for thirty years, since 1880, we have been piling up wealth in the hands of men who do not work. in almost every year there has been pouring from our mills a steady grist of idlers. it has gone so far that to-day, in every city of the union, the class of the idle rich has reached proportions that to the thoughtful student of events are alarming. the millionaire habit has spread until to-day men of millions are far more numerous in our great cities than were men of one tenth the wealth twenty years ago.
i do not desire to criticize wealth; for90 i am not a socialist, and i entertain no utopian dreams concerning the equal distribution of wealth among the people or the public control of all sources of wealth. i agree thoroughly with mr. carnegie, and with much older economists, in the opinion that any arbitrary distribution of wealth, or any arbitrary assignment of the sources of wealth, would be but temporary, and would be followed by another period of adjustment which would end with the reappropriation of wealth and the reassignment of the sources of wealth into the hands best qualified by nature to hold them. i take it to be proven by the experience of the world that individual exploitation of the sources of wealth remains as the established basis of the industrial, commercial, and social development of the world.
yet, i confess, the terrific sweep of industrialism 91across this land throughout the past century appalls me as i study it from records written and unwritten. i cannot go down through the crowded tenement sections of our great cities without having it borne in upon me that we as a nation pay a fearful price in human blood and tears for our industrial triumphs. i cannot see the poverty, even the degradation, of the wives and children of the wage-working class in many cities, and even in many rural districts, without being visited by the devastating thought that surely, if the principle of the thing be necessary and right, there must be fearful errors somewhere in the application of the principle.
for the grim fact stands out beyond denial that the men who are the workers of the nation, and the women and the92 children dependent upon them, are not to-day given the opportunities that are their proper birthright in free america; and that, struggle as they will, save as they may, lift their voices in protest as they dare, they cannot obtain from our industrial hierarchy much more than a mere living wage. and, on the other hand, it is equally true that the wage of capital is high, that the class of idle rich has grown out of all proportion, and that it has taken upon itself a power and an arrogance unsurpassed in the industrial history of the world.
somewhere there is something wrong. i speak as a rich man. i speak as a representative of the class of which i write, and to which in particular i address myself. we can no longer blind ourselves with idle phrases or drug our consciences with the outworn boast that the workingman of93 america is to-day the highest paid artisan in the world. we know those lying figures well. many a time i myself, in personal argument, have shown that the american workman receives from one and a half to three times as much as his english cousin at the same trade; but we know now that it means nothing. we are learning, instead of envying the american workingman his lot, to pity more deeply that english cousin. we are learning, too, that what we give our workers in wages we take back from them in the higher cost of necessities, in food, in clothing, in medicine, in insurance—in a hundred devious ways all with one tendency—to keep the living margin down.
many centuries ago two great greek philosophers, aristotle and plato, predicted that the time would come when the94 tools of wealth production—machinery—would have reached such an advanced stage of development that it would become unnecessary to enslave anybody for the sake of allowing any one class to devote itself to the pursuit of culture. these great philosophers believed in slavery during that period of the world’s development in which they lived, on the ground that only by the exploitation of forced labour could any class be left free to develop the higher attributes of mankind. yet both looked forward to the time when, in the progress of humanity toward the ideal, the perfection of methods would permit the emancipation of all mankind.
aristotle and plato were no visionaries. their dreams, so far as the methods are concerned, are to-day realities; but, alas, how different the result! instead of emancipation95 we have welded about the necks of the people the chains of industrial slavery. it is true that the form of slavery, the direct exploitation of the bodies of men, has been wiped out in every civilized nation; but is it not equally true that since our own great struggle for freedom from the pollution of chattel slavery we have but stepped out of a process of direct exploitation of a few enchained slaves into a process far more expansive and embracing far more people, namely, the indirect exploitation of wage workers for the benefit of capital?
the fruit of the genius of the inventors of the world is plucked not by the hands of the workers, but by the hands of the comparatively small and personally insignificant class who, by virtue of the genius of their fathers, or by virtue of mere96 chance, administer the tremendous power of capital.
the evolution of the ages, then, has brought about this strangely ironical condition. humanity is face to face with a god-given opportunity to acquire and apply knowledge. the wealth producing machinery of the world has the capacity to give to all men the opportunity of enjoying leisure. knowledge and culture are the proper birthright of humanity to-day. even in the face of obstacles, knowledge and culture spread among the people. only one great obstacle remained to block the fulfillment of the prophecy of the great philosophers. that obstacle is the idle rich. it is the leisure class that to-day destroys the spirit of our dream.
it cannot be for long. we in america are moving fast toward social revolution.97 conflicts between labour and capital are assuming the proportions of civil war. the once powerful middle class, which is the safety of every nation, is to-day weak, and is every day declining. soon, politically it will be a memory, and the battle field will be cleared for conflict.
it is, i know, a hopeless and a thankless task for any man to raise his voice in an appeal for peace. the forces which have been set in motion in the making of america so far must, i suppose, run their allotted course. to-day the class spirit in america is thoroughly aroused, and it is almost with terror that i, a representative of one of the two classes that are to fight this battle, raise my feeble voice in warning to the other members of my class.
to-day the author’s position is similar to that of helper, who wrote these words, save that it differs in one important particular. helper, though a southerner, was not a slave-holder. i am in every sense a member of the class to whom i write. i do not flatter myself that my words will have any more effect among mine own people than helper’s had among the people of the south, but fortunately my voice is but one of a hundred that are raised to-day to warn the leisure class of the rocks toward which it is drifting.
hinton rowan helper died but a little time ago. four years after the appearance100 of his book he saw the outbreak of the civil war. in the end of that war he saw the states of his beloved south bent like reeds in a storm, its armies overthrown, its fields laid waste, its homes destroyed, its cherished institutions gone forever. i wonder, as i write, whether it be possible in this age of civilization and advancement that i, too, am but a voice crying in the wilderness. will our capitalist class, like the old french monarchy, “learn nothing and forget nothing?”
many a time, while engaged in the manifold activities of social life, at a dinner or a ball, or amusing myself in the country, this question has come to me. i have wondered whether it is all really as it seems. here are gay hearts, merry voices, lives all brimming with laughter, young men and maidens all untouched by the101 sterner things of life, boys with their fortunes to inherit and high positions in life secured, débutantes with every problem solved for them, a formulated education leading to a formulated social routine, stately matrons born to rule their little social world, fine men and women of more ripened years, whose careers have led to what seemed a purposeful goal. it all seems happy and light-hearted, and yet there must be shadows, if these men and women are really men and women, and not mere thoughtless, heartless, brainless creatures. is it, again, “after us the deluge?”
again, i remember very well an occasion this past winter, when the same thought came to me. i was dining in one of the city hotels. music and laughter flooded the place as sunshine floods the fields.102 outwardly, the scene had all the appearance of perfect ease and happiness. looking around, i lighted by chance upon a table where a group of elderly people, all well known to me, were dining. they were people who live well, and who take a large part in the social world as well as in the world of business. i watched them as they talked. i noted an air of gravity, of seriousness, and i wondered what it was all about. a little later, as their table assumed the normal aspect, i went over and exchanged greetings with them. incidentally, i asked them what had made them so very serious throughout the evening.
one of them, an old friend of mine, told me. they had been discussing a statement that had appeared as a news item during the afternoon. it was part of a speech made in the senate at washington. it was103 an attack upon the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. it was really a veiled denunciation of the principle upon which society is founded. these men and women, all part and parcel of the social world, had spent most of their evening discussing that item of news.
a very few years ago such an episode as this would have been dismissed by almost any group of men and women who belonged to society, with hardly a single thought. somebody might have introduced the subject; somebody else would have abusively called the senator a demagogue, or an agitator, or a socialist—and the conversation would have drifted on into the latest sporting news or talk of somebody’s ball a month or so away. but now, the older men and women of society know better. they have learned, in fact, to104 distinguish real news from mere sensation. they know a statesman from a demagogue and facts from sensations.
i do not say that it is general, this tendency to take seriously the social, industrial, and economic questions of the day. in my own case, i do know that up to a very few years ago none of these problems bothered me very much. i know that very rarely did i hear the question raised as to the permanence of the conditions under which we lived within our social barriers. nobody, in my world, considered the problem of industry his own; and every one drifted onward through the years secure in the conviction that in the end everything was going to be all right.
to-day how different it is! to-day we are studying the sources of our wealth, finding out for ourselves the real price105 paid by humanity to give us the privileges of the social life which we and our fathers have enjoyed. excited by curiosity, we go down to inspect the mines our fathers left to us. we watch the men at work, mere pitiful animals, risking their lives in terrible endeavour for a meagre wage, that we, the heirs of time and of eternity, may take our leisure in the palaces of wealth. in the mills of pittsburg we watch the workers in iron and steel, toiling in the white hot blast of the furnaces that we, who never have toiled, may draw our dividends and spend them on the luxuries we love.
all around and about us are millions of active, industrious human beings. how can we, the rich, longer remain idle? is it possible that the heroism of the wealth-producing, life-preserving population of the world exerts no influence upon those who106 are not forced by circumstances to work? i know from my own experience that those who are worth while in the social and financial world have not only been influenced by the activity of the world’s workers, but i can positively state that mere pleasure-seeking idlers are disappearing so fast that it is a question of but a few years more before their extinction is complete.
but a very few years ago we would have visited the mines of scranton or the forges of pittsburg, and we would have looked upon the workers there with eyes of pity, perhaps, and we might have talked more or less glibly of the hardships of labour. yet it would not have been our problem. to-day we recognize the relationship between the labour that produces our wealth and the wealth which we enjoy.
“it is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. for with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. the day will come when in the state of new york a multitude of people, none of whom have had more than half a breakfast or expect to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen? on one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. on the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted ... to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. which of the two candidates is liable to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread?”
—lord macaulay, 1857.
