee of Congress of 1888 as the "worst balderdash," and before the New York Legislative Committee of 1888 as "irresponsible newspaper statements," "a malignity and mendacity that is little short of devilishness." The secretary of the oil trust waved it away as "all this newspaper talk and flurry." The president knows nothing about the existence of such privileges, except that he has "heard much of it in the papers." And yet another of the trust in the North American Review of February, 1883, similarly describes the accusation as "uncontradicted calumny," to which, he regrets to say, "several respectable journals and magazines lent themselves."

After taking 3700 pages of evidence and sitting for months, the committee of 1879 of the New York Legislature said in their report: "The history of this corporation is a unique illustration of the possible outgrowth of the present system of railroad management in giving preferential rates, and also showing the colossal proportions to which monopoly can grow under the laws of this country.[734] ... The parties whom they have driven to the wall have had ample capital and equal ability in the prosecution of their business in all things save their ability to acquire facilities for transportation."[735]

The committee of the Ohio Legislature which took the evidence of the treatment of the Marietta independents by the railroads[736] is, so far as the author knows, the only body of all the legislative and judicial tribunals that have been investigating for the past thirty years which has found the relations of the railroads and the oil combination to be proper. It used the words "public," "uniform," "in accordance with law," "equitable," "no special discriminations or privileges" to describe the conduct of the common carriers in that case. But in doing so it had to except from these exculpations the railroad which originated the attack on the independent refiners, and the rates of which controlled the others, as it was the initial road. It had also to admit that the oil combination had received "better rates," but defended them on the ground that its shipments were larger. These two exceptions are doors wide enough to admit every possibility of the rebate. The Secretary of State for Internal Affairs of Pennsylvania made an investigation in 1878 on the complaint of citizens. He reported to the Attorney-General that no case had been made out "beyond the ordinary province of individual redress." He was hung in effigy by the citizens, and the evidence he took remains, like that of the Ohio Committee of 1879, a valuable repository of facts from which students can draw their own conclusions.

More than any others the wrongs of the oil industry provoked the investigations by Congress from 1872 to 1887, and caused the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and more than any others they have claimed the attention of the new law and the new court. The cases brought before it cover the oil business on practically every road of any importance in the United States--in New England, the Middle States, the West, the South, the Pacific coast; on the great East and West trunk roads--the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, the New York Central, and all their allied lines; on the transcontinental lines--the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the Southern Pacific; on the steamship and railroad association controlling the South and Southwest. They show that from ocean to ocean, and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, wherever the American citizen seeks an opening in this industry, he finds it, like the deer forests and grouse moors of the old country, protected by game-keepers against him and the common herd. The terms in which the commission have described the preferences given the oil combination are not ambiguous: "Great difference in rates," "unjust discrimination," "intentional disregard of rights," "unexcused," "a vast discrepancy," "enormous," "illegal," "excessive,"[737] "extraordinary," "forbidden by the act to regulate commerce,"[738] "so obvious and palpable a discrimination that no discussion of it is necessary," "wholly indefensible," "patent and provoking discriminations for which no rational excuse is suggested," "obnoxious," "disparity ... absurd and inexcusable," "gross disproportions and inequalities,"[739] "long practised," "the most unjust and injurious discrimination ... and this discrimination inured mostly to the benefit of one powerful combination."[740]

This was what the Interstate Commerce Commission found all along the record from 1887 to 1893. When one of those who got the benefits so characterized was before the New York Legislature in 1888, he said:

"I know of no discrimination in the oil traffic of any kind since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act."

"Do you use any means for the purpose of avoiding the effect of that new law?"

"None whatever."[741]

But the people have found that the explicit prohibitions of the Interstate Commerce law were of no more protection to them than the equally explicit prohibitions given long before by the State constitutions and laws, the common law of the court, and by the still older common law of right, which the statute was created to enforce. The "unjust," "enormous," "illegal" differences in freights by which the public was excluded were got from the railroads after, as before, Congress, obedient to an aroused and universal demand, had passed a special statute and created a special tribunal to prevent and punish this special sort of crime. This is the adjudicated fact.

This "uncontradicted calumny," "worst balderdash," "malignity and mendacity," "irresponsible newspaper statements" proves upon examination to be:

1. Testimony of unimpeached and in many cases uncontradicted witnesses, given under oath in legislative investigations and in court, subject to examination and cross-examination and rebuttal.

2. Reports of State legislative committees.

3. Copies of the contracts.[742]

4. Decision of courts, State and national.[743]

The South Improvement plan of 1872 is still in unrelenting operation, according to the latest news. A case is now pending before the Interstate Commerce Commission,[744] in which charges of highway abuse even more sensational than any of those we have seen judicially proved are made against the thirty railroads by which the oil of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York reaches the Pacific coast. A San Francisco oil dealer is the petitioner for relief. He recites the discriminations given the oil combination on the Pacific coast before the Interstate Commerce law was enacted. These were admitted by the officials of the roads before the United States Pacific Railway Commission of 1887. The traffic managers of the Southern Pacific testified that the oil combination, "from the time it acquired the oil business on this coast, had lower rates than the general tariff provided, or than other shippers paid on coal oil."[745] The general freight agent of the Central Pacific Railroad admitted that his road had the same arrangement, and had accepted the business "at rates dictated" by the oil combination.[746] The general traffic manager of the Union Pacific Railroad said:

"We have paid them a good deal in rebates." It was a "pretty large" preference.

"What was the effect on the small dealer?"

"I should think it would be embarrassing to the small shipper!"[747]

When the Interstate Commerce law went into force the oil combination introduced a patented car for the transcontinental trade, which it claimed the sole right to use. Though the new car was to the disadvantage of the railroads, as it cost more to haul, the managers gave it lower rates than any other car and carried it back free, while they punished the shippers who gave them a lighter and better car by charging them $105 for carrying that back.

The San Francisco complainant goes on to charge that a plan was concocted and put in operation by which rates were lowered whenever the combination wanted to fill its warehouses on the Pacific coast, and as soon as they were full were put back again. This lowering and raising of rates was "to the public sudden and unexpected."[748] It was known in advance only to the ring and the railroads. Before other shippers could take advantage of the low rates they would be raised again. The complaint recites that in pursuance of this plan, after the combination had transferred to the Pacific coast at the end of 1888 from its Eastern refineries all it needed for the next season's business, the railroads advanced the rates from 82-1/2 cents a hundred pounds to $1.25. The next May the railroads made a similar seesaw, and, he says, in December, 1892, "are still making ... such arbitrary and sudden reductions ... to the undue advantage" of the oil combination "and to the detriment and injury of all other shippers." The San Francisco merchant also charges that in the interest of the Eastern refineries of the combination rates are made to prevent the large product of the oil-fields and independent refineries of Colorado and Wyoming from reaching the Pacific coast, "which needs them to furnish fuel for its manufactories, as well as for light for its residents." Similarly we find the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad charging $105 for a car-load of cattle from Wyoming to Chicago, while for a car of 75 barrels of oil the freight would be $348. In connection with these charges the press published the telegrams, filling columns, which were said to have passed between the officials of the railroads and the oil combination in the negotiation of this arrangement. In one of these telegrams the freight agent of the Southern Pacific explains the new deal. "He" (the agent of the oil combination) "would stock up at the low rate, then notify the association of railroads when to advance." The advance or decline was to be "made at certain seasons of the year in accordance with this supply on hand." When the negotiation was finished and the plan was agreed to, a San Francisco agent of the oil combination is said to have telegraphed to its officers in New York: "I think we have managed this freight business pretty well from this long distance, especially when you think that we have secured the 90-cent rate with which to stock up from time to time." His telegram also discloses that the arrangement extended to lead and linseed-oil, showing, what is well known, that the combinations in these articles belong to the members of that in oil. These charges are, it is to be remembered, still unadjudicated, this published evidence is not yet substantiated. But the arrangement which is charged is in exact pursuance of that part of the South Improvement Company contract which bound the railroads to "lower or raise the gross rates of transportation ... for such times and to such extent as may be necessary to overcome ... competition."[749] And Attorney-General Olney has been publicly informed[750] that during the summer of 1894 oil rates between Pennsylvania and Colorado were put down from 75 cents a hundred to 25 cents, and a few weeks later raised again to the old rate. Another increase made the rates to Denver higher, for oil, than to the Pacific coast. He has been asked to ascertain, judicially, if this shuffling of rates was not made, like that complained of before the Interstate Commerce Commission, to allow the oil trust "to stock up at the old rate." His informants suggest that the same powers with which he has brought railway employés to trial for infractions of the Interstate Commerce law can be used against the railways.

This is not all of the story. This patented car spoken of was a mere aggregation of old elements, as the courts held, and the patent was void. Advised by their lawyer that this would be the view the courts would have to take, competitors of the combination in the business of the Pacific coast, where they had been at the head until these new tricks of trade came in, introduced a car of their own of the same class. They thus became entitled to the same low rates and the same free return of the car as their powerful rival. This put them again on an equality in transportation. They had not been using these new cars long before two of them, shipped as usual from the East, failed to arrive. Their search for the missing cars put them in possession of the interesting information that a litigation, of which they had had no notice or knowledge whatever, had for some time been in progress, and was at that moment at the point of decision. As their interests had been entirely unrepresented, this decision would certainly have been against them, and would have forever made impossible the use of their cars on any railroad of the United States. This had been done by an apparently hostile litigation by the oil combination against the Southern Pacific Railroad. The former sued in the United States courts for an injunction to forbid the railroad from hauling the cars of the competitor, on the ground that they were an infringement on its own patented cars. No notice was given the persons most interested--the owners of the cars in question--whose business life was involved, and they were not at first made parties to the suit. The dummy defendant--the railroad--made no valid opposition, but with great condescension admitted that all the averments of its antagonist were true. The case was sent through the courts on a gallop to get a decision. After that the merchants whose cars were the object of the attack, as they had not been parties to the case, could not have it reopened, and it would stand against them without possibility of reversal. The firm found that a temporary injunction had been applied for and had been granted; that this had been followed by proceedings to make the injunction perpetual; that subpoenas had been issued, served, and returned, and an order had been obtained from the court for taking testimony. In place of the regular examiner of the court, a special examiner had been appointed; he had begun taking evidence the same day, and taking it privately. The testimony so taken had been sealed and filed. The railroad had made its answer December 2d, the testimony already taken was filed in court December 3d, making the case complete for decision by the judges. December 4th the firm heard for the first time of what was being done, and December 5th applied for the right to take part, which saved them. To get such cases ready for a hearing in the United States Circuit Court, where this was done, usually requires a year. But in this instance it was done in two weeks! Only just as the door of the court was closing irrevocably, as far as their rights were concerned, did the firm get inside, and secure leave to have their side represented. The whole fabric of the litigation fell at the first touch. The temporary injunction against the use of their car was dissolved, the permanent injunction was refused, the patent of the oil trust's car was declared worthless, and this decision was upheld by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in February, 1893.[751]

Meanwhile their oil, side-tracked in the Mojave Desert and elsewhere, was being cooked to death, their customers were going elsewhere, and they were being put to loss and damages which they are now suing to have made good to them. "There are some equivocal circumstances in the case," said Judge Hoffman, dissolving the injunctions in 1890. He pointed out that the railroad made no objection to the injunction which deprived it of business. This "tends to corroborate suspicions," he said, suggested by other features of the case. The railroad persisted in remaining in the case to the end, after the real parties in interest came in, and, although codefendants with these parties, the road manoeuvred for the benefit of the other side in a way which the Court again said "had an equivocal appearance." The counsel for the firm, in his brief for the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, pointed out more causes for "suspicion." He showed the Court that the records of the case had been mutilated in many places. All the mutilations were in favor of the other side of the case. Who was the author of the mutilations was not shown, but it was shown that the record had been intrusted by the lower court to a representative of one of the oil trust, to be printed and delivered to the Court of Appeals. "It would be a very easy matter for a vicious attorney," said the lawyer of the independents, "under such circumstances, to make changes and alterations in the record that might not be noticed, but would nevertheless greatly prejudice the case."

When the victims of the smokeless rebate used the only property many of them had left--their right of appeal to courts or Legislature or executive officials--they were showered with abuse, as people with "private grievances,"[752] "strikers and sore-heads," "black-mailers,"[753] "moss-backs," ... "naturally left in the lurch" ... "people who came forward with envy and jealousy of the success" of the oil combination,[754] "throttlers," "ravenous wolves," "hoary old reprobate," "senile old liar," "public till-tapper," "plunderers," "pestilence."[755] Such are a few of the blossoms of rhetoric with which those who sought their rights in courts or before the Legislature have been crowned. These witnesses have come forward all through the period between 1872 and 1892, and from every point of importance in the industry--New York, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Oil City, San Francisco, Titusville, Philadelphia, Marietta, Buffalo, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans. They have come from every province of the industry--the refineries, the oil fields, the pipe lines, railroads, the wholesale and retail markets. Bound together by no common tie of organization or partnership, they have, each and all, exactly the same kind of story to tell. The substance of their complaint--that one selected knot of men, members of one organization, were given, unlawfully, the control of the highways, to the exclusion and ruin of the people--has been sustained by the evidence taken by every official investigation, and by the decision of every court to which the facts have been submitted.

As the counsel of the New York Chamber of Commerce before the New York Legislative Committee of 1879 said: "Such a power makes it possible to the freight agents of the railways to constitute themselves special partners in every line of business in the United States, contributing as their share of capital to the business the ability to crush out rivals." Men who can choose which merchants, manufacturers, producers shall go to market and which stay at home, have a key that will unlock the door of every business house on the line; they know the combination of every safe.

In their appeal to the executive of Pennsylvania, the Petroleum Producers' Union refer to the conduct of the railroad officials as "inexplicable upon any ordinary hypothesis, or under any known theory of railroad politics."[756] What the railroad managers did, we know; why they did it, has never been judicially demonstrated. One of the earliest intimations of the kind of lubricant used was given by the anti-monopoly leader of the people in the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania of 1872, who is now the legal leader of the oil combination. He said: "I am told that discriminations are now made to so great an extent as to be ruinous to certain companies unless the railroad companies' officers are given a bonus. That is the evil under which we labor. I do not know how to cure it, but it must be cured somehow." Again he said: "It is charged--I do not make the charge myself--but it is charged upon a railroad company running through the oil regions that it will not, without delay, transport oil delivered to the railroad station by the various pipe lines unless it is interested in the pipe line.... It is said that whenever a new pipe line is built, it is necessary that somebody connected with the particular railroad company shall be presented with stock in the pipe line; otherwise, it (the railroad company) will not furnish cars without tedious and unnecessary delay. This is a discrimination which should be stopped."[757]

It is plain that the purpose of the discrimination was something more than to shunt the control of the trade--more than "to maintain the business" of the favorite. Ten cents a barrel difference would have done that, for, as the Supreme Court of Ohio pointed out, that alone amounted to a tax of 21 per cent. a year on the capital of the "outsiders."[758] When 10 cents was enough, why was the tax made 22-1/2 cents, 25 cents, 64-1/2 cents up to $1.10?

Some railroad men are known to have been stockholders in the oil combination. "I think I owned--I guess I had $100,000 in it.... I don't know anything at all about it"--the company--the head of the New York Central admitted.[759] Who were the owners of certain shares of their capital stock these men have always refused to divulge. In giving in court a list of stockholders of one of their corporations one of the officers uncovered only three-quarters of the stock. Who held the other fourth he avowed he could not say, although the stock-book was in his custody.[760] The dividends were paid to the vice-president, and by him handed over to these veiled prophets. There was a similar mystery about the owners of about $2,000,000 of the National Transit stock, the concern which owns and manages the pipe lines. Asked for the names of the owners of this portion, the "secretary" said:

"It is a private matter.... I decline to answer."[761]

The president of this pipe-line branch also refused to give Congress this information.[762] This secrecy will couple itself at once in the mind of the investigator with the charges just quoted, that railroad officials had to be given backsheesh of pipe-line stock before their roads would carry the oil of the pipe lines.

The United States Senate Committee which investigated the cattle and meat monopolies had a similar experience. Their report says: "The secretary of the Union Stockyards testified at Chicago that when the company was established the stock was subscribed by the railroads; but when asked to show his stock-books he declined, after consultation with the company's attorneys, and persisted in this refusal at Washington City. For the purposes of our investigation it was not considered necessary to ascertain in whose names the stock now stands, for we were satisfied that whatever the ownership it would not appear in the names of the railroad presidents, directors, and stockholders, who are the real owners.... The refusal of the secretary, under direction of his employers, to make public the list of stockholders must have been because of the fact that the same men own the stockyards and the railroads running to them, and they do not propose to submit their books to scrutiny because they dread the truth.... This extraordinary conduct on the part of the stockyards company is not alone in the chain of evidence which shows complicity between the stockyards and the railroads."[763]

The smokeless rebate makes the secret of success in business to be not manufacture, but manufracture--breaking down with a strong hand the true makers of things. To those who can get the rebate it makes no difference who does the digging, building, mining, making, producing the million forms of the wealth they covet for themselves. They need only get control of the roads. All that they want of the wealth of others can be switched off the highways into their hands. To succeed, ambitious men must make themselves refiners of freight rates, distillers of discriminations, owners, not of lands, mines, and forests--not in the first place, at least--but of the railway officials through whose hands the produce must go to market; builders, not of manufactories, but of privileges; inventors only of schemes to keep for themselves the middle of the road and both sides of it; contrivers, not of competition, but of ways to tax the property of their competitors into their pockets. They need not make money; they can take it from those who have made it.

In the United States the processes of business feudalization are moving more rapidly to the end than in any other country. In Chicago, the youngest of the great cities of the youngest of the great nations, there are fewer wholesale dry-goods stores in 1894 for a population of 1,600,000 than there were in 1860 for 112,172. In almost every one of the meteoric careers by which a few men in each trade are rising to supreme wealth, it will generally be found that to some privilege on the railed highways, accomplished by the rebate, is due the part of their rise which is extraordinary. A few cases of great wealth from the increased value of land, a few from remarkable inventions like the sewing-machine, are only exceptions.

From using railroad power to give better rates to the larger man, it was an easy step to using it to make a favorite first a larger man, then the largest man, and finally the only man in the business. In meat and cattle we see men rising from poverty to great wealth. From being competitors, like other men, in the scramble, they get into the comfortable seat of control of the prices at which the farmer must sell cattle, and at which the people must buy meat.[764] Many other men had thrift, sobriety, industry, but only these had the rebate, and so only these are the "fittest in the struggle for existence." We find a merchant prince of the last generation in New York gathering into his hands a share of the dry-goods business of the country which appears entirely disproportionate to his ability and energy, great though these be. Is his secret a brain so much larger than his competitors' brains as his business is greater than theirs? The freight agent of the New York Central testified that he gave this man a special rate "to build up and develop their business."

"They were languishing and suffering?"

"To a great extent."[765]

"This," said the counsel for the Chamber of Commerce of New York before the committee, "is deliberately making the rich richer and the poor poorer, by taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich through the instrumentality of the freight charge."[766]

The officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad, by the use of rebates, handed over the State of Pennsylvania to three coal-dealers, each of whom had his territory, and was supreme in it, as would-be competitors found out when they undertook to ship coal into his market. They made a similar division of the iron and steel business. The rebate is the golden-rule of the "gospel of wealth." We have already seen that the secret of the few corporations which have become the owners of almost every acre of the anthracite coal of Pennsylvania was the rebate.[767]

Along one of the most important lines out of Chicago grain dealers who had been buying and selling in an open market, building elevators, investing capital and life, found five years ago market and railroad and livelihood suddenly closed to them, and the work of thirty years brought to an untimely end. The United States Interstate Commerce Commission, and the United States District Attorneys co-operating with it, broke down in the attempt to compel the railroad men who gave these privileges of transportation, or the business men who received them, to testify or to produce their books. The United States grand-jury in Chicago, in December, 1890, proceeded against the shippers and the railroad men. All of them refused to tell the rates given or received, or to produce their books.

Why do you refuse to answer? they were asked.

Because to do so would incriminate us.

Here, too, would-be successful men have gone gunning with the smokeless rebate for control of the wheat and corn and all the produce of the American farmer. Grain is fated to go the way that oil, hard coal, cattle, and meat have already gone. The farmer may remain the nominal owner of his farm under these circumstances, but he will be real owner of nothing but the piece of paper title.

First the product of the farm; then the farm. In America rises the shadow of a coming land-ownership more concentrated, more cruel, with the impersonal cruelty of corporate anonymity, than any the world has yet seen.

The grain broker who becomes, by favor of the general freight agent, the sole shipper and warehouseman of grain along a line of railroad, becomes thereby the sole buyer, and in the sole buyer of the produce we have the fast-growing germ of the future sole buyer of the land.

"Petroleum is the victim to-day," said the address, in 1872, of the Petroleum Producers' Union "to all newspapers and boards of trade opposing monopoly.... Coal, iron, cotton, breadstuffs, or live-stock may be in the grasp of the monopoly to-morrow." The prediction is more than half fulfilled.

"I ran away from home, and went to California," said a prominent grain merchant to the writer, "to escape being compelled to testify as to the freight rates I was paying. But these decisions that we cannot be forced to incriminate ourselves give me safe-conduct, and I am going home to take all the rebates I can get."

This is what is going on to-day in the "division of property" in America. Our society is woven together by the steam shuttle that moves between its farms and dinner-tables, its cotton-fields and factories, thousands of miles apart, and the shuttle is crooked. Out of $800,000,000 paid yearly in this country for the carriage of freight, it was estimated in 1888, by one who knew, that $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 goes to favored shippers.[768] As the result of personal examination made as an expert for stockholders, he declared that one of the great trunk lines had in the last twenty years thus diverted to favorites of the managers $100,000,000 of the money of the stockholders. Besides his yachts and trotters, every Captain of Industry worth talking about keeps his stud of railway presidents and general freight agents.

Public opinion, as yet only in the gristle in these new questions, turns upon first one and then another as the author of its troubles--the soulless corporation, the combination of corporations, railroad oppression, or what not. But the corporation is merely a cover, the combination of corporations an advantage, the private ownership of public highways an opportunity, and the rebate its perfect tool. The real actors are men; the real instrument, the control of their fellows by wealth, and the mainspring of the evil is the morals and economics which cipher that brothers produce wealth when they are only cheating each other out of birthrights.

The success of the same men in Europe shows that railroad discrimination is not the essence of their power, though it has in America been the chief instrument. By their wealth and their willingness to use it in their way they have become supreme. Supreme even where, as in England and Germany, they had no such unjust and crushing preference on the highways as in America. Back of highway privilege, back of money power, back of trade supremacy gained by these two means must be reckoned, as the essence of this phenomenon, the morality--our morality--which not only allows but encourages men to do each other to death, provided only the weapon be a bargain and the arena a market. "Everything shall not go to market," says Emerson; but everything does go to market. The millionaire is the modern hero, says the New York Evening Post. The men who have found in the rebate the secret of business success--and there are more of them than the public guesses--have only extended a fiercer hand to the results all were aiming at. They have used the smokeless rebate because it was the best gun. But if that had not been ready to their hand, they would have taken the next best. The course of conquest might have been slower, but, unless checked by moral interventions, it would have reached the same end. If society is founded on the idea that property belongs to the strongest, these will sooner or later get all the property, by bargains or by battles according to "the spirit of the age."

The highest State and national courts and the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States have sustained the people in the assertion of their rights, under the law, to come and go with free and equal rights on the highways. The judges have solemnly warned the guilty men that they must give up their "abhorrent" attempt to drive citizens out of the industries of their choice, and to add the property of the people to their vast estates. Although thus declared in the right by the highest judges of the law and the fact, the people are poor, defeated, and unsuccessful. Though thus warned by the authoritative voice of the ministers of right and justice that their purposes and practices are iniquitous and intolerable, the men who have determined that whole provinces of American industry shall be theirs, and theirs only, continue their warfare of extermination upon poor men with methods practically unchanged. They evade or defy the laws of the States and of the nation, and the decisions of the courts, State and national. Guided by the advice of the skilfullest lawyers, they persist in open violation, or make such changes in their procedure as will nullify statute and decision without danger to them. For thirty years the independents in the oil regions have had this reinforcement of the law, and for thirty years, in spite of it, their rights have been defiantly, continuously violated to the common ruin. The people spend their lives passing about from field or factory, or shop or office, to market, from market to court, from court to Legislature, from Legislature to printing-office. They are the type of the time, disturbed by the demand of the new tyranny of wealth for tribute from their daily labors, and forbidden to rest until out of their suffering a new liberty has been won--the industrial liberty, for which political and religious liberty wait for their full realization.

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XXXIV. THE OLD SELF-INTEREST

The corn of the coming harvest is growing so fast that, like the farmer standing at night in his fields, we can hear it snap and crackle. We have been fighting fire on the well-worn lines of old-fashioned politics and political economy, regulating corporations, and leaving competition to regulate itself. But the flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant, property in many necessaries of life becoming monopoly of the necessaries of life.

We are still, in part, as Emerson says, in the quadruped state. Our industry is a fight of every man for himself. The prize we give the fittest is monopoly of the necessaries of life, and we leave these winners of the powers of life and death to wield them over us by the same "self-interest" with which they took them from us. In all this we see at work a "principle" which will go into the records as one of the historic mistakes of humanity. Institutions stand or fall by their philosophy, and the main doctrine of industry since Adam Smith has been the fallacy that the self-interest of the individual was a sufficient guide to the welfare of the individual and society. Heralded as a final truth of "science" this proves to have been nothing higher than a temporary formula for a passing problem. It was a reflection in words of the policy of the day.

When the Middle Ages landed on the shores of the sixteenth century they broke ranks, and for three hundred years every one has been scurrying about to get what he could. Society was not highly developed enough to organize the exploration and subjugation of worlds of new things and ideas on any broader basis than private enterprise, personal adventure. People had to run away from each other and from the old ideas, nativities, guilds, to seize the prizes of the new sciences, the new land, the new liberties which make modern times. They did not go because the philosophers told them to. The philosophers saw them going and wrote it down in a book, and have believed themselves ever since to be the inventors of the division of labor and the discoverers of a new world of social science. But now we are touching elbows again, and the dream of these picnic centuries that the social can be made secondary to the individual is being chased out of our minds by the hard light of the crisis into which we are waking.

"It is a law of business for each proprietor to pursue his own interest," said the committee of Congress which in 1893 investigated the coal combinations. "There is no hope for any of us, but the weakest must go first," is the golden rule of business.[769] There is no other field of human associations in which any such rule of action is allowed. The man who should apply in his family or his citizenship this "survival of the fittest" theory as it is practically professed and operated in business would be a monster, and would be speedily made extinct, as we do with monsters. To divide the supply of food between himself and his children according to their relative powers of calculation, to follow his conception of his own self-interest in any matter which the self-interest of all has taken charge of, to deal as he thinks best for himself with foreigners with whom his country is at war, would be a short road to the penitentiary or the gallows. In trade men have not yet risen to the level of the family life of the animals. The true law of business is that all must pursue the interest of all. In the law, the highest product of civilization, this has long been a commonplace. The safety of the people is the supreme law. We are in travail to bring industry up to this. Our century of the caprice of the individual as the law-giver of the common toil, to employ or disemploy, to start or stop, to open or close, to compete or combine, has been the disorder of the school while the master slept. The happiness, self-interest, or individuality of the whole is not more sacred than that of each, but it is greater. They are equal in quality, but in quantity they are greater. In the ultimate which the mathematician, the poet, the reformer projects the two will coincide.

Our world, operated by individual motive, is the country of the Chinese fable, in which the inhabitants went on one leg. Yes, but an "enlightened self-interest"? The perfect self-interest of the perfect individual is an admirable conception, but it is still individual, and the world is social. The music of the spheres is not to be played on one string. Nature does nothing individually. All forces are paired like the sexes, and every particle of matter in the universe has to obey every other particle. When the individual has progressed to a perfect self-interest, there will be over against it, acting and reacting with it, a correspondingly perfect self-interest of the community. Meanwhile, we who are the creators of society have got the times out of joint, because, less experienced than the Creator of the balanced matter of earth, we have given the precedence to the powers on one side. As gods we are but half-grown. For a hundred years or so our economic theory has been one of industrial government by the self-interest of the individual. Political government by the self-interest of the individual we call anarchy. It is one of the paradoxes of public opinion that the people of America, least tolerant of this theory of anarchy in political government, lead in practising it in industry. Politically, we are civilized; industrially, not yet. Our century, given to this laissez-faire--"leave the individual alone; he will do what is best for himself, and what is best for him is best for all"--has done one good: it has put society at the mercy of its own ideals, and has produced an actual anarchy in industry which is horrifying us into a change of doctrines.

We have not been able to see the people for the persons in it. But there is a people, and it is as different from a mere juxtaposition of persons as a globe of glass from the handful of sand out of which it was melted. It is becoming, socially, known to itself, with that self-consciousness which distinguishes the quick from the dead and the unborn. Every community, said Pascal, is a man, and every man, said Plato, is a community. There is a new self-interest--that of the "man called million," as Mazzini named him--and with this social motive the other, which has so long had its own way, has now to reckon. Mankind has gone astray following a truth seen only partially, but coronated as a whole truth. Many civilizations must worship good men as gods and follow the divinity of one and another before civilization sees that these are only single stars in a firmament of humanity. Our civilization has followed the self-interest of the individual to learn that it was but one of the complex forces of self-interest.

The true laissez-faire is, let the individual do what the individual can do best, and let the community do what the community can do best. The laissez-faire of social self-interest, if true, cannot conflict with the individual self-interest, if true, but it must outrank it always. What we have called "free competition" has not been free, only freer than what went before. The free is still to come. The pressure we feel is notice to prepare for it. Civilization--the process of making men citizens in their relations to each other, by exacting of each that he give to all that which he receives from all--has reached only those forms of common effort which, because most general and most vital, first demanded its harmonizing touch. Men joining in the labors of the family, the mutual sacrifices of the club or the church in the union of forces for self-defence and for the gains of co-operation on the largest scale in labors of universal concern, like letter-carrying, have come to be so far civilized.

History is condensed in the catchwords of the people. In the phrases of individual self-interest which have been the shibboleths of the main activities of our last hundred years were prophesied: the filling up of the Mississippi by the forest-destroying, self-seeking lumber companies of the North; the disintegration of the American family--among the rich by too little poverty, and among the poor by too much; the embezzlement of public highways and public franchises into private property; the devolution of the American merchants and manufacturers into the business dependants--and social and political dependants, therefore--of a few men in each great department of trade, from dry-goods to whiskey; the devolution of the free farmer into a tenant, and of the working-man into a fixture of the locomotive or the factory, forbidden to leave except by permission of his employer or the public; and that mêlée of injunctions, bayonets, idle men and idle machinery, rich man's fear of poor man and poor man's fear of starvation, we call trade and industry.

Where the self-interest of the individual is allowed to be the rule both of social and personal action, the level of all is forced down to that of the lowest. Business excuses itself for the things it does--cuts in wages, exactions in hours, tricks of competition--on the plea that the merciful are compelled to follow the cruel. "It is pleaded as an excuse by those" (common carriers) "who desire to obey the" (Interstate Commerce) "law that self-preservation drives them to violate it because other carriers persist in doing so," says Senator Cullom. When the self-interest of society is made the standard the lowest must rise to the average. The one pulls down, the other up. That men's hearts are bad and that bad men will do bad things has a truth in it. But whatever the general average of morals, the anarchy which gives such individuals their head and leaves them to set the pace for all will produce infinitely worse results than a policy which applies mutual checks and inspirations. Bad kings make bad reigns, but monarchy is bad because it is arbitrary power, and that, whether it be political or industrial, makes even good men bad.

A partial truth universally applied as this of self-interest has been is a universal error. Everything goes to defeat. Highways are used to prevent travel and traffic. Ownership of the means of production is sought in order to "shut down" production, and the means of plenty make famine. All follow self-interest to find that though they have created marvellous wealth it is not theirs. We pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to establish the rule of the majority, and end by finding that the minority--a minority in morals, money, and men--are our masters whichever way we turn. We agonize over "economy," but sell all our grain and pork and oil and cotton at exchanges where we pay brokerage on a hundred or a thousand barrels or bushels or bales of wind to get one real one sold. These intolerabilities--sweat-shops where model merchants buy and sell the cast-off scarlet-fever skins of the poor, factory and mine where childhood is forbidden to become manhood and manhood is forbidden to die a natural death, mausoleums in which we bury the dead rich, slums in which we bury the living poor, coal pools with their manufacture of artificial winter--all these are the rule of private self-interest arrived at its destination.

A really human life is impossible in our cities, but they cannot be reconstructed under the old self-interest. Chicago was rebuilt wrong after the fire. Able men pointed out the avenues to a wider and better municipal life, but they could not be opened through the private interpositions that blocked the way. The slaughter of railway men coupling cars was shown, in a debate in the United States Senate, to be twice as great as it would be if the men were in active service in war. But under the scramble for private gain our society on its railway side cannot develop the energy to introduce the improved appliances ready to hand which would save these lives, all young and vigorous. The cost of the change would be repaid in 100-per-cent. dividends every year by the money value alone to us of the men now killed and wounded. But we shall have to wait for a nobler arithmetic to give us investments so good as that. The lean kine of self-interest devour the fat kine. The railroad stockholder, idolater of self-interest, lets himself be robbed--like the stockholder of all the railroads in this story--either because he is too rich to mind, too feeble to make himself heard, or too much implicated elsewhere as principal in the same kind of depredation to care or dare to stir what he knows to be a universal scandal. He has become within himself the battle-ground of a troop of warring devils of selfishness; his selfishness as a stockholder clutched at the throat by his selfishness as a parasite, in some "inside deal," feeding on the stockholder; some rebate arrangement, fast-freight line, sleeping-car company, or what not. And, as like as not, upon this one's back is another devil of depredation from some inner ring within a ring. Torn at the vitals, the enlightened swinishness of our leit-motif is hastening to throw itself into the sea.

We are very poor. The striking feature of our economic condition is our poverty, not our wealth. We make ourselves "rich" by appropriating the property of others by methods which lessen the total property of all. Spain took such riches from America and grew poor. Modern wealth more and more resembles the winnings of speculators in bread during famine--worse, for to make the money it makes the famine. What we call cheapness shows itself to be unnatural fortunes for a very few, monstrous luxury for them and proportionate deprivation for the people, judges debauched, trustees dishonored, Congress and State legislatures insulted and defied, when not seduced, multitudes of honest men ruined and driven to despair, the common carrier made a mere instrument for the creation of a new baronage, an example set to hundreds of would-be commercial Cæsars to repeat this rapine in other industries and call it "business," a process set in operation all over the United States for the progressive extinction of the independence of laboring men, and all business men except the very rich, and their reduction to a state of vassalage to lords or squires in each department of trade and industry. All these--tears, ruin, dishonor, and treason--are the unmarked additions to the "price marked on the goods."

Shall we buy cheap of Captain Kidd, and shut our ears to the agony that rustles in his silks? Shall we believe that Captain Kidd, who kills commerce by the act which enables him to sell at half-price, is a cheapener? Shall we preach and practise doctrines which make the Black Flag the emblem of success on the high seas of human interchange of service, and complain when we see mankind's argosies of hope and plenty shrink into private hoards of treasure, buried in selfish sands to be lost forever, even to cupidity? If this be cheapness, it comes by the grace of the seller, and that is the first shape of dearness, as security in society by the grace of the ruler is the first form of insecurity.

The new wealth now administers estates of fabulous extent from metropolitan bureaus, and all the profits flow to men who know nothing of the real business out of which they are made. Red tape, complication, the hired man, conspiracy have taken the place of the watchful eye of the owner, the old-fashioned hand at the plough that must "hold or drive." We now have Captains of Industry, with a few aids, rearranging from office-chairs this or that industry, by mere contrivances of wit compelling the fruits of the labor of tens of thousands of their fellows, who never saw them, never heard of them, to be every day deposited unwilling and unwitting to their own credit at the bank; setting, as by necromancy, hundreds of properties, large and small, in a score of communities, to flying through invisible ways into their hands; sitting calm through all the hubbub raised in courts, legislatures, and public places, and by dictating letters and whispering words remaining the master magicians of the scene; defying, though private citizens, all the forces and authorities of a whole people; by the mere mastery of compelling brain, without putting hand to anything, opening or closing the earth's treasures of oil or coal or gas or copper or what not; pulling down or putting up great buildings, factories, towns themselves; moving men and their money this way and that; inserting their will as part of the law of life of the people--American, European, and Asiatic--and, against the protest of a whole civilization, making themselves, their methods and principles, its emblematic figures.

Syndicates, by one stroke, get the power of selling dear on one side, and producing cheap on the other. Thus they keep themselves happy, prices high, and the people hungry. What model merchant could ask more? The dream of the king who wished that all his people had but one neck that he might decapitate them at one blow is realized to-day in this industrial garrote. The syndicate has but to turn its screw, and every neck begins to break. Prices paid to such intercepters are not an exchange of service; they are ransom paid by the people for their lives. The ability of the citizen to pay may fluctuate; what he must pay remains fixed, or advances like the rent of the Irish tenant to the absentee landlord until the community interfered. Those who have this power to draw the money from the people--from every railroad station, every street-car, every fireplace, every salt-cellar, every bread-pan, wash-board, and coal-scuttle--to their own safes have the further incentive to make this money worth the most possible. By contracting the issue of currency and contracting it again by hoarding it in their banks, safe-deposit vaults, and the government treasury, they can depress the prices of all that belongs to the people. Their own prices are fixed. These are "regular prices," established by price-lists. Given, as a ruling motive, the principles of business--to get the most and give the least; given the legal and economic, physical and mechanical control, possible under our present social arrangements, to the few over the many, and the certain end of all this, if unarrested, unreversed, can be nothing less than a return to chattel slavery. There may be some finer name, but the fact will not be finer. Between our present tolerance and our completed subjection the distance is not so far as that from the equality and simplicity of our Pilgrim Fathers to ourselves.

Everything withers--even charity. Aristocratic benevolence spends a shrunken stream in comparison with democratic benevolence. In an address to the public, soliciting subscriptions, the Committee of the United Hospitals Association of New York said, in December, 1893: "The committee have found that, through the obliteration of old methods of individual competition by the establishment of large corporations and trusts in modern times, the income of such charitable institutions as are supported by the individual gifts of the benevolent has been seriously affected."

Franklin pricked the bubble of the lottery by showing that to buy all the tickets and win all the prizes was to be most surely the loser. Our nascent common-sense begins to see that the many must always lose where all spend their lives trying to get more than they give, and that all lose when any lose. The welfare of all is more than the welfare of the many, the few, or the one. If the few or the one are not fine enough to accept this truth from sentiment or conscience, they can find other reasons as convincing, though not as amiable. From the old régime of France, the slave-holders of the South, the death-rate of tyrants, the fear of their brothers which the rich and the great of to-day are printing on their faces, in fugitive-slave treaties with Russia, and in the frowning arsenals and armories building in our cities for "law and order," they can learn how to spell self-interest.

If all will sacrifice themselves, none need be sacrificed. But if one may sacrifice another, all are sacrificed. That is the difference between self-interest and other-self interest. In industry we have been substituting all the mean passions that can set man against man in place of the irresistible power of brotherhood. To tell us of the progressive sway of brotherhood in all human affairs is the sole message of history. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is not the phrase of a ritual of sentiment for the unapplied emotion of pious hours; it is the exact formula of the force to-day operating the greatest institutions man has established. It is as secular as sacred. Only by each neighbor giving the other every right of free thought, free movement, free representation which he demands for himself; only by calling every neighbor a friend, and literally laying down his life for his friend against foreign invasion or domestic tumult; only by the equalization which gives the vote to all and denies kingship to all, however strong or "fittest"--only thus is man establishing the community, the republic, which, with all its failings, is the highest because the realest application of the spirit of human brotherhood. Wonderful are the dividends of this investment. You are but one, and can give only yourself to America. You give free speech, and 65,000,000 of your countrymen will guard the freedom of your lips. Your single offer of your right arm puts 65,000,000 of sheltering arms about you. Does "business" pay such profits? Wealth will remain a secret unguessed by business until it has reincorporated itself under the law which reckons as the property of each one the total of all the possessions of all his neighbors.

Society could not live a day, the Bishop of Peterborough said, if it put the principles of Christ into practice. There is no rarer gift than that of eyes to see what we see. Society is society, and lives its day solely by virtue of having put into actual routine and matter-of-fact application the principles of Christ and other bringers of the same message. Imperfect and faulty though the execution, it is these principles which are the family, the tribe, the sect, the club, the mutual-benefit society, the State, with their mutual services, forbearance, and guarantees. The principles of Christ are the cause and essence of society. They are not the ideal of which we dream; they are the applied means with which we are working out our real life in "the light of common day." They have not been so much revealed to us by our inspired ones as best seen and best said by them. Insurance for fire, accident, sickness, old age, death--the ills that flesh is heir to--has the same co-operation for its innermost forces. Limited now by the intervention of the selfishness of profit-seeking, it needs only to be freed from this, and added, as in New Zealand, to the growing list of the mutualities of the general welfare operated by the State to be seen as what it is. The golden rule is the original of every political constitution, written and unwritten, and all our reforms are but the pains with which we strive to improve the copy.

In the worst governments and societies that have existed one good can be seen--so good that the horrors of them fall back into secondary places as extrinsic, accidental. That good is the ability of men to lead the life together. The more perfect monopoly makes itself the more does it bring into strong lights the greatest fact of our industry, of far more permanent value than the greed which has for the moment made itself the cynosure of all eyes. It makes this fair world more fair to consider the loyalties, intelligences, docilities of the multitudes who are guarding, developing, operating with the faithfulness of brothers and the keen interest of owners properties and industries in which brotherhood is not known and their title is not more than a tenancy at will. One of the largest stones in the arch of "consolidation," perhaps the key-stone, is that men have become so intelligent, so responsive and responsible, so co-operative that they can be intrusted in great masses with the care of vast properties owned entirely by others and with the operation of complicated processes, although but a slender cost of subsistence is awarded them out of fabulous profits. The spectacle of the million and more employés of the railroads of this country despatching trains, maintaining tracks, collecting fares and freights, and turning over hundreds of millions of net profits to the owners, not one in a thousand of whom would know how to do the simplest of these things for himself, is possible only where civilization has reached a high average of morals and culture. More and more the mills and mines and stores, and even the farms and forests, are being administered by others than the owners. The virtue of the people is taking the place Poor Richard thought only the eye of the owner could fill. If mankind, driven by their fears and the greed of others, can do so well, what will be their productivity and cheer when the "interest of all" sings them to their work?

This new morality and new spring of wealth have been seized first by the appropriating ones among us. But, as has been in government, their intervention of greed is but a passing phase. Mankind belongs to itself, not to kings or monopolists, and will supersede the one as surely as the other with the institutions of democracy. Yes, Callicles, said Socrates, the greatest are usually the bad, for they have the power. If power could continue paternal and benign, mankind would not be rising through one emancipation after another into a progressive communion of equalities. The individual and society will always be wrestling with each other in a composition of forces. But to just the extent to which civilization prevails, society will be held as inviolable as the individual; not subordinate--indeed inaudible--as now in the counting-room and corporation-office. We have overworked the self-interest of the individual. The line of conflict between individual and social is a progressive one of the discovery of point after point in which the two are identical. Society thus passes from conflict to harmony, and on to another conflict. Civilization is the unceasing accretion of these social solutions. We fight out to an equilibrium, as in the abolition of human slavery; then upon this new level thus built up we enter upon the struggle for a new equilibrium, as now in the labor movement. The man for himself destroys himself and all men; only society can foster him and them.

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is only the doctrine of self-interest writ large and made more dangerous by multitude. It is the self-interest of the majority, and this has written some of the unloveliest chapters of history. There have never been slaves more miserable than those of Sparta, where the State was the owner. American democracy prepares to repeat these distresses of the selfishness of the many, and gives notice to its railway employés of a new divine right--"the convenience of the public"--to which they must forego every right of manhood. No better definition of slave could be found than one who must work at the convenience of another. This is the position into which recent legal decisions and acts of the Federal executive force railway men. These speak in the name of Interstate Commerce, but their logic can be as easily applied by State judges to State commerce, and all working-men are manifestly as necessary, each in his function, to the convenience of the public as the men of the rail. The greatest happiness of all must be the formula. When Lamennais said, "I love my family more than myself, my village more than my family, my country more than my village, and mankind more than my country," he showed himself not only a good lover, but the only good arithmetician.

Children yet, we run everything we do--love or war, work or leisure, religion or liberty--to excess. Every possibility of body and mind must be played upon till it is torn to pieces, as toys by children. Priests, voluptuaries, tyrants, knights, ascetics--in the long procession of fanatics a new-comer takes his place; he is called "the model merchant"--the cruelest fanatic in history. He is the product of ages given to progressive devotion to "trading." He is the high-priest of the latest idolatry, the self-worship of self-interest. Whirling-dervish of the market, self, friends, and family, body and soul, loves, hopes, and faith, all are sacrificed to seeing how many "turns" he can make before he drops dead. Trade began, Sir Henry Sumner Maine tells us, not within the family or community, but without. Its first appearances are on the neutral borderland between hostile tribes. There, in times of peace, they meet to trade, and think it no sin that "the buyer must beware," since the buyer is an enemy. Trade has spread thence, carrying with itself into family and State the poison of enmity. From the fatherhood of the old patriarchal life, where father and brother sold each other nothing, the world has chaffered along to the anarchy of a "free" trade which sells everything. One thing after another has passed out from under the régime of brotherhood and passed in under that of bargainhood. The ground we move on, the bodies we work with, and the necessaries we live by are all being "exchanged," by "rules fetched with cupidity from heartless schools," into the ownership of the Jacobs of mankind. By these rules the cunning are the good, and the weak and the tender the bad, and the good are to have all the goods and the weak are to have nothing. These rules give one the power to supply or deny work to thousands, and to use the starvation terms of the men he disemploys as the measure of the cost of subsistence of all workmen. This must be near the end. The very churches have become mercantilized, and are markets in which "prophets" are paid fancy prices--"always called of God," as Milton said, "but always to a greater benefice"--and worshippers buy and sell knee-room.

Conceptions of duty take on a correspondingly unnatural complexion. The main exhortations the world gives beginners are how to "get on"--the getting on so ardently inculcated being to get, like the old-man-of-the-sea, on somebody's back. "If war fails you in the country where you are, you must go where there is war," said one of the successful men of the fourteenth century to a young knight who asked him for the Laws of Life. "I shall be perfectly satisfied with you," I heard one of the great business geniuses of America say to his son, "if you will only always go to bed at night worth more than when you got up in the morning." The system grows, as all systems do, more complicated, and gets further away from its first purposes of barter of real things and services. It goes more under the hands of men of apt selfishness, who push it further away from general comprehension and the general good. Tariffs, currencies, finances, freight-rate sheets, the laws, become instruments of privilege, and just in proportion become puzzles no people can decipher. "I have a right to buy my labor where I can buy it cheapest"--beginning as a protest against the selfish exclusions of antiquated trade-guilds outgrown by the new times--has at last come to mean, "I have a right to do anything to cheapen the labor I want to buy, even to destroying the family life of the people."

When steaming kettles grew into beasts of burden and public highways dwindled into private property administered by private motives for private ends, all previous tendencies were intensified into a sudden whirl redistributing wealth and labors. It appears to have been the destiny of the railroad to begin and of oil to lubricate to its finish the last stage of this crazy commercialism. Business colors the modern world as war reddened the ancient world. Out of such delirium monsters are bred, and their excesses destroy the system that brought them forth. There is a strong suggestion of moral insanity in the unrelieved sameness of mood and unvarying repetition of one act in the life of the model merchant. Sane minds by an irresistible law alternate one tension with another. Only a lunatic is always smiling or always weeping or always clamoring for dividends. Eras show their last stages by producing men who sum up individually the morbid characteristics of the mass. When the crisis comes in which the gathering tendencies of generations shoot forward in the avalanche, there is born some group of men perfect for their function--good be it or bad. They need to take time for no second thought, and will not delay the unhalting reparations of nature by so much as the time given to one tear over the battle-field or the bargain. With their birth their mission is given them, whether it be the mission of Lucifer or Gabriel. This mission becomes their conscience. The righteous indignation that other men feel against sin these men feel against that which withstands them. Sincere as rattlesnakes, they are selfish with the unconsciousness possible to only the entirely commonplace, without the curiosity to question their times or the imagination to conceive the pain they inflict, and their every ideal is satisfied by the conventionalities of church, parlor, and counting-room. These men are the touchstones to wither the cant of an age.

We preach "Do as you would be done by" in our churches, and "A fair exchange no robbery" in our counting-rooms, and "All citizens are equal as citizens" in courts and Congress. Just as we are in danger of believing that to say these things is to do them and be them, there come unto us these men, practical as granite and gravitation. Taking their cue not from our lips, but from our lives, they better the instruction, and, passing easily to the high seats at every table, prove that we are liars and hypocrites. Their only secret is that they do, better than we, the things we are all trying to do, but of which in our morning and evening prayers, seen of all men, we are continually making believe to pray: Good Lord, deliver us! When the hour strikes for such leaders, they come and pass as by a law of nature to the front. All follow them. It is their fate and ours that they must work out to the end the destiny interwoven of their own insatiate ambition and the false ideals of us who have created them and their opportunity.

If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know. The forces and the wealth are new, and have been the opportunity of new men. Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them. To them science is but a never-ending répertoire of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates, government but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth written for them. They claim a power without control, exercised through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual. The possibilities of its gratification have been widening before them without interruption since they began, and even at a thousand millions they will feel no satiation and will see no place to stop. They are gluttons of luxury and power, rough, unsocialized, believing that mankind must be kept terrorized. Powers of pity die out of them, because they work through agents and die in their agents, because what they do is not for themselves.

Of gods, friends, learnings, of the uncomprehended civilization they overrun, they ask but one question: How much? What is a good time to sell? What is a good time to buy? The Church and the Capitol, incarnating the sacrifices and triumphs of a procession of martyrs and patriots since the dawn of freedom, are good enough for a money-changer's shop for them, and a market and shambles. Their heathen eyes see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing but an intelligence-office and hired men to help them burglarize the treasures accumulated for thousands of years at the altars of liberty and justice, that they may burn their marbles for the lime of commerce.

By their windfall of new power they have been forced into the position of public enemies. Its new forms make them seem not to be within the jurisdiction of the social restraints which many ages of suffering have taught us to bind about the old powers of man over man. A fury of rule or ruin has always in the history of human affairs been a characteristic of the "strong men" whose fate it is to be in at the death of an expiring principle. The leaders who, two hundred years ago, would have been crazy with conquest, to-day are crazy with competition. To a dying era some man is always born to enfranchise it by revealing it to itself. Men repay such benefactors by turning to rend them. Most unhappy is the fate of him whose destiny it is to lead mankind too far in its own path. Such is the function of these men, such will be their lot, as that of those for whom they are building up these wizard wealths.

Poor thinking means poor doing. In casting about for the cause of our industrial evils, public opinion has successively found it in "competition," "combination," the "corporations," "conspiracies," "trusts." But competition has ended in combination, and our new wealth takes as it chooses the form of corporation or trust, or corporation again, and with every change grows greater and worse. Under these kaleidoscopic masks we begin at last to see progressing to its terminus a steady consolidation, the end of which is one-man power. The conspiracy ends in one, and one cannot conspire with himself. When this solidification of many into one has been reached, we shall be at last face to face with the naked truth that it is not only the form but the fact of arbitrary power, of control without consent, of rule without representation that concerns us.

Business motived by the self-interest of the individual runs into monopoly at every point it touches the social life--land monopoly, transportation monopoly, trade monopoly, political monopoly in all its forms, from contraction of the currency to corruption in office. The society in which in half a lifetime a man without a penny can become a hundred times a millionaire is as over-ripe, industrially, as was, politically, the Rome in which the most popular bully could lift himself from the ranks of the legion on to the throne of the Cæsars. Our rising issue is with business. Monopoly is business at the end of its journey. It has got there. The irrepressible conflict is now as distinctly with business as the issue so lately met was with slavery. Slavery went first only because it was the cruder form of business.

Against the principles, and the men embodying them and pushing them to extremes--by which the powers of government, given by all for all, are used as franchises for personal aggrandizement; by which, in the same line, the common toil of all and the common gifts of nature, lands, forces, mines, sites, are turned from service to selfishness, and are made by one and the same stroke to give gluts to a few and impoverishment to the many--we must plan our campaign. The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity, and each of us is equally guilty who directs to his own pleasure the labor he should turn to the wants of others. Our fanatic of wealth reverses the rule that serving mankind is the end and wealth an incident, and has made wealth the end and the service an accident, until he can finally justify crime itself if it is a means to the end--wealth--which has come to be the supreme good; and we follow him.

It is an adjudicated fact of the business and social life of America that to receive the profits of crime and cherish the agents who commit it does not disqualify for fellowship in the most "solid" circles--financial, commercial, religious, or social. It illustrates what Ruskin calls the "morbid" character of modern business that the history of its most brilliant episodes must be studied in the vestibules of the penitentiary. The riches of the combinations are the winnings of a policy which, we have seen, has certain constant features. Property to the extent of uncounted millions has been changed from the possession of the many who owned it to the few who hold it:

1. Without the knowledge of the real owners.

2. Without their consent.

3. With no compensation to them for the value taken.

4. By falsehood, often under oath.

5. In violation of the law.

Our civilization is builded on competition, and competition evolves itself crime--to so acute an infatuation has the lunacy of self-interest carried our dominant opinion. We are hurried far beyond the point of not listening to the new conscience which, pioneering in moral exploration, declares that conduct we think right because called "trade" is really lying, stealing, murder. "The definite result," Ruskin preaches, "of all our modern haste to be rich is assuredly and constantly the murder of a certain number of persons by our hands every year." To be unawakened by this new voice is bad enough, but we shut our ears even against the old conscience.

We cannot deal with this unless we cleanse our hearts of all disordering rage. "The rarer action is in virtue rather than in vengeance." Our tyrants are our ideals incarnating themselves in men born to command. What these men are we have made them. All governments are representative governments; none of them more so than our government of industry. We go hopelessly astray if we seek the solution of our problems in the belief that our business rulers are worse men in kind than ourselves. Worse in degree; yes. It is a race to the bad, and the winners are the worst. A system in which the prizes go to meanness invariably marches with the meanest men at the head. But if any could be meaner than the meanest it would be they who run and fail and rail.

Every idea finds its especially susceptible souls. These men are our most susceptible souls to the idea of individual self-interest. They have believed implicitly what we have taught, and have been the most faithful in trying to make the talent given them grow into ten talents. They rise superior to our half-hearted social corrections: publicity, private competition, all devices of market-opposition, private litigation, public investigation, legislation, and criminal prosecution--all. Their power is greater to-day than it was yesterday, and will be greater to-morrow. The public does not withhold its favor, but deals with them, protects them, refuses to treat their crimes as it treats those of the poor, and admits them to the highest places. The predominant mood is the more or less concealed regret of the citizens that they have not been able to conceive and execute the same lucky stroke or some other as profitable. The conclusion is irresistible that men so given the lead are the representatives of the real "spirit of the age," and that the protestants against them are not representative of our times--are at the best but intimators of times which may be.

Two social energies have been in conflict, and the energy of reform has so far proved the weaker. We have chartered the self-interest of the individual as the rightful sovereign of conduct; we have taught that the scramble for profit is the best method of administering the riches of earth and the exchange of services. Only those can attack this system who attack its central principle, that strength gives the strong in the market the right to destroy his neighbor. Only as we have denied that right to the strong elsewhere have we made ourselves as civilized as we are. And we cannot make a change as long as our songs, customs, catchwords, and public opinions tell all to do the same thing if they can. Society, in each person of its multitudes, must recognize that the same principles of the interest of all being the rule of all, of the strong serving the weak, of the first being the last--"I am among you as one that serves"--which have given us the home where the weakest is the one surest of his rights and of the fullest service of the strongest, and have given us the republic in which all join their labor that the poorest may be fed, the weakest defended, and all educated and prospered, must be applied where men associate in common toil as wherever they associate. Not until then can the forces be reversed which generate those obnoxious persons--our fittest.

Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few. Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and Pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces. Their furniture must be banished to the world-garret, where lie the out-worn trappings of the guilds and slavery and other old lumber of human institutions.

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XXXV. AND THE NEW

We have given the prize of power to the strong, the cunning, the arithmetical, and we must expect nothing else but that they will use it cunningly and arithmetically. For what else can they suppose we gave it to them? If the power really flows from the people, and should be used for them; if its best administration can be got, as in government, only by the participation in it of men of all views and interests; if in the collision of all these, as in democracy, the better policy is progressively preponderant; if this is a policy which, with whatever defects, is better than that which can be evolved by narrower or more selfish or less multitudinous influences of persons or classes, then this power should be taken up by the people. "The mere conflict of private interests will never produce a well-ordered commonwealth of labor," says the author of the article on political economy in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The failure of monarchy and feudalism and the visibly impending failure of our business system all reveal a law of nature. The harmony of things insists that that which is the source of power, wealth, and delight shall also be the ruler of it. That which is must also seem. It is the people from whom come the forces with which kings and millionaires ride the world, and until the people take their proper place in the seat of sovereignty, these pseudo owners--mere claimants and usurpers--will, by the very falsity and iniquity of their position, be pushed into deceit, tyranny, and cruelty, ending in downfall.

Thousands of years' experience has proved that government must begin where it ends--with the people; that the general welfare demands that they who exercise the powers and they upon whom these are exercised must be the same, and that higher political ideals can be realized only through higher political forms. Myriads of experiments to get the substance of liberty out of the forms of tyranny, to believe in princes, to trust good men to do good as kings, have taught the inexorable truth that, in the economy of nature, form and substance must move together, and are as inextricably interdependent as are, within our experience, what we call matter and spirit. Identical is the lesson we are learning with regard to industrial power and property. We are calling upon their owners, as mankind called upon kings in their day, to be good and kind, wise and sweet, and we are calling in vain. We are asking them not to be what we have made them to be. We put power into their hands and ask them not to use it as power. If this power is a trust for the people, the people betrayed it when they made private estates out of it for individuals. If the spirit of power is to change, institutions must change as much. Liberty recast the old forms of government into the Republic, and it must remould our institutions of wealth into the Commonwealth.

The question is not whether monopoly is to continue. The sun sets every night on a greater majority against it. We are face to face with the practical issue: Is it to go through ruin or reform? Can we forestall ruin by reform? If we wait to be forced by events we shall be astounded to find how much more radical they are than our utopias. Louis XVI. waited until 1793, and gave his head and all his investitures to the people who in 1789 asked only to sit at his feet and speak their mind. Unless we reform of our own free will, nature will reform us by force, as nature does. Our evil courses have already gone too far in producing misery, plagues, hatreds, national enervation. Already the leader is unable to lead, and has begun to drive with judges armed with bayonets and Gatling guns. History is the serial obituary of the men who thought they could drive men.

Reform is the science and conscience with which mankind in its manhood overcomes temptations and escapes consequences by killing the germs. Ruin is already hard at work among us. Our libraries are full of the official inquiries and scientific interpretations which show how our master-motive is working decay in all our parts. The family crumbles into a competition between the father and the children whom he breeds to take his place in the factory, to unfit themselves to be fathers in their turn. A thorough, stalwart resimplification, a life governed by simple needs and loves, is the imperative want of the world. It will be accomplished: either self-conscious volition does it, or the slow wreck and decay of superfluous and unwholesome men and matters. The latter is the method of brutes and brute civilizations. The other is the method of man, so far as he is divine. Has not man, who has in personal reform risen above the brute method, come to the height at which he can achieve social reform in masses and by nations? We must learn; we can learn by reason. Why wait for the cruder teacher?

We have a people like which none has ever existed before. We have millions capable of conscious co-operation. The time must come in social evolution when the people can organize the free-will to choose salvation which the individual has been cultivating for 1900 years, and can adopt a policy more dignified and more effective than leaving themselves to be kicked along the path of reform by the recoil of their own vices. We must bring the size of our morality up to the size of our cities, corporations, and combinations, or these will be brought down to fit our half-grown virtue.

Industry and monopoly cannot live together. Our modern perfection of exchange and division of labor cannot last without equal perfection of morals and sympathy. Every one is living at the mercy of every one else in a way entirely peculiar to our times. Nothing is any longer made by a man; parts of things are made by parts of men, and become wholes by the luck of a good-humor which so far keeps men from flying asunder. It takes a whole company to make a match. A hundred men will easily produce a hundred million matches, but not one of them could make one match. No farm gets its plough from the cross-roads blacksmith, and no one in the chilled-steel factory knows the whole of the plough. The life of Boston hangs on a procession of reciprocities which must move, as steadily and sweetly as the roll of the planets, between its bakeries, the Falls of St. Anthony, and the valley of the Red River. Never was there a social machinery so delicate. Only on terms of love and justice can men endure contact so close.

The break-down of all other civilizations has been a slow decay. It took the Northerners hundreds of years to march to the Tiber. They grew their way through the old society as the tree planting itself on a grave is found to have sent its roots along every fibre and muscle of the dead. Our world is not the simple thing theirs was, of little groups sufficient to themselves, if need be. New York would begin to die to-morrow if it were not for Illinois and Dakota. We cannot afford a revulsion in the hearts by whose union locomotives run, mills grind, factories make. Practical men are speculating to-day on the possibility that our civilization may some afternoon be flashed away by the tick of a telegraph. All these co-operations can be scattered by a word of hate too many, and we left, with no one who knows how to make a plough or a match, a civilization cut off as by the Roman curse from food and fire. Less sensitive civilizations than ours have burst apart.

Liberty and monopoly cannot live together. What chance have we against the persistent coming and the easy coalescence of the confederated cliques, which aspire to say of all business, "This belongs to us," and whose members, though moving among us as brothers, are using against us, through the corporate forms we have given them, powers of invisibility, of entail and accumulation, unprecedented because impersonal and immortal, and, most peculiar of all, power to act as persons, as in the commission of crimes, with exemption from punishment as persons? Two classes study and practise politics and government: place hunters and privilege hunters. In a world of relativities like ours size of area has a great deal to do with the truth of principles. America has grown so big--and the tickets to be voted, and the powers of government, and the duties of citizens, and the profits of personal use of public functions have all grown so big--that the average citizen has broken down. No man can half understand or half operate the fulness of this big citizenship, except by giving his whole time to it. This the place hunter can do, and the privilege hunter. Government, therefore--municipal, State, national--is passing into the hands of these two classes, specialized for the functions of power by their appetite for the fruits of power. The power of citizenship is relinquished by those who do not and cannot know how to exercise it to those who can and do--by those who have a livelihood to make to those who make politics their livelihood.

These specialists of the ward club, the primary, the campaign, the election, and office unite, by a law as irresistible as that of the sexes, with those who want all the goods of government--charters, contracts, rulings, permits. From this marriage it is easy to imagine that among some other people than ourselves, and in some other century than this, the off-spring might be the most formidable, elusive, unrestrained, impersonal, and cruel tyranny the world has yet seen. There might come a time when the policeman and the railroad president would equally show that they cared nothing for the citizen, individually or collectively, because aware that they and not he were the government. Certainly such an attempt to corner "the dear people" and the earth and the fulness thereof will break down. It is for us to decide whether we will let it go on till it breaks down of itself, dragging down to die, as a savage dies of his vice, the civilization it has gripped with its hundred hands; or whether, while we are still young, still virtuous, we will break it down, self-consciously, as the civilized man, reforming, crushes down the evil. If we cannot find a remedy, all that we love in the word America must die. It will be an awful price to pay if this attempt at government of the people, by the people, for the people must perish from off the face of the earth to prove to mankind that political brotherhood cannot survive where industrial brotherhood is denied. But the demonstration is worth even that.

Aristotle's lost books of the Republics told the story of two hundred and fifty attempts at free government, and these were but some of the many that had to be melted down in the crucible of fate to teach Hamilton and Jefferson what they knew. Perhaps we must be melted by the same fierce flames to be a light to the feet of those who come after us. For as true as that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a nation half slave and half free cannot permanently endure, is it true that a people who are slaves to market-tyrants will surely come to be their slaves in all else, that all liberty begins to be lost when one liberty is lost, that a people half democratic and half plutocratic cannot permanently endure.

The secret of the history we are about to make is not that the world is poorer or worse. It is richer and better. Its new wealth is too great for the old forms. The success and beauties of our old mutualities have made us ready for new mutualities. The wonder of to-day is the modern multiplication of products by the union of forces; the marvel of to-morrow will be the greater product which will follow when that which is co-operatively produced is co-operatively enjoyed. It is the spectacle of its concentration in the private fortunes of our day which reveals this wealth to its real makers--the whole people--and summons them to extend the manners and institutions of civilization to this new tribal relation.

Whether the great change comes with peace or sword, freely through reform or by nature's involuntary forces, is a mere matter of detail, a question of convenience--not of the essence of the thing. The change will come. With reform, it may come to us. If with force, perhaps not to us. But it will come. The world is too full of amateurs who can play the golden rule as an aria with variations. All the runs and trills and transpositions have been done to death. All the "sayings" have been said. The only field for new effects is in epigrams of practice. Titillation of our sympathies has become a dissipation. We shed a daily tear over the misery of the slums as the toper takes his dram, and our liver becomes torpid with the floods of indignation and sentiment we have guzzled without converting them into their co-efficients of action.

"Regenerate the individual" is a half-truth; the reorganization of the society which he makes and which makes him is the other half. Man alone cannot be a Christian. Institutions are applied beliefs. The love of liberty became liberty in America by clothing itself in the complicated group of structures known as the government of the United States. Love is a half-truth, and kissing is a good deal less than half of that. We need not kiss all our fellow-men, but we must do for them all we ask them to do for us--nothing less than the fullest performance of every power. To love our neighbor is to submit to the discipline and arrangement which make his life reach its best, and so do we best love ourselves.

History has taught us nothing if not that men can continue to associate only by the laws of association. The golden rule is the first and last of these, but the first and last of the golden rule is that it can be operated only through laws, habits, forms, and institutions. The Constitution and laws of the United States are, however imperfectly, the translation into the language of politics of doing as you would be done by--the essence of equal rights and government by consent. To ask individuals to-day to lead by their single sacrifices the life of the brother in the world of business is as if the American colonist had been asked to lead by his individual enterprise the life of the citizen of a republic. That was made possible to him only by union with others. The business world is full of men who yearn to abandon its methods and live the love they feel; but to attempt to do so by themselves would be martyrdom, and that is "caviare to the general." "We admire martyrdom," Mazzini, the martyr, said, "but we do not recommend it." The change must be social, and its martyrdoms have already begun.

The new self-interest will remain unenforced in business until we invent the forms by which the vast multitudes who have been gathered together in modern production can organize themselves into a people there as in government. Nothing but this institutionalization will save them from being scattered away from each other again, and it can be achieved only by such averaging and concessions and co-operations as are the price of all union. These will be gains, not losses. Soldiers become partners in invincibility by the discipline which adopts an average rate of march instead of compelling all to keep step with the fastest and stay with the strongest. Moralists tell men to love each other and the right. How, by doing what things, by leaving what undone, shall men love each other? What have the ethicals to say upon the morality of putting public highways in private hands, and of allowing these private hands to make a private and privileged use of them? If bad, will a mere "change of heart," uninstitutionalized, change them?

New freedoms cannot be operated through the old forms of slavery. The ideals of Washington and Hamilton and Adams could not breathe under kingly rule. Idle to say they might. Under the mutual dependence of the inside and outside of things their change has all through history always been dual. Change of heart is no more redemption than hunger is dinner. We must have honesty, love, justice in the heart of the business world, but for these we must also have the forms which will fit them. These will be very different from those through which the intercourse of man with man in the exchange of services now moves to such ungracious ends. Forms of Asiatic and American government, of early institutions and to-day's, are not more different. The cardinal virtues cannot be established and kept at work in trade and on the highways with the old apparatus. In order that the spirit that gave rebates may go to stay, the rebate itself must go. If the private use of private ownership of highways is to go, the private ownership must go. There must be no private use of public power or public property. These are created by the common sacrifices of all, and can be rightfully used only for the common good of all--from all, by all, for all. All the grants and franchises that have been given to private hands for private profit are void in morals and void in that higher law which sets the copy for the laggard pens of legislatures and judges. "No private use of public powers" is but a threshold truth. The universe, says Emerson, is the property of every creature in it.

No home so low it may not hope that out of its fledglings one may grow the hooked claw that will make him a millionaire. To any adventurer of spirit and prowess in the Italy of the Renaissance might come the possibility of butchering or poisoning his way to a castle or a throne. Such prizes of power made the peninsula a menagerie of tyrants, murderers, voluptuaries, and multitudes of misery. We got republican liberty by agreeing each with the other never to seek to become kings or lords or dukes. We can get industrial and economic liberty only by a like covenant never to let ourselves or any one else be millionaires.

There can be no public prosperity without public virtue, and no public virtue without private virtue. But private cannot become public except by organization. Our attempts at control, regulation, are but the agitations of the Gracchi, evidencing the wrong, but not rising to the cure. We are waiting for some genius of good who will generalize into one body of doctrine our partial truths of reform, and will help us live the generalization. Never was mankind, across all lines of race, creed, and institutions, more nearly one in discontent and restless consciousness of new powers and a new hope and purpose, never more widely agitated by influences leading in one direction, never more nearly a committee of the whole on the question of the day. Never before were the means for flashing one thought into the minds of the million, and flashing that thought into action, what they are to-day. The good word or good deed of Chicago in the morning may be the inspiration of Calcutta before nightfall. The crusades were but an eddy in comparison with the universal tide waiting for another Peter the Hermit to lead us where the Man who is to rise again lies in the hands of the infidel.

Our problem can be read from its good side or its bad, and must be read from both, as: Business has become a vice, and defeats us and itself; or, Humanity quickens its step to add to its fellowships the new brotherhood of labor. The next emancipation, like all emancipations, must destroy and build. The most constructive thinker in history said, Love one another; but he also drove the money-changers from the temple, and denounced the scribes and Pharisees, and has been busy for nineteen hundred years pulling down tenements unfit for the habitation of the soul. We see something new and something old. Old principles run into mania, a wicked old world bursting into suicidal explosion, as Carlyle said of the French Revolution. New loves, new capabilities, new institutions, created by the expansion of old ideals and new opportunities of human contact. Our love of those to whom we have been "introduced" is but unlocking a door through which all men will pass into our hearts. What makes men lovable is not the accident of our knowing them. It is that they are men. Before 1776 there were thirteen patriotisms in America.

The bishops of Boswell's day had no ear for the lamentations of the victims of the slave-trade, but there came a new sympathy which rose superior to their divine displeasure that this commerce of Christian merchants should be attacked. We are coming to sympathize with the animals, and Queen Victoria contributes money to a hospital for the succor of decayed old gentlemen and lady cats. By-and-by royal hearts may widen to include men and women evicted in Ireland, or--worse fate--not evicted from Whitechapel. The spirit that defended the slave-trade now finds its last ditch behind the text, The poor ye have with you always. But a new sympathy rises again, like that which declared that the poor should be free of the slave-trade and slavery, and declares that the poor shall be freed from starvation of body, mind, and soul. Slave-trade, slavery, poverty; the form varies, but against them all runs the refusal of the human heart to be made happy at the cost of the misery of others, and its mathematical knowledge that its quotient of satisfactions will increase with the sum of the happiness of all.

The word of the day is that we are about to civilize industry. Mankind is quivering with its purpose to make men fellow-citizens, brothers, lovers in industry, as it has done with them in government and family, which are also industry. We already have on our shelves the sciences--hygienic, industrial, political, ethical--to free the world almost at a stroke from war, accidents, disease, poverty, and their flowing vices and insanities. The men of these sciences are here at call praying for employment. The people, by the books they read, show themselves to be praying to have them put at work. If we who call ourselves civilization would for one average span devote to life-dealing the moneys, armies, and genius we now give to death-dealing, and would establish over the weaker peoples a protectorate of the United States of Europe and America, we would take a long step towards settling forever the vexed question of the site of the Garden of Eden.

"Human nature," "monotony," and "individuality" are the lions which the reformer is always told will stop the way to a better world. "You cannot change human nature." There are two human natures--the human nature of Christ and of Judas; and Christ prevails. There is the human nature which seeks anonymity, secrecy, the fruits of power without its duties; and there is the human nature which rises against these and, province by province, is abolishing them from human affairs. Men have always been willing to die for their faith. The bad have died as bravely as the good, Charles I. with as smooth a front as Sir Harry Vane. In this readiness to die lies folded every loyalty of life.

"You would make the world a dead level of monotony." Good society does not think it monotonous that all its women should at the same time dust the streets with long-tailed gowns, or that its men should meet every night in funereal black and identical cut, but it shrinks from the monotony of having all share in reforms which would equalize surfeit and starvation. "Good society" is still to come, and it will find some better definition of "monotony" than a fair share for all--a better definition of variety than too much for ourselves at the cost of too little for all others. Shall we choose the monotony of sharing with every one under George III. or Alexander II. the denial of all right to participate in the supreme power, or shall we choose the monotony of sharing with every fellow-citizen the right to become President?--the monotony of being forbidden to enter all the great livelihoods, some syndicate blocking each way with "This business belongs to us"? Or the monotony of a democracy, where every laborer has equal rights with all other citizens to decide upon the administration of the common toil for the common welfare, and an equal right with every other to rise to be a Captain of Industry? Such are the alternatives of "monotony." We have made an historic choice in one; now for the other.

And "individuality." "You are going to destroy individuality." We can become individual only by submitting to be bound to others. We extend our freedom only by finding new laws to obey. Life outside the law is slavery on as many sides as there are disregarded laws. The locomotive off its tracks is not free. The more relations, ties, duties, the more "individual." The isolated man is the mere rudiment of an individual. But he who has become citizen, neighbor, friend, brother, son, husband, father, fellow-member, in one, is just by so many times individualized. Men's expanding powers of co-operation bring them to the conscious ability to unite for new benefits; but this extension of individuality is forbidden in the name of individuality. There are two individualities: that of the dullard, who submits to take his railroad transportation, his light, his coal, his salt, his reaping-machine at such prices and of such quality as arbitrary power forces upon him, and that of the shrewder man who, by an alliance of the individualities of all, supplies himself at his own price.

Time carries us so easily we do not realize how fast we move. This social debate has gone far beyond the question whether change there must be. What shall the change be? is the subject all the world is discussing. Exposure of abuses no longer excites more than a languid interest. But every clear plan how things might be rearranged raises the people. Before every revolution marches a book--the Contrat Social, Uncle Tom's Cabin. "Every man nowadays," says Emerson, "carries a revolution in his vest-pocket." The book which sells more copies than any other of our day abroad and at home, debated by all down to the boot-blacks as they sit on the curb-stones, is one calling men to draw from their success in insuring each other some of the necessaries of life the courage to move on to insure each other all the necessaries of life, bidding them abandon the self-defeating anarchy which puts railroad-wreckers at the head of railroads and famine-producers at the head of production, and inspiring them to share the common toil and the fruits of the toil under the ideals which make men Washingtons and Lincolns. You may question the importance of the plan; you cannot question the importance of its welcome. It shows the people gathering-points for the new constitution they know they must make.

In nothing has liberty justified itself more thoroughly than in the resolute determination spreading among the American people to add industrial to political independence. It is the hope of the world that good has its effects as well as evil, and that on the whole, and in the long-run, the seed of the good will overgrow the evil. "Heaven has kindly given our blood a moral flow." Liberty breeds liberties, slavery breeds slaveries, but the liberties will be the strongest stock. If the political and religious liberties which the people of this country aspired to set up had in them the real sap and fibre of a better life than the world had yet known, it must certainly follow that they would quicken and strengthen the people for discovery and obedience in still higher realms. And just this has happened. Nowhere else has the new claim to tax without representation been so quickly detected, so intelligently scrutinized, and so bravely fought. Nowhere else has this spreading plague of selfishness and false doctrine found a people whose average and general life was pitched on so high a level that they instantly took the alarm at its claims over their lives and liberties. It has found a people so disciplined by the aspiration and achievement of political and religious rights that they are already possessed of a body of doctrine capable, by an easy extension, of refuting all the pretensions of the new absolutism. At the very beginning of this new democratic life among the nations it was understood that to be safe liberty must be complete on its industrial as well as on its political and religious sides. This is the American principle. "Give a man power over my subsistence," said Alexander Hamilton, "and he has power over the whole of my moral being." To submit to such a power gives only the alternative of death or degradation, and the high spirit of America preferred then, as it prefers now, the rule of right, which gives life.

The mania of business has reached an acuter and extremer development in America than elsewhere, because nowhere else have bounteous nature and free institutions produced birthrights and pottages so well worth "swapping." But the follies and wickedness of business have nowhere been so sharply challenged as in free America. "Betake yourself to America," said Carlyle to a friend beginning a literary career; "there you can utter your freest thoughts in ways impossible here." It is to this stern wakefulness of a free people that the world owes it that more light has been thrown in America than in any other country on the processes of modern money-making. A free press, organ of a free people, has done invaluable service. The legislatures have pushed investigation after investigation into the ways in which large masses of the people have been deprived, for the benefit of single men or groups of men, of rights of subsistence and government. Through the courts the free people have pursued their depredators by civil and criminal process, by public and private prosecutions. Imperfect and corrupt, these agencies of press, courts, legislatures have often been; they have still done a work which has either been left undone altogether in other countries, or has been done with but a fraction of our thoroughness.

It is due to them that there exists in the reports of legislative investigations, State and national, in the proceedings of lawsuits and criminal trials, in the files of the newspapers, a mass of information which cannot be found in any other community in the world. There is in these archives an accumulation of the raw material of tragedy, comedy, romance, ravellings of the vicissitudes of human life, and social and personal fate, which will feed the fires of whole generations of literary men when once they awake to the existence of these precious rolls. In these pigeon-holes are to be found keys of the present and clews to the future. As America has the newest and widest liberty, it is the stage where play the newest and widest forces of evil as well as good. America is at the front of the forward line of evolution. It has taken the lead in developing competition to the extreme form in which it destroys competition, and in superfining the processes of exchange of services into those of the acquisition of the property of others without service.

The hope is that the old economic system we inherited has ripened so much more rapidly than the society and government we have created that the dead matter it deposits can be thrown off by our vigorous youth and health. "It is high time our bad wealth came to an end," says Emerson. It has grown into its monstrous forms so fast that the dullest eye can separate it from the Commonwealth, and the slowest mind comprehend its mischievousness. In making themselves free of arbitrary and corrupt power in government the Americans prepared themselves to be free in all else, and because foremost in political liberty they have the promise of being the first to realize industrial liberty--the trunk of a tree of which political liberty is the seed, and without which political liberty shrinks back into nothingness.

"The art of Italy will blossom over our graves," Mazzini said when, with true insight, he saw that the first artistic, first literary task before the Italians was to make their country free. Art, literature, culture, religion, in America, are already beginning to feel the restrictive pressure which results from the domination of a selfish, self-indulgent, luxurious, and anti-social power. This power, mastering the markets of a civilization which gives its main energies to markets, passes without difficulty to the mastery of all the other activities. When churches, political campaigns, the expounding of the law, maintenance of schools and colleges, and family life itself all depend on money, they must become servile to the money power. Song, picture, sermon, decrees of court, and the union of hearts must pass constantly under stronger control of those who give their lives to trade and encourage everybody else to trade, confident that the issue of it all will be that they will hold as property, in exclusive possession, to be doled out on their own terms, the matter by which alone man can live, either materially or spiritually.

In America, where the supreme political power and much of the government of church and college have been taken out of traditional hands and subjected to the changing determinations of popular will, it has inevitably resulted that the State, church, and school have passed under this mercantile aristocracy to a far greater extent than in other countries where stiffer régimes under other and older influences still stand. Our upper classes--elected, as always, by the equipoise of effort and opinion between them and the lower classes--are, under this commercial system, the men who trade best, who can control their features and their consciences so that they can always get more than they give, who can play with supply and demand so that at the end of the game all their brethren are their tributaries for life. It is the birthright-buying minds that, by the adoption of this ideal, we choose for our rulers. The progressive races have altered their ideals of kings with the indescribable advantage of being ruled by Washingtons and Lincolns and Gladstones instead of Caligulas and Pharaohs. We have now to make a similar step forward in another part of life. The previous changes expressed outwardly an inner change of heart. The reformer of to-day is simply he who, with quicker ear, detecting that another change of heart is going on, goes before.

Another great change is working in the inner mind of man, and will surely be followed by incorporation in institutions and morals and manners. The social head and heart are both being persuaded that too many are idle--rich and poor; too many are hurt in body and soul--rich and poor; too many children are "exposed," as in the old Greek and Roman market-places; too many are starving within reach of too much fertile waste; too many passions of envy, greed, and hate are raging among rich and poor. There is too much left undone that ought to be done along the whole scale of life, from the lowest physical to the highest spiritual needs, from better roads to sweeter music and nobler worship. It cannot be long, historically speaking, before all this new sense and sentiment will issue in acts. All will be as zealously protected against the oppression of the cruel in their daily labor as now against oppression from invader or rioter, and will be as warmly cheered in liberty to grow to their fullest capabilities as laborers--i.e., users of matter for the purpose of the spirit--as they are now welcomed to the liberty of the citizen and the worshipper. Infinite is the fountain of our rights. We can have all the rights we will create. All the rights we will give we can have. The American people will save the liberties they have inherited by winning new ones to bequeath.

With this will come fruits of new faculty almost beyond calculation. A new liberty will put an end to pauperism and millionairism and the crimes and death-rate born of both wretchednesses, just as the liberty of politics and religion put an end to martyrs and tyrants. The new liberty is identical in principle and purpose with the other; it is made inevitable by them. Those who love the liberties already won must open the door to the new, unless they wish to see them all take flight together. There can be no single liberty. Liberties go in clusters like the Pleiades.

We must either regulate, or own, or destroy, perishing by the sword we take. The possibility of regulation is a dream. As long as this control of the necessaries of life and this wealth remain private with individuals, it is they who will regulate, not we. The policy of regulation, disguise it as we may, is but moving to a compromise and equilibrium within the evil all complain of. It is to accept the principle of the sovereignty of the self-interest of the individual and apply constitutional checks to it. The unprogressive nations palter in this method with monarchy. But the wits of America are equal to seeing that as with kingship and slavery so with poverty--the weeding must be done at the roots. Sir Henry Sumner Maine says mankind moves from status to contract; from society ruled by inherited customs to one ruled by agreement, varied according to circumstances. Present experience suggests the addition that the movement, like all in nature, is pendulous, and that mankind moves progressively from status to contract, and from this stage of contract to another status. We march and rest and march again. If our society is settling down to an interval of inertia, perhaps ages long, we must before night comes establish all in as much equality and comfort as possible.

The aspirations are not new. We have had them since Plato. The knowledge of means for realizing them is not new. We have had it since Aristotle, and the history of civilization is but the record of the progressive embodiment of the ideals in institutions for the life together--sexual, social, spiritual. What is new in our moment is that mankind's accumulating forces are preparing for another step forward in this long processional realization of its best possible. Nothing so narrow as the mere governmentalizing of the means and processes of production. It is only the morally nerveless who ask government to do that which they will not rise to do. The conversion which is now working itself out within us, and perhaps is more nearly born than we suspect ("We shall not live to see slavery abolished," said Emerson, in 1859) is making itself felt on all sides of our life. In manners, in literature, in marriage, in church, in all, we see at work the saving ferment which is to make all things new by bringing them nearer to the old ideals. George Sand was revolted by the servile accent of the phrase of her day, "Madame est servie." Society has grown to the better fellowship her finer ear found wanting in these words, and is now told it is dinner, not madame or monsieur, that is served.

We are to have, of course, great political changes. We are to apply the co-operative methods of the post-office and the public school to many other common toils, to all toils in which private sovereignty has become through monopoly a despotism over the public, and to all in which the association of the people and the organization of processes have been so far developed that the profit-hunting Captain of Industry may be replaced by the public-serving Captain of Industry. But we are to have much more. We are to have a private life of a new beauty, of which these are to be merely the mechanical exhibitions on the side of politics. We are to move among each other, able, by the methodical and agreed adherence of all, to do what the words of Lamennais mean, instead of being able, as now, in most things, to afford only an indulgence in feeling them. We are to be commoners, travellers to Altruria.

We are to become fathers, mothers, for the spirit of the father and mother is not in us while we can say of any child it is not ours, and leave it in the grime. We are to become men, women, for to all about reinforcing us we shall insure full growth and thus insure it to ourselves. We are to become gentlemen, ladies, for we will not accept from another any service we are not willing to return in kind. We are to become honest, giving when we get, and getting with the knowledge and consent of all. We are to become rich, for we shall share in the wealth now latent in idle men and idle land, and in the fertility of work done by those who have ceased to withstand but stand with each other. As we walk our parks we already see that by saying "thine" to every neighbor we say "mine" of palaces, gardens, art, science, far beyond any possible to selfishness, even the selfishness of kings. We shall become patriots, for the heart will know why it thrills to the flag. Those folds wave the salute of a greater love than that of the man who will lay down his life for his friend. There floats the banner of the love of millions, who, though they do not know you and have never seen you, will die for you and are living for you, doing in a thousand services unto you as you would be done by. And the little patriotism, which is the love of the humanity fenced within our frontier will widen into the reciprocal service of all men. Generals were, merchants are, brothers will be, humanity's representative men.

There is to be a people in industry, as in government. The same rising genius of democracy which discovered that mankind did not co-operate in the State to provide a few with palaces and king's-evil, is disclosing that men do not co-operate in trade for any other purpose than to mobilize the labor of all for the benefit of all, and that the only true guidance comes from those who are led, and the only valid titles from those who create. Very wide must be the emancipation of this new self-interest. If we free America we shall still be not free, for the financial, commercial, possessory powers of modern industrial life are organized internationally. If we rose to the full execution of the first, simplest, and most pressing need of our times and put an end to all private use of public powers, we should still be confronted by monopolies existing simply as private property, as in coal-mines, oil lands.

It is not a verbal accident that science is the substance of the word conscience. We must know the right before we can do the right. When it comes to know the facts the human heart can no more endure monopoly than American slavery or Roman empire. The first step to a remedy is that the people care. If they know, they will care. To help them to know and care; to stimulate new hatred of evil, new love of the good, new sympathy for the victims of power, and, by enlarging its science, to quicken the old into a new conscience, this compilation of fact has been made. Democracy is not a lie. There live in the body of the commonalty the unexhausted virtue and the ever-refreshened strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress. In the hope of tapping some reserve of their powers of self-help this story is told to the people.

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