i know society. i was born in it, and have lived in it all my life, both here and in the capitals of europe. i believe that i understand as well as any man what are the true traditions and the true conditions of american society; and for comparison, i also know and understand the conditions and traditions of society in other lands. my honest opinion is that american society, for all its faults, and it has many, and for all the hideous abnormalities that in these later years have been grafted upon it, stands to-day a cleaner, saner and more normal society than that of4 any other highly civilized nation in the world.
in this nation, the very soul of which is the spirit of democracy, we have evolved a very elaborate and extremely complex society. like all such organizations, in all the lands under the sun, it is an oligarchy; one might almost say a tyranny. its rulers for the most part inherit their power and rule by hereditary right. the foundations of this society and the foundations of the power of its rulers were laid in generations now dead and gone. time has crystallized its rules into laws and formulated its conventions into tenets.
it is not my desire, in writing about society, to describe in detail its practices, to dwell upon its rules and regulations, to dilate upon its normal condition or its5 duties. rather, i intend to dwell upon a phase of its existence that does not traditionally belong to it, and that is not normally a part of it. this phase or condition i choose to describe in the phrase “the idle rich.”
if, in the writer’s license of generality, i seem at times to deal too harshly with the world of which i am a part, let the reader put himself for a moment in my place. let him imagine himself a member of a class judged and condemned according to a distorted popular conception based upon a semi-knowledge of the acts, habits, morals and ethics of the very worst of the class; nay, even of men and women who, while aping to the best of their poor ability the fashions, the habits, and the customs of that class, ignore every one of its best traditions, forget every one6 of its laws, and break every one of its commandments.
it is hard for me to write with patience of the small class that has done so much to disgrace and discredit the spirit of american society. for i know that it is true that in the mind of an enormous number of our people, and of the people of other civilized countries, american society is brought to shame and ridicule by the extraordinary excesses that have been brought within its gates and grafted into its system by the idle rich.
yet there are excuses. this is the most rapid age in history. in the progress of this nation we have ignored and turned our back upon that process which tennyson so well described in the happy phrase, “slow broadening down from precedent to precedent.” we laugh at precedent.7 we choose instead to tumble riotously down from step to step of progress, marking swift epochs with every bump.
naturally i am a conservative, and i deplore the process by which we sweep away the precedents of the nations. i prefer orderly evolution to disorderly revolution, either in business, in politics, or in the making of a social world; but i cannot change the things that i deplore. the fact, in the face of my protests, is as unblinking as the sphinx in the roar of napoleon’s cannon. and that fact is that in the making of our social world, as in the making of everything else that goes to make america, we have ignored the traditions of our fathers.
let me put this a little more fully. for this, after all, is the great cause that explains so much that needs explanation8 in the structure of our social world, in the rules that govern it, and in the habits, deplorable or otherwise, which have fastened themselves upon it. let me speak first of banking, for by profession i am a banker. to-day the english banker and the french banker follow, in the pursuit of business, paths beaten to smooth running by the feet of their ancestors. to-day you will find in the banking world of england and of france the same rules of personal conduct and personal honour, the same principles of business nursing and business repression that you would have found a century ago.
how different it is in this country! through our early history, if you care to study it in detail, you would have found us pacing step by step the progress of england; but more than half a century9 ago, when this nation rejected as unsuited to its ideals the notion of a central bank, our ways divided in the banking world. from that day to this there has hardly been a single important step—until very recently—that has not carried us farther from the traditions of our english cousins. in the matter of currency, we stumbled blindly through a maze of ignorance, piling error upon error, plunging desperately from the early madness of wild-cat state currency into the preposterous and abnormal system which to-day threatens periodically the throttling of our commerce and the disruption of the business world.
in the twin worlds of railroads and manufacturing, too, we blazed out paths entirely our own. even to this day, in the face of industrial marvels here and in germany, england clings desperately to the conditions10 that made her what she is. i would not dare generalize and say that the industrial world of england does not know the idea of centralization and concentration, but i will say this, that if one seek at its best the individual factory, the separate plant, the trade-mark that cannot be bought, the personal name that never can be submerged, he may go look in england for them now and he will find them, just as he would have found them a century ago.
here a new magic grew. it came not as a heaven-born inspiration to one man’s mind, but as an evolution born of the land and the air and the water. i shall dwell upon it more in a later chapter. here it is enough merely to indicate it. it was that the individual plant and the individual name must be submerged in the combine11 of plants and individuals. the personal name must vanish in the trust. the trust in turn must disappear into a greater trust, and yet a greater trust—and so on until, at last, a dozen mighty combinations were gathered together into one great trust of trusts, bringing under one hand the finding, the production, the marketing, and the transportation of the raw material, and the assembling, manufacture, selling, and transportation of the finished product.
so we struck out methods, manners, customs, and traditions all our own. we did it—this marvellous evolution—in half the lifetime of a man. in fact, in the industrial world one might almost say it was a process of twenty years—merely a moment of the nation’s history. well may one say it is a rapid age in which we live. madly we rush at our great problems.12 we did not know—we do not know yet—what the result is to be. there is no precedent to guide us; the road to to-morrow bears no sign-posts. not yet has our new system been tried by a panic that disturbed the depths of the commercial and industrial seas. only, we hope for the best, for optimism is the sign-manual of the true-born american.
i dwell upon these matters not because i care to pose or dare to pose as an authority upon them, but because the principles and ideas upon which they rest underlie also the making of the kingdom of society of which i would write. for social evolution is, after all, but a part of this same evolution that has given us our own distinctive banking system—good as it is or bad as it may be—and our own industrial system—giant or weakling as it may prove to be.
and if our banking system and our great industrial system were born in a day and a night, what may one say of the plutocracy that in this later day has been grafted upon and has grown to be a part of the american social world? here, indeed, the traditions of the world of history flashed past us, in our forward rush, as dead leaves fly backward from a speeding train. we saw them as they flew—yet we did not clearly see them. we knew they were, but we could not distinguish them one from the other; and, after all, little we cared for them, and little we care now.
perhaps, as i write, my mind will carry me back to the days before these new phenomena transpired; and i shall be moved to write of social america in the days of its true glory, before the glitter of tinsel and the tawdry finery of mere wealth overlaid14 it. for that is the background against which stand out in all their hideousness the empty follies of the idle rich and the vapid foolishness of the ultra-fashionable in america to-day.
forty years ago, as a boy, i lived in a true american home. the atmosphere of that home was still under the vitalizing influence of the nation’s great struggle for emancipation. lincoln was a saint. the writings of longfellow and emerson, hawthorne and washington irving, were constantly read. the traditions of european society had not struck their roots deep into the social soil of the united states. we were provincial, to be sure, but there was bliss in simplicity and innocence. morally and intellectually the life of the family and the life of the state were settled. we knew there was a god. we were positive15 as to just what was right and what was wrong. the bible, the declaration of independence, the constitution of the united states, the fact of the assured greatness of our country, the power of our religious, political, and social ideals to save the world—our faith in these was our rock of ages; and to these must be added the absolute belief in the theory that it was the sacred duty of every human being to serve his kind.
just in how far these fundamentals are now broken and scattered i shall not here attempt to say. but it is simply true that the bible is no longer read, that religion has lost its hold, that the constitution and laws are trampled upon by the rich and powerful, and are no longer held sacred by the poor and weak. instead of hawthorne, we read zola and gorky; instead16 of longfellow and bryant, ibsen and shaw. among how many perfectly respectable, ay, even religious, people is the name of nietsche not more familiar than that of cardinal newman! i do not know whither we are going, but i do know that we are going.
come search the records of generations long dead for the seeds of our social system. you will find them planted deep, and long ago. they are the same seeds of class destruction that lay in darkness through the early centuries of rome’s history, to spring to life in the sunshine of the triumphs of the republic, and reach their perfect flower in the era of plethoric wealth that marked the apogee of the empire—and then to fall, as full-blown blossoms will. they are the same seeds that for half a thousand years lay buried in simple england,17 to come to tardy life in the afterglow of elizabeth’s triumphs, and reach their fulness in the social glory of the mid-victorian era.
less than half a century ago the aristocracy of america worked with its hands, laboured in its broad fields, ate its bread in the sweat of its brow. the cities were small and inconsequential, and the laws of hospitality far overbalanced the traditions of class. here and there was wealth—but wealth was shackled to the wheels of opportunity.
often i have pondered over the startling wisdom of that succinct description of the american ideal written, strange to say, a hundred and forty years ago, by adam smith:
in our north american colonies, where uncultivated land is still to be had upon18 easy terms, no manufactures for distant sale have ever yet been established in any of their towns. when an artificer has acquired a little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own business and supplying the neighbouring country, he does not, in north america, attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of uncultivated lands. from artificer, he becomes planter, and neither the large wages nor the easy subsistence which the country affords to artificers, can bribe him rather to work for other people than for himself. he feels that an artificer is the servant of his customers, from whom he derives his subsistence, but that a planter who cultivates his own land, and derives his necessary subsistence from the labour of his own family, is really a master, and independent of all the world.
that was the america of 1760—and it was the america that lincoln knew. in the region that he knew as a boy and a man, there were neither great plantations, great factories, nor combines. the bulk of the population lived on small farms, toiled with their own hands, and remained in possession of their own products. a few owned and operated small stores or factories for the making of necessities. these could not grow rich. great riches must be derived from the labour of many. the rich of the eastern states fifty years ago were the owners of banks, large importing houses, railroads, and factories. these industries, being small, gave rise to fortunes that now seem small. they were riches, but not great riches.
think, then, of the transition that i myself have seen! sometimes, as i sit alone in my library reading and thinking about these matters, and reflecting upon the years that make up my brief lifetime, a sort of terror of to-morrow seizes me. i do not need to guess at the facts of my own world. i know the facts that such satirists as mr. upton sinclair vaguely guess, or gather from the gossip of the stables and the kitchen. the miserable excesses of society are an open book. i cannot blind my eyes or deafen my ears or close my nostrils and forget them. that decay has set in i know; that it has struck deep, as yet i cannot bring myself to believe. and this book is but my feeble effort to prevent it striking deeper, if i may.
“the wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.”
—theodore roosevelt.
