ASS NG
FREDERICK TOWNSEND
MARTIN
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THE PASSING OF THE IDLE RICH
/THE PASSING
OFT'HE IDLE RICH
BY
FREDERICK TOWNSEND MARTIN
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY. PAGE & COMPANY
1911
MVfl
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, IQII, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, igil, BY THE RJDGWAY COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAO*
I. THE KINGDOM OF SOCIETY .... 3
II. THE MADNESS OF EXTRAVAGANCE . 23
III. THE SUBJUGATION OF AMERICA ... 61
IV. WHO ARE THE SLAVES ? 89
V. THE AWAKENING OF SOCIETY . . . 109
VI. FOR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER . . . 133
VII. THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE . . . 153
VIII. FIGHTING FOR LIFE 169
IX. THE SOCIAL NEMESIS 197
X. THE DEATH-KNELL OF IDLENESS . . 219
XI. THE END OF THE STORY , 243
"The habits of our whole species fall into three
great classes useful labour, useless labour, and idle-
ness. Of these, the first only is meritorious, and to
it all the products of labour rightfully belong; but the
two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners
upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of its
just rights. The only remedy for this is to, so far
as possible, drive useless labour and idleness out of
existence. . . ."
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
Chapter One
THE KINGDOM OF SOCIETY
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 under-
stand as well as any man what are the true
traditions and the true conditions of Ameri-
can Society; and for comparison, I also know
and understand the conditions and tradi-
tions of Society in other lands. My hon-
est 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 of
[3]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 oli-
garchy; 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 foun-
dations 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 its
[4]
The Kingdom of Society
duties. Rather, I intend to dwell upon a
phase of its existence that does not tra-
ditionally belong to it, and that is not
normally a part of it. This phase or con-
dition 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 accord-
ing 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 one
[5]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 So-
ciety 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 Tenny-
son so well described in the happy phrase,
"slow broadening down from precedent
to precedent." We laugh at precedent.
[6]
The Kingdom of Society
We choose instead to tumble riotously
down from step to step of progress, mark-
ing swift epochs with every bump.
Naturally I am a conservative, and I de-
plore 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 tra-
ditions 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 explanation
[71
The Passing of the Idle Rich
in the structure of our social world, in the
rules that govern it, and in the habits, de-
plorable 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 con-
duct and personal honour, the same prin-
ciples 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 century
[8]
The Kingdom of Society
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 desper-
ately 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 manu-
facturing, 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 con-
[91
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ditions 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 concentra-
tion, but I will say this, that if one seek
at its best the individual factory, the sepa-
rate plant, the trade-mark that cannot
be bought, the personal name that never
can be submerged, he may go look in Eng-
land for them now and he will find them,
just as he would have found them a cen-
tury 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 combine
[10]
The Kingdom of Society
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 find-
ing, 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 in-
dustrial world one might almost say it. was
a process of twenty years merely a mo-
ment 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.
[HI
The Passing of the Idle Rich
We did not know we do not know yet
what the result is to be. There is no prece-
dent 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 indus-
trial 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 author-
ity 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 evolu-
tion is, after all, but a part of this same evo-
lution 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.
[12]
The Kingdom of Society
And if our banking system and our great
industrial system were born ID a day and
a night, what may one say of the plutoc-
racy 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 phe-
nomena 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 over-
The Passing of the Idle Rich
laid 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 vitaliz-
ing 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 Euro-
pean 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 posi-
[14]
The Kingdom of Society
live 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 great-
ness of our country, the power of our re-
ligious, 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 Haw-
thorne, we read Zola and Gorky; instead
[15J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
of Longfellow and Bryant, Ibsen and
Shaw. Among how many perfectly re-
spectable, 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 Eng-
[16]
The Kingdom of Society
land, to come to tardy life in the after-
glow of Elizabeth's triumphs, and reach
their fulness in the social glory of the
mid-Victorian era.
Less than half a century ago the aris-
tocracy 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 tra-
ditions 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
r
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 upon
[17J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 neces-
sary for carrying on his own business and
supplying the neighbouring country, he does
not, in North America, attempt to estab-
lish with it a manufacture for more dis-
tant 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 sub-
sistence which the country affords to artifi-
cers, can bribe him rather to work for
other people than for himself. He feels
that an artificer is the servant of his cus-
tomers, from whom he derives his sub-
sistence, but that a planter who cultivates
his own land, and derives his necessary sub-
sistence 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
[18]
The Kingdom of Society
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 fac-
tories 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 for-
tunes 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
[19]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
world. I know the facts that such satir-
ists 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 nos-
trils 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 pre-
vent it striking deeper, if I may.
[201
"The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren
woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous
community. "
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
Chapter Two
THE MADNESS OF EXTRAVAGANCE
I remember very well indeed that bitter
period of transition when first the ideal,
or lack of ideals, of the newer America
began to corrode the old society. I re-
member with what intense bitterness and
chagrin the early excesses of the earliest of
the idle rich were condoned by the leaders
of society in that day. At first the social
world fought hard for its traditions, and
the leaders of American Society of my
father's day were never reconciled to the
changes that came about in the body social.
In Boston and Philadelphia, to this day,
society maintains its battle against the
[231
The Passing of the Idle Rich
invader. Now, as then, society frowns
upon the idle men. Only recently one of
the leaders of Boston society quoted in the
course of a conversation with me that
powerful sentence from one of Mr. Roose-
velt's speeches:
"The wilfully idle man, like the wil-
fully barren woman, has no place in a
sane, healthy, vigorous community. "
That, after all, is as much a tradition
of true society as it is of the plains and the
fields. I do not yield to any man or any
class in America in my detestation of idle-
ness in man or woman. And I believe
that the traditions of real American society
support me in this attitude.
In spite of ourselves, we drifted into a
period in which idleness became the fashion.
We did not know just why the thing was
true; but we were forced to recognize its
[24]
The Madness of Extravagance
truth. Now, looking back rather than for-
ward over the past quarter of a century,
one may see quite clearly how it came about.
And I purpose, in the course of this book,
to write down, perhaps for the amusement
of my own contemporaries, perhaps for
the guidance of those who have not yet
begun to think about these matters, the
causes that gave us this plague of idleness.
First of all, however, I would merely
set down in a phrase the immediate cause of
it, and then proceed to sketch the phenom-
enon itself, that one may know the things
which are right. It was the magic of
gold; it was the poison of idle wealth. It
came at first like a little spot upon the body
of a man. Quickly it spread from limb
to limb, and part to part, until, in the ful-
ness of time, it was a leprosy, following
the body of society almost from head to
[25]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
foot. It was the curse of gold, no more,
no less the same condition that laid in the
dust the glory of Athens, that hurled to
ruin the splendour of Rome, that brought
upon Bourbon France the terror of the
Revolution.
Think, if you can, of the swift stages
through which we pass. Picture the solid,
conventional, Christian, and cleanly society
of New York immediately after the Civil
War. To think of it now, even as I learned
it by hearsay, very likely, brings me a
feeling of personal regret, as though I
had lost a fine old friend. Picture, then,
the beginning of a revolution, small, in-
consequent yet, to the most discerning,
portentous of evil and pregnant of disaster.
A few young men, sons of society, set up
new idols in the ancient temples. They
began to ape the habits and to imitate
[26]
The Madness of Extravagance
the morals of that world which, while
possessing wealth in plenty, had never
possessed the refinement or the ethical
standards of true society.
It is a melancholy fact that the impetus
toward extravagance, excess, debauchery,
and shamelessness came to us from the
under-world.
For always, in every country, just out-
side the gates, there lives a people peculiar
to itself. They have wealth equal, per-
haps, to that of any in the social world.
They have education, it may be, of the
finest. They have desires, just as all
men have. They have instincts, it may
be, little better or little worse than those
of the best in the land. The gates are
shut against them for reasons that, to those
inside, seem quite sufficient. It may be
vulgarity; it may be immorality; it may be
[27]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
mere gaucherie of manners; it may be lack of
education; or it may be any one of a dozen
other reasons that puts them beyond the
pale. Whatever may be the reason, the fact
remains that they are beyond the pale.
In this class of society, always, in all
races, morals, and manners tend to excesses.
They are not restrained by sane conven-
tions and laws that regulate society; nor
are they held in the leash of respectability
or in the chains of religion or of honour,
as are the sturdy men and women of the
so-called middle class. Constantly they
are in rebellion against these laws and these
traditions. Ever they are prone to sub-
stitute license for liberty, to plunge into
immorality, to draw upon the stage in its
worst moods for their passions and their
pleasures, and to practise in their lives the
vices of the decadent nations.
[28]
The Madness of Extravagance
In this stage of our social life of which I
write, the manners, the morals, and the
practices of this social class crept into even
that small section of society which calls
itself "the Upper Class." The young
men and unhappily the young women
of the finest families in our great cities began
to copy the vices and to imitate the man-
ners of this other class, and to plunge into
the same excesses that marked its manner
of life.
There is a vast difference between the
healthy, wholesome spending of money
for amusements, pleasures, and recreations
and the feverish searching for some
new sensation that can be had only
at a tremendous cost. The simple ex-
penditure of money, even in startling
amounts, eventually fails to produce the
thrill that it ought to have, and when the
[29]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
man or woman of fortune, with little
to think of but the constant hunt for
amusement and novelty, begins to suffer
from continuous ennui, the result is fre-
quently amazing and sometimes sickening.
A wearied, bored group of men arranged
a dinner. They had been attending din-
ners until such functions had lost interest
for them. Similarly their friends were
wearied by the conventional dinner of the
time. Why not prepare a meal, the like of
which had never been before? Why not
amuse society and astonish the part of the
community that is outside of society? They
did so. The dinner was served on horse-
back on the upper floor of a fashionable
New York resort, the name of which is
known from coast to coast; the guests were
attired in riding habits; the handsomely
groomed horses pranced and clattered
[30]
The Madness of Extravagance
about the magnificent dining-room, each
bearing, besides its rider, a miniature table.
The hoofs of the animals were covered with
soft rubber pads to save the waxed floor
from destruction. At midnight a reporter
for an active and sensational morning news-
paper ran across the choice bit of mews.
He telephoned the information to his city
editor and the reply of that moulder of
opinion was brief and to the point.
:< You're lying to me," said the editor.
The most sensational paper in town re-
fused to believe its reporter, who attempted
later on to reach the scene of the event, but
was repulsed and driven away.
"How much did it cost?" the public
inquired interestedly. The man who paid
the bill knew. The public and its news-
papers guessed, their estimates running
from ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars.
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
The fond owner of a diminutive black-
and-tan dog gave a banquet in honour of
the animal. The dog was worth, perhaps,
fifty dollars. The festivities were very
gay. The man's friends came to his din-
ner in droves, the men in evening clothes
and the women bedecked in shimmering
silks and flashing jewels. In the midst
of the dinner, the man formally decorated
his dog with a diamond collar worth fifteen
thousand dollars. It contained seven hun-
dred small brilliants, varying in weight from
one sixth to one carat. The guests shouted
their approval, and the dinner was regarded
as a huge success.
The leader of a wealthy clique in a
Western city was struck with a unique
idea. He was tired of spending money.
There was nothing new for which to spend
it. He gave a "poverty social. " The thirty
[32]
The Madness of Extravagance
guests came to his palatial home in rags and
tatters. Scraps of food were served on
wooden plates. The diners sat about on
broken soap boxes, buckets, and coal-
hods. Newspapers, dust cloths, and old
skirts were used as napkins, and beer was
served in a rusty tin can, instead of the
conventional champagne. They played
being poor for one night, and not one of
them but joined in ecstatic praise of their
host and his unusual ability to provide
a sensation.
A bored individual with a fondness for
gems covered as much of his person as
possible with diamonds. When he walked
abroad, he flashed and sparkled in the sun-
light. He, also, became the possessor of
a happy inspiration. He went to his
dentist and had little holes bored in his
teeth, into which the tooth expert inserted
[33]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
twin rows of diamonds. He had found
another way of spending money.
A Southern millionaire purchased an
imported motor car. It cost him twelve
thousand dollars when it came off the ship.
He looked at it in scorn and called in
decorators. The car was refitted completely.
It was equipped with two diminutive rooms,
a living apartment, and a sleeping room.
Hot and cold water fixtures were put in
and space was found for a small bath-tub.
A kitchen with a full equipment of cooking
utensils was added, and, when the various
tradesmen and mechanics completed their
work, the car resembled a complete and
luxuriously furnished home on wheels.
The original cost of twelve thousand dollars
had been brought up to thirty thousand
and the owner was temporarily contented.
Very young and very wealthy was the
[341
The Madness of Extravagance
young man whose attentions to an embry-
onic actress amused a community a few
years back. It was the young man's opinion
that he was desperately in love with the
lady, who in later years married a publisher
of songs. The millionaire youngster show-
ered the girl with gifts. He gave her rings,
bracelets, necklaces, and diamond-studded
combs for her black tresses until she
glistened from head to foot. The very
buttons of her gloves were diamonds and
her shoes were fastened with monster
pearls. The question of taste never en-
tered into the situation. It was simply
the spending of money and the bedecking
of a coarse, but crafty, stage girl. In
three years, she succeeded in throwing
away almost a million dollars for the de-
luded youngster, at the end of which time
they parted.
[351
The Passing of the Idle Rich
At the conclusion of an elaborate affair
in New York City, the guests leaned back
in their chairs to listen to the singers. The
cigarettes were passed around. Oddly
enough, the banquet had not been marked
until that moment, and, as the host was
famous for the unusualness of his dinners,
many of the diners were disappointed.
Their disappointment gave way to admira-
tion. Each cigarette was rolled, not in white
paper, but in a one hundred dollar bill
and the initials of the host were engraved
in gold letters. This strange conceit was
applauded until the voices of the singers
struggled amid the uproar.
A member of the idle rich rumbled along
a Jersey highway in his motor car. He
approached an excavation where workmen
were manoeuvring cranes and hoists. At
the side of the road lay a dying horse.
[36]
The Madness of Extravagance
It had_fallen into a hole and two of its legs
were broken. The workmen were waiting
for the arrival of a policeman to put the
suffering animal to death.
"I'll save that horse," decided the
wealthy motorist. His decision was simply
an idle whim. When the policeman came,
the motorist had already bought the use-
less horse for a ten dollar bill. He pro-
cured an ambulance and had the animal
removed to his own stable. He summoned
the foremost veterinarians in New York
and the crippled work horse was patched
up. For weeks it hung suspended in a sling
and finally the broken bones knitted and
the horse hobbled about. The veterinarians
demanded five thousand dollars for their
work and were paid without complaint.
In his stoutest days, the saved horse was
worth no more than a hundred dollars.
[37]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
A well known metropolitan spender has
an annual bill of some ten thousand "dol-
lars for shoes alone. His order stands
in every manufactory in America and
Europe. Whenever a new style of men's
shoes is designed, a sample pair is imme-
diately shipped to him. He cannot possibly
wear a tenth of the shoes sent to him, but
he has the satisfying knowledge that he
is never behind the style.
The wife of a Western man owns a
pet monkey. The little beast lives in a
private room and is constantly attended
by a valet. It rides abroad behind its
private trotter, has its own outfit of clothes,
its dining table, and a bed made of solid
ivory, tipped with gold ornaments. All
told, perhaps a dozen human beings minis-
ter to the comfort of the little simian and
the mistress cheerfully pays from ten to
[38]
The Madness of Extravagance
fifteen thousand dollars yearly on this one
extravagance. She became dissatisfied
with the dining service in the monkey-
room of her home, and her pet now eats
its meals off solid silver plates.
At a dinner party given by a notorious
millionaire, each guest discovered in one of
his oysters a magnificent black pearl.
It was a fitting prelude to a sumptuous
banquet and it contained an element of
surprise. It was said that the dinner
cost the giver twenty thousand dollars.
A party of engineers were studying the
country in a Southern state with an eye
to a future railroad. Accompanying them
was a tired young man of wealth, who ha,d
little interest in what they were doing,
and who had gone with them in search
of possible amusement. He found it. The
party discovered an aged family of primi-
[39]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
live negroes living in a wretched hovel
on the edge of a swamp. The millionaire
was struck by the utter desolation of the
house and its occupants. It occurred to
him that he might find it interesting to
aid the darkeys. He parted company
with the engineers, and, with a single
friend, he gave himself over to bettering
the condition of the coloured family. Car-
penters appeared from New Orleans. Ma-
terials were dragged through the country
behind mules. Decorations were shipped
from New York. The tottering shack
came down and a splendid country bunga-
low was reared in its place. The interior
was furnished with a lavish hand and with
a total disregard for expense. White pil-
lars supported the roof. Old-fashioned
fireplaces were built into the walls and plate-
glass windows were set into the doors.
[40]
The Madness of Extravagance
The floors were paved with concrete, and
a handsome bath room was fitted up for
the amazed and awe-stricken family.
When he had finished the home, the young
man turned his attention to its inmates.
He bought them clothes such clothes
as they had never before dreamed of. He
provided them with toilet articles and tri-
fling luxuries, and, before he went away,
he supplied the larder with enough food
to last a year. That negro family is still
the talk of the entire state in which it
lives and its members regard what has
happened as a manifestation from on high.
The young man in search of interesting
occupation parted from twenty thousand
of his innumerable dollars and probably
thinks of the whole affair with satisfaction.
An Italian savant and student has visit-
ed America. He has set down his opinions
[41]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
and some of them are interesting. He
finds, for instance, that the wife of one of
our foremost millionaires wears a necklace
that cost more than six hundred thousand
dollars. The infant son of this favoured
lady reposed, during his tenderer years, in
a cradle that was valued at ten thousand
dollars and immediately following the birth
of the boy an event that was flashed by
telegraph to the furthest corners of the
earth a retinue of servants was formed
for the sole benefit of the infant. This
corps of retainers consisted of four nurse
ladies, four high-priced physicians, who
examined the child four times a day,
and posted serious bulletins for the infor-
mation of the clamant press and public.
Another child came to another family,
and Fifth Avenue trotted past the birth-
place with bated breath and curious eyes.
[42]
The Madness of Extravagance
When the boy came to that stage of his
development wherein the salutary bottle
could be dispensed with, he was clothed
in dignity and provided with a staff of
personal attendants consisting of two able
cooks, six grooms, three coachmen, two
valets, and one governess. He grew in
health and strength and to-day he manages
a railway with acumen and success.
A gentleman of improvident habits and
few dollars packed his meagre belongings
in a hand bag and departed for the West.
Subsequently, he achieved fortune and
fame and came into possession of a gold
mine, the ledges of which soon placed his
name high in the ranks of America's mil-
lionaires. Overcome by gratitude, he gave
a commemorative dinner party in the
sombre depths of the kindly mine. The
space devoted to the festivities was forty
[43]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
feet wide and seventy feet long. One
hundred guests assembled in the bowels
of the mine and sat down to a sumptuous
feast. The waiters were clad in imitation
of miners. They hovered about attentively
with oil lamps flaring from their foreheads.
Picks and shovels decorated the uneven
walls, and the various courses were lowered
from the mouth of the mine in the faith-
ful cage that had carried up to the grate-
ful millionaire his many dollars. A band
discoursed sweet music and the bill was
some fourteen thousand dollars.
A man of common name, but of uncom-
mon wealth, decided to have a home in
New York City. He purchased the palace
of a friend who had died and paid for it
two million dollars, which was popularly
supposed to be one half the original cost
of the pile. On his garden, to make space
[44]
The Madness of Extravagance
for which he tore down a building that had
cost a hundred thousand, the new owner
spent five hundred thousand dollars. His
bedstead is of carved ivory and ebony,
inlaid with gold. It cost two hundred
thousand dollars. The walls are richly
carved and decorated with enamel and
gold; they cost sixty-five thousand dollars.
On the ceiling, the happy millionaire ex-
pended twenty thousand in carvings, enam-
els, and gold, and ten pairs of filmy cur-
tains, costing two thousand a pair, wave
in the morning breeze. The wardrobe
in this famous bedroom represents an out-
lay of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and the dressing table sixty-five
thousand. The wash stand cost thirty-
eight thousand, and the bed hangings,
fifty dollars a yard. The chimney-piece
and overhanging mantel threw into gen-
[451
The Passing of the Idle Rich
eral circulation eight thousand more,
and the four doors consumed another ten
thousand.
A wealthy lover of music paid the highest
price ever recorded for a piano. It was
no ordinary piano. Its price was fifty
thousand dollars. For a single painting
a Westerner paid fifty-five thousand dollars.
Another collector, whose name is known
in the humblest homes, expended fifty
thousand dollars for a silver trinket only
four inches high.
An enthusiastic American happened to
live in London at the time the North Pole
was discovered. For an indefinite period
of time the North Pole was seemingly
discovered by two Americans. That con-
troversy is ended and dead, but the memory
of the dinner given in London by the proud
American will live for many years. Thirty
[461
The Madness of Extravagance
guests accepted the invitations, and, upon
entering the home of their host, found
themselves in a barren and icy waste.
The prow of an ice-bound ship protruded
from one side of the wall. Pale electric
lights flashed coldly from a score of points.
Icebergs towered above the dinner table,
surmounted by polar bears. In the centre
of the room was a huge oval table to repre-
sent a solid block of ice and thereon the
brilliant feast was served. The waiters
moved about noiselessly in the costumes of
Eskimos, hooded in the skins of animals
and clad in the white fur of polar bears.
The dinner was a tremendous success.
It cost the American ten thousand dollars
and not one word of criticism was passed,
except by the suffering waiters in their
heavy furs on a warm mid-summer day.
A wealthy mining man wagered upon
[47]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
the outcome of an election and lost. He
proceeded to pay his bet by giving a din-
ner in his stables. Thirty-five guests ap-
peared and prepared to enjoy themselves
to the fullest. The table was arranged
in the shape of a horseshoe, and the
waiters were jockeys in silken jackets and
long peak caps. During the enthusiastic
scenes that followed, the favourite horse
of the host was admitted to the banquet
room from his near-by box stall and di-
verted the guests by eating the flowers,
with which the banquet table was heavily
laden, and by drinking champagne from
the punch-bowl. Tiny Shetland ponies
trotted and pranced about the diners
and the favourite steed became mildly
intoxicated from the champagne and was
ridden about the room by hilarious men.
The entire dinner was the exact opposite
[48]
The Madness of Extravagance
of monotony. It cost the loser of the bet
twelve thousand dollars.
A famous ten thousand dollar dinner
was given in the heart of the tired old
metropolis. The table was laid out as
an oval and over its smooth surface costly
flowers were spread in deep layers. In the
centre was a lake of limpid water, sus-
pended from the ceiling by gold wire net-
work. Four white swans swam about dur-
ing the progress of the banquet. From
various rings in the ceiling hung golden
cages containing rare song birds that twit-
tered incessantly and the guests ate fruit
from the branches of dwarf trees especially
provided and at a cost that might seem
staggering to the commonplace man of
little wealth.
In Paris, a voluntarily exiled millionaire
provided a dinner for twenty-two of his
[49]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
intimate friends. For each guest was a
private carriage with a team of splendid
horses, and when the fortunate diners
arrived in state, each found before him a
whole leg of mutton, a whole salmon, an
entire fowl, a basket of assorted fruits,
and several bottles of wine. A mysterious
bag made its appearance toward the close
of the feast and each diner was invited to
explore it for a keepsake. The souvenirs
consisted of pearl studs, emerald links,
cigarette cases of solid gold, inlaid with
jewels, diamond rings, and other trifles.
Thirty thousand dollars went into the
pockets of the Parisian shopkeepers from
this single dinner.
In searching for an unusual manner to
spend a large sum of money upon a single ob-
ject, a man of wealth selected a beautiful pair
of opera glasses. They were made of solid
[501
The Madness of Extravagance
gold and the lenses were perfect. The cost
was seventy-five thousand dollars, princi-
pally because of a lyre which surmounted
the top, and which was encrusted with dia-
monds and sapphires. Without the embel-
lishments, glasses of equal worth may be
purchased in any shop for twenty dollars.
What was at the time designated as a
tame waste of wealth, drunkenness without
conviviality, the amusement of dull and
unintelligent society, was a seventy-five
thousand dollar feast given a few years
ago. Monkeys sat between the guests
and ducks swam about in pools contained
in ivory fountains. An entire theat-
rical company journeyed from New
York to provide entertainment for the
favoured guests.
One of the most prominent band-masters
in America was summoned by telegraph
[511
The Passing of the Idle Rich
to gather an orchestra of forty pieces.
The command came from a woman of vast
wealth in whose service the man of music
had often laboured. A child had been
born to her. She desired to have the
occasion fittingly celebrated, and the dili-
gent leader hurried home from the midst of
a vacation, selected an orchestra, rehearsed,
and eventually serenaded the new-come
bit of humanity.
The "freak" dinner takes on many
forms. One of the most unusual of this
sort was given by a South African mil-
lionaire whose wealth had come from the
diamond mines at Kimberly. The dinner
was given amidst scenes of the Kimberly
diggings. Beautiful birds flew about, and
a hidden band wafted soft strains upon
the assembled guests. Huge quartz blocks
surrounded the table and formed the walls.
[52]
The Madness of Extravagance
The floor was inch deep with sand, and
a monster tent raised its head in the centre
of the space. On the wash stand was a
rough board on which were scrawled the
words: "Wash your hands before sitting
down to eat. " It was all very amusing and
undoubtedly unique. Veldt carts rumbled
back and forth, pickaxes hung suspended
from silken cords, and bags of genuine
gold-dust, lay scattered about. Turtle
soup was served from a cauldron, and
two armed Boers paced up and down
as sentinels. The dinner cost twenty
thousand dollars.
In Boston a man of gold fell ill. From
his waist down, he became nerveless and
helpless. The time hung heavily on his
hands as he lay in a hospital bed, and he
determined to provide adequate amuse-
ment. His bed was removed to the largest
[53]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
room in the hospital. An entire 'musical
comedy company was transported from
New York City and a popular production
of the day was performed for the benefit
of the invalid. It cost him three thousand
five hundred dollars, and it was probably
worth it.
In Pittsburg, workmen went about their
task mysteriously. They were construct-
ing a great glass tank. For five days they
laboured and finally the affair was completed.
It was taken into the banquet room of a
hotel and filled with water. A dinner was
to be given by the officials of a corpo-
ration. As the hours wore on, the diners
waxed enthusiastic and happy. The
more important and dignified officials
of the corporation left. They probably
knew what was coming and desired
to be absent in view of possible news-
[54]
The Madness of Extravagance
paper investigation. Then came the solu-
tion of the mystery. A human gold fish
swam about in the tank a shapely girl,
clad in golden spangles and scales. The
dinner was very expensive. Those who
attended the banquet afterward declined
to discuss it with the reporters when ques-
tioned about the human gold fish.
Another celebrated dinner that repre-
sented the effort of a wealthy man to vary
the monotony of life and to provide a
unique outlet for his money was the feast
that culminated in the appearance of the
girl in the pie. A monster pie was carried
before the astounded diners upon the
shoulders of four servants. The top crust
was cut open. A slip of a girl bounded
to her feet. A score of birds was released
at the same moment.
In Los Angeles the son of a millionaire
[55]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
mine owner felt the time hanging heavily
upon his hands. He wandered down to
where the trains rumbled in and out of the
station, and an idea possessed him. He
ordered a special train of five coaches and
informed his friends. Those who cared to
go accompanied the young squanderer.
For fifty thousand dollars the railway
company, which cares little about human
emotions or desires, offered to take the
young man to New York. Train despatch-
ers cleared the rails. Switches were nailed
fast. The young man and his special
train were shot across the continent like
a flying star. He was buying a fresh ex-
perience at a price that in all probability
suited him.
A Nebraska individual is the proud
owner of a hat that is made of greenbacks.
It is rather a costly hat, as twenty thousand
[56]
The Madness of Extravagance
dollars in bills was used in making it.
It weighs twenty ounces and it looks ex-
actly like the white hats worn by gentlemen.
A young Croesus grew fond of a lady
fair and sought to display a mark of his
affection in some extraordinary manner.
He commissioned eight of the foremost
artists in America to paint a fan. The
cost was one hundred thousand dollars.
For five years skilled artisans have been
carving a tombstone. The man who or-
dered the tombstone is still living, but the
tombstone is vast in bulk, and the carvers
have plenty of space to display their
ingenuity. It is the order of the patron
that work shall not cease until he is dead,
and each year he sends the monument
company a check for fifteen thousand
dollars to cover running expenses. If the
gentleman lives long enough, his tombstone
[57]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
will be a spectacle worth seeing when it
is finally bundled into place over his casket.
One of the most lavish and expensive
probably the most expensive dinners
ever given in America was a hyphenated
feast, the record of which is writ large
upon the annals of metropolitan society.
It endured for six hours and cost fourteen
thousand dollars per hour.
But why enumerate any more of these
instances? Our papers are full of them.
My purpose, however, is larger than gossip
and I shall mention other pieces of extrav-
agance wherever they make a point.
[58]
"No men living are more worthy to be trusted than
those who toil up from poverty none less inclined
to take or touch what they have not honestly earned.
Let them beware of surrendering a political power
which they already possess, and which, if surrendered,
will surely be used to close the door of advancement
against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and
burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost. "
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
Chapter Three
THE SUBJUGATION OF AMERICA
In the golden days of American Society,
as I have said, great fortunes were very
rare indeed. The few that there were
came mostly from merchandising and trade.
The accumulations of John Jacob Astor,
John Hancock, and Stephen Girard, in
New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, re-
spectively, had not been dwarfed by the
accumulations of a later era. They re-
mained, up to about 1850, as the typical
marvels of the American world of business.
The middle of last century was the
harvest time of Opportunity in this land.
Agriculture and trade remained the staple
[61]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
occupations of the race; yet there had
grown up throughout the land a wonderful
manufacturing industry. Away back in
the days of the embargo, a man named
Samuel Slater had come over from England
and built, from memory, the first Ameri-
can cotton mill. He little knew what seeds
he sowed. That little mill set up in Rhode
Island was the mother of American
industry.
It had grown, this infant, until in every
valley of the East there stood factories
and mills uncounted. Turning from the
little iron mines of New Jersey, the pioneers
of our greatest industry had begun to
open up the hills of Pennsylvania and
even Michigan. In that age, which has
been called the golden age of industry,
fortune followed swiftly upon the heels of
honest labour.
[62]
The Subjugation of America
Always, it was free, democratic, inde-
pendent, this march of the manufacturers.
A hundred men manufactured cotton cloths
in one small area of New England. No
one of them would have listened to the
call of combination. They worked out
their own destinies, took their own profits,
built up their own plants from very small
to very large. In the twenty years from
1840 to 1860 the independent American
manufacturer became the true American
type. In 1850, for the first time, the prod-
ucts of industry surpassed in value the
products of agriculture. America came
into its destiny.
Often have I heard this tale of the
making of America; and I can trace, by
hearsay, the evolution of the mighty in-
dustrial enterprises of to-day from the
puny beginnings of the days of Franklin.
[631
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Then, in our nation's youth, manufacturing
was carried on in the home, by household
industry. In the homes of New England
men spun and wove the cotton; or beat
the stubborn iron implements of agricul-
ture. Long the battle of industry was
fought along these lines.
Then came the change, when, after the
War of 1812, the English manufacturers,
armed with new industrial machinery,
flooded the United States with manu-
factured goods. In self-defence America
took to its arms the hated factory system,
realizing that here and here alone lay its
industrial salvation. Instead of the scat-
tered household manufacturing, the country
developed the gathering and working of all
sorts and conditions of manufacturing under
one roof. Instead of piece work, paid for as
delivered, men began to work for wages.
[64]
The Subjugation of America
How strange, in this day, sounds the
warning of Franklin in our ears! At the
risk of being tiresome, let me quote a para-
graph from his writings :
A people spread through the whole
tract of country on this side of the Missis-
sippi, and secured by Canada in our hands,
would probably for some centuries find
employment in agriculture, and thereby
free us at home effectually from our fears
of American manufactures. Unprejudiced
men well know that all the penal and
prohibitory laws that ever were thought
of will not be sufficient to prevent manu-
factures in a country whose inhabitants
surpass the number that can subsist by
the husbandry of it. That this will be
the case in America soon, if our people
remain confined within the mountains,
and almost as soon should it be unsafe
for them to live beyond, though the coun-
try be ceded to us, no man acquainted
with political and commercial history can
doubt. It is the multitude of poor with-
out land in a country, and who must work
for others at low wages or starve, that
enables undertakers to carry on a manu-
[65]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
f acture, and afford it cheap enough to pre-
vent the importation of its own exportation.
But no man who can have a piece of land
of his own, sufficient by his labour to sub-
sist his family in plenty, is poor enough to
be a manufacturer, and work for a master.
Hence while there is land enough in Amer-
ica for our people, there can never be
manufactures in any amount or value.
Writings of Benjamin Franklin: Smith
Ed. Vol. IV, pp. 48-49.
This was written in 1761 just a
century before the Civil War! What a
transition to our day and we have but
begun ! In the days of Franklin, according
to our best authorities, less than one out
of eight of the population depended for
a living on manufacturing, trade, transpor-
tation, and fisheries. As early as 1851,
it was one out of five. The character of
the nation had undergone a complete
and sweeping change.
Yet, let me repeat, the American in-
[66]
The Subjugation of America
dustrialist of that day was not the serf
he is to-day. In every sense, he was a
free and independent man. True, he had
been forced to leave the household plan
for the factory plan; but yet he managed
without any trouble to keep the spirit
of individualism and independence thor-
oughly alive. Industry, in the middle of the
last century, was carried on in this country
in scattered individual plants, each one
a little independent republic of its own.
The owners generally worked in the fac-
tory and the mill. Half a dozen partners,
perhaps, laboured side by side with the
men in their employ. Men stepped swiftly
from the position of wage workers to the
independence of ownership. The doors of
individual opportunity stood wide open.
I would, if I dared risk tiring the reader
with extended comment upon subject mat-
[67]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ter that has been handled often much
better than I can handle it, dwell upon
this happy phase of the making of America.
For it is germane to my subject. And
then, again, it is gone from us forever
gone with the happy simplicity and in-
nocence of the youth of our nation. In
its stead there has come upon us an age
of industrial terror, of fierce, abnormal
struggle for expansion and wealth beyond
the dreams of the fathers.
Often, as the years have passed, I have
heard older men talk with affection of
the "good old days." I put it down to
the failing memory of man, which forgets
all that is ugly and repugnant, and re-
members best the beautiful. When men
in society spoke of the past, they seemed
to me to be ignoring the many advantages
of the present. As time has fled, however,
[68]
The Subjugation of America
I come to realize that they spoke truly.
They were thinking of this "golden age,"
this high mid-day of our industrial history.
They were thinking of the free American,
son of the soil, of the factory, as you will,
yet free, independent, unafraid. They
were thinking of a nation that did not
tolerate tyranny, political or industrial,
within its borders. They were thinking
of that rich America where no man dwelt
in poverty. They were thinking of the
utter astonishment with which European
travellers noted in our cities the absolute
lack of beggars, of want, of hunger, and
of cold. They were thinking of that happy
day, now dead and gone, when evenly
and justly the reward of labour fell upon
the people, scattered far and wide and
sufficiently, like the dew that falls at night
upon the fields.
[69]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Perhaps you think that Society, as such,
cares little about these things. You are
eternally wrong. Society is a group of
men and women and children. The best
of the men and the best of the women think
deeply, as the best of men and women think
deeply everywhere. Because it is edu-
cated, and because it, too, is engaged in
an eternal fight for life, Society, perhaps,
studies these matters more zealously and
more accurately than the rest of the world
that makes a nation.
The leaders of the social world in the
middle of the last century saw as clearly
as any one the tendencies of the time, and
recognized as fully as any one the bearing
of the conditions of labour and capital
upon the purely social problems. They
knew that because wealth was evenly
distributed as it flowed from the mine,
[70]
The Subjugation of America
the forest, and the field, Society had nothing
to fear. They knew, too, that, when the
division of wealth began to be uneven,
danger to the social world began. The
lesson of the French Revolution was better
understood in those days than it is to-day
in high Society because high Society
in those days had, at least, read Carlyle
or Junius; while to-day it reads little more
than the Sunday editions of the newspapers.
Very few, in that time, were the new
recruits in the army of Society. The old
laws still lived. The ancient families of
New York, Boston, and Philadelphia still
held sway. The leader of the social world
could afford to speak of her father and her
grandfather and even, in some cases, of her
great-grandfather, without treading on dan-
gerous ground. The subtle barriers of
caste, flimsy as they always are in a new
[71]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
country, had yet withstood all the puny
assaults to which they had been exposed.
Happy, indeed, was Society; and happy,
too, were the people of the country. Yet
the poison was even then at work within
their veins. Already, here and there, rich
men were selling out of industry, taking
their mighty profits, and moving away
from the industrial cities and towns into
the great social and business centres.
There is no social index to record the exo-
dus; but one may note, here and there, in
government reports of the time, strange
facts that to-day are all too clear in their
meaning.
In the year 1840, at the beginning of
this golden period of national happiness
and prosperity, there were in this country
1,240 cotton manufacturing plants, with
a combined gross output of $46,000,000
[72]
The Subjugation of America
worth of goods. Each plant made $37,000
worth of goods. Twenty years later, the
number of plants was 1,091, and the out-
put was $115,000,000.
Our fathers saw these figures; but it is
not on record that any man, at that time,
saw their true meaning. It was simply,
to their minds, the working out of the
factory system to its completion. It meant
economy. It was part of the same sys-
tem that had reduced the cost of making
a yard of broadcloth from fifty cents in
1823 to fifteen cents in 1840.
They could not, naturally, see in it, as
we can, the seeds of a revolution that was
to make over again the America of that
day, to drag the boasted freedom of
America in the mire of poverty, to pros-
titute our political system, to tear and
wreck and sweep away the sacred barriers
[73]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
of Society. It was, in truth, the hand-
writing on the wall, but America lacked
a prophet. If, indeed, there had been such
a one, his warning would have been in
vain. For evolution is inexorable; and
the nation, high and low, rich and poor,
poverty and Society all are but its
creatures, brought into life by it, buried
at its command.
Let me hurry on to sketch the progress
of this wonderful change that was to found
in America two great new classes, the Idle
Rich and the Slaves of Industry.
I have compiled a table from the cen-
sus reports, dealing with textile industries
alone, because that branch of manufactur-
ing was the oldest and one of the greatest,
as it is to-day, and because it illustrates
perhaps better than any other the progress
of principles, rather than the influence of
[74]
The Subjugation of America
special causes, particularly through this
twenty-year period of which I am writing:
TEXTILE INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES
Average Av. No. of
Year No. Capital Employes Product Average
1860 8027 50,000 65 75,500
1870 4790 62,500 57 108,600
1880 4018 103.000 96 144,000
In these few figures all the industrial
history of that great period may be found
epitomized. The number of plants, in-
stead of increasing as the volume of demand
for products increased, was contracted.
The leadership of the trade, and, therefore,
the making of prices, was taken by the
houses of larger capital. The average
capital employed in the trade doubled in
the twenty years. The output also doubled
for the average factory. The number of
employes, on the other hand, increased
but hah*. Better machinery, more effi-
cient control over the workers, more drastic
industrial discipline, fiercer industrial com-
[75]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
petition for individual work, did their
destiny-appointed task.
Here one begins to see on this broad
canvas, but faint in outline, the tracing of
the picture of America to-day. The chains
began to tighten. Men who had grown
to comfortable wealth in the long period
of small factories, scattered industries,
and free and easy industrial democracy,
began to gather together into industrial
groups. Little industries were rolled to-
gether into big industries. The capital
of the factory expanded, doubling, on an
average, in the decade. At the same time,
by more intense methods of carrying on the
trades, the number of employes needed
to produce a given value of products was
cut down.
Let me turn, for a moment, to introduce
a slight record of that industry which has
[76]
The Subjugation of America
done more, perhaps, than any other to
bring about the creation of the class of
whom I write the idle rich. I have not
dwelt upon it in the beginnings of American
industry, for it was scarcely existent. I
refer to the iron and steel industry.
In 1860 there were in this country only
402 plants manufacturing wrought, forged,
and rolled iron. They used an average
of $58,000 of capital apiece, produced
products worth $9 1,000 each, and employed
an average of 55 men. In 1880 twenty
years there were 1,005 such plants, with
an average capital of $23,000, average
products of $296,005, and an average roll
of 121 men. Here the evolution of an
industry from the small, scattered plants
to the concentrated, efficient, and powerful
"combine" is unmistakable.
To summarize: In this twenty-year pe-
[77]
The Passing of the Idle Rick
riod, the value of products trebled, while
the number of workers doubled. The
wealth-producing capacity of each worker
increased from $1,438 to $2,015.
If the tendency toward monopoly was
striking in the twenty years from 1860 to
1880, what may one say of the twenty years
that followed? In the iron and steel trade,
the 699 plants of 1880, with an average
production of $419,000 each, became 668
with an average production of $1,203,500
in 1900. The average number of employes
per plant rose from 197 to 333. In the
cotton mills, the average number of em-
ployes in each mill rose during the same
period from 287 to 1,185.
Here is the birthplace of the idle rich.
Hundreds of men who had owned small
manufacturing plants sold them out at
good profits in the first ten years of this
[781
The Subjugation of America
era and retired to live on the proceeds.
Men who, twenty years before, had built
their puny mills on river banks and rapidly
developed them into great wealth-produc-
ing plants by natural growth, then turned
them over to the trusts and combinations
at prices that would have staggered the
imagination of the fathers of the industry.
The firm gave way to the corporation.
Industries that had been for generations
family affairs were suddenly capitalized
in the form of stocks and bonds, and the
owners retired from the active business,
hiring skilled men to carry on the work.
They themselves sat down in comfort
and ease and luxury to draw their sus-
tenance from interest and dividends on
the securities that represented the plants.
Into the mighty cities of the East there
moved an ever-growing army of those who
[79]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
had gathered, from the mines of Califor-
nia, from the forges of Pittsburg, from the
forests of Michigan, from the metalled
mountains of Montana, wealth beyond the
dreams of Midas. They had capitalized
the products of their own labour, and
brought with them the tangible evidences
of wealth in the shape of stocks and bonds.
I remember very well the first great march
of the suddenly rich upon the social capi-
tals of the nation. Very distinctly it comes
back to me with what a shock the fact
came home to the sons and daughters
of what was pleased to call itself the aris-
tocracy of America that here marched an
army better provisioned, better armed
with wealth, than any other army that
had ever assaulted the citadels of Society.
The effect of these immigrations from
the fields of labour to the cities of capital
[80]
The Subjugation of America
I shall sketch more fully in another chap-
ter. I would now, instead, touch upon
the conditions that they left behind them,
the conditions that made possible their
own retirement from actual labour to the
ease and comfort of luxurious leisure.
It is not too much to say that they left
behind them a people reduced to industrial
slavery. Gone forever was the free America
our fathers knew. Faded into history
was the ideal of Washington and Jefferson
and Lincoln. From the year 1890 onward
the progress of the United States has been
the fearful march of manufacturing in-
dustry. In that year the products of
industry and agricultural wealth were
about equal. Ten years later the products
of industry were two to one against the
wealth gathered from the fields.
Side by side with this conquest of Amer-
[81]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ica went the growth of tenant farming,
as against the old free tenure farming that
had marched steadily into the farthest
untilled corners of the land so long as land
was free. To-day there is no free land
within the borders of the nation, save for
a few small tracts hardly worth mentioning.
Here, as in the industries, capital did not
hesitate to claim and capture all that
it dared. Law after law was passed to
prevent the centralization of the power of
exploiters over great tracts of the West.
Law after law was broken, evaded, or
laughed at. Once the spirit of exploitation
on a large scale was abroad in the land,
nothing could stand against it.
To gain its ends, wealth crept stealthily
into every seat of power. The law stood
in its way; therefore, in legislative halls
and in political caucuses, wealth had to
[82]
The Subjugation of America
have its representatives. The legislatures,
the courts, the press these were made
pawns in the game of exploitation. Where-
ever possible, the army of exploiters laid
profane hands even upon the trusteed
funds that guard the poverty of the spoiled
and broken, the funds of the savings-banks,
and of the insurance companies. Nothing
was sacred; nothing was secure.
The raw material of wealth, as I have
stated in a previous chapter, is the labour
of men. In the days of individual effort,
exploitation of labour was not possible, for
men shied off from the chains of the ex-
ploiter, took to the boundless free fields
of the West, and declared over again that
they would dwell and labour hi freedom,
or they would die.
But, in the census of 1900, it is shown
clearly that the average employe" in this
[83]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
country produces every year $1,280 of
wealth, after full allowance for the cost
of the material he works with and all
possible running expenses that are paid
by his employer. Out of this amount of
wealth he gets $437. The remainder, $843,
goes into the hands of other men the
capitalist or the exploiter of labour.
That money, nearly two thirds of the
wealth produced by the men who labour
with their hands and heads, goes to pay
interest and dividends on the securities
that represent the increment gathered by
those who sold out in other days, or who
capitalized their plants and settled down
to draw their sustenance from the labour
of other men.
Hence the idle rich. I do not mean to
say that by any means all of the dividends
and interest are gathered by the idle rich.
[84]
The Subjugation of America
Such a condition as that can exist but once
in the history of a nation. It came about
in Rome and it led to the fall. It came
about in France and it led to the terror.
Here, in America, it has gone far to be sure,
and the tendency is still onward; but it
has not yet quite reached a point where
one may say: "To-morrow the harvest is
ripe!"
[851
"As well might the oligarchy attempt to stay the
flux and reflux of the tides as to attempt to stay the
progress of freedom in the South. Approved of God,
the edict of the genius of Universal Emancipation
has been proclaimed to the world, and nothing, save
Deity himself, can possibly reverse it. To connive
at the perpetuation of slavery is to disobey the com-
mands of Heaven. Not to be an abolitionist is to be
a toilful and diabolical instrument of the devil. The
South needs to be free, the South wants to be free, the
South SHALL be free!"
HINTON ROWAN HELPER.
Chapter Four
WHO ARE THE SLAVES?
For thirty years, since 1880, we have been
piling up wealth hi 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; for
[89]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
I am not a Socialist, and I entertain no
Utopian dreams concerning the equal dis-
tribution 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 re-
assignment of the sources of wealth into
the hands best qualified by nature to hold
them. I take it to be proven by the ex-
perience of the world that individual
exploitation of the sources of wealth
remains as the established basis of the
industrial, commercial, and social devel-
opment of the world.
[90]
Who Are the Slaves?
Yet, I confess, the terrific sweep of in-
dustrialism across this land throughout
the past century appalls me as I study it
from records written and unwritten. I
cannot go down through the crowded tene-
ment 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 can-
not 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 some-
where 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 the
[911
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 thatit 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 rep-
resentative 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 of
[92]
Who Are the Slaves?
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 learn-
ing, instead of envying the American work-
ingman 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, pre-
dicted that the time would come when the
[93J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 dur-
ing 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 eman-
Who Are the Slaves ?
cipation 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 pol-
lution of chattel slavery we have but
stepped out of a process of direct exploi-
tation 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 bene-
fit 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 in-
significant class who, by virtue of the gen-
ius of their fathers, or by virtue of mere
[95]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
chance, administer the tremendous power
of capital.
The evolution of the ages, then, has
brought about this strangely ironical con-
dition. 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 en-
joying leisure. Knowledge and culture
are the proper birthright of humanity to-
day. Even in the face of obstacles, knowl-
edge 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.
[96]
Who Are the Slaves?
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 warn-
ing to the other members of my class.
But lately I have read again a monumen-
tal work, written fifty years ago by a
[97]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Southerner, in an attempt to turn the
minds of his fellow citizens from the fatal
error of chattel slavery. The book is
called "The Impending Crisis of the South:
How to Meet It. " Of all the books that
I have ever read upon public problems it
has always seemed to me to be the most
sane and factual. Here is a paragraph
taken from it which I marked when first
I read the book, and which I have read
over and over again with infinite satis-
faction:
The truth is that slavery destroys or
vitiates, or pollutes whatever it touches.
No interest of society escapes the influence
of its clinging curse. It makes Southern
religion a stench in the nostrils of Christen-
dom it makes Southern politics a libel
upon all the principles of republicanism
it makes Southern literature a travesty
upon the honourable profession of letters.
. . . When will the South, as a whole,
abandoning its present suicidal policy,
[981
Who Are the Slaves?
enter upon that career of prosperity, great-
ness, and true renown, to which God by
His word and His providence is calling
it? That voice, by whomsoever spoken,
must yet be heard and heeded. The time
hastens the doom of slavery is written
the redemption of the South draws nigh.
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 peo-
ple 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 appearance
[991
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 won-
der, 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 mani-
fold 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 the
[1001
Who Are the Slaves?
sterner things of life, boys with their for-
tunes to inherit and high positions in life
secured, debutantes 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.
[101]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Outwardly, the scene had all the appear-
ance of perfect ease and happiness. Look-
ing 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 nor-
mal 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 was
[102]
Who Are the Slaves ?
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 al-
most 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 con-
versation 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, to
[103]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
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 ten-
dency 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 prob-
lem of industry his own; and every one
drifted onward through the years secure
in the conviction that in the end every-
thing 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 price
[104]
Who Are the Slaves?
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 who
[105]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
are not forced by circumstances to work?
I know from my own experience that those
who are worth while in the social and finan-
cial 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 be-
tween the labour that produces our wealth
and the wealth which we enjoy.
[106]
"It is quite plain that your government mil never
be able to restrain a distressed and discontented ma-
jority. For with you the majority is the government,
and has the rich, who are always a minority, ab-
solutely 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 Legis-
lature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legis-
lature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman
preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict ob-
servance 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 candi-
dates is liable to be preferred by a workingman who
hears his children cry for more bread?"
LORD MACAULAY* 1857.
Chapter Five
THE AWAKENING OF SOCIETY
Many are the causes that have led to this
great change in the attitude of the wealthy
classes toward the world at large. First
and foremost, in my judgment, is the change
in the attitude of the working classes them-
selves toward the rich. For, more assid-
uously than anything else in this world,
we, the wealthy, seek the praise and ad-
miration of the crowd. It may seem a
strange confession from a member of the
wealthy class, but it is true.
And the attitude of the people at large
toward the rich has been changed indeed.
I remember, even in my own lifetime, a
The Passing of the Idle Rich
period when the people of this country
looked up with admiration and respect
to their wealthy classes. It was in the
end of that long period of which I have
spoken, in which the wealth of the nation
was well distributed and had not been
gathered together into the hands of the
few by means of the exploitation of the
masses.
To-day how great the change! How
wonderful the transformation! At first
a few weak voices told what a few eyes
saw. In unheard-of journals of the labour
movement, in certain revelations of high
finance, corruption of politics, dreadful
tales were told stories long since for-
gotten. In Henry Demarest Lloyd's
"Wealth vs. Commonwealth" we have a
strong voice describing what keen eyes
clearly discerned. Soon were published
[110]
The Awakening of Society
several profound historical studies which
aroused the more thoughtful. Then, with
drum and trumpet and black banners fly-
ing, came the army of the muck-rakers.
And their revelations made the nation
heartsick.
It is but five years since the white light
of the noon-day sun beat down upon the
hitherto deeply buried roots of America's
industrial and social life, and eighty-five
millions knew whence the social fruitage
of our age draws its sustenance. Just
what, in this connection, has been the
effect of these five years upon American
opinion?
When the nineteenth century closed,
America worshipped great wealth. It
sanctified its possessors. It deified the
hundred-millionaire. In five years' time
America has learned to hate great wealth.
[Ill]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Plutocracy is disgorging, but public opinion
is relentless.
Never before in the history of the world
has there been anything analogous to the
campaign of the American muck-rakers.
The progressive forces of French society
raged at the monarchy and the Church
before the French Revolution. But their
propaganda took thirty years to gain
power, and fifty years to accomplish its
purpose. The work of destruction here
seemed to be done in a night. The
"pillars of Society" tumbled. From offi-
cial statements of the President of the
United States down to the output of ten
dollar a week hack-writers, our publi-
cations teemed with the products of the
popular trade of exposure. Great com-
mercial and industrial institutions were
analyzed. National and municipal govern-
The Awakening of Society
merits were dissected. Universities and
churches did not escape the busy seeker for
sin. After submerging itself in the story of
its shames, the nation turned in disgust
to more pleasing visions. But it had an-
swered the question "How?" And the
answer is by no means forgotten.
Some day, perhaps in the twenty-first
century, some Carlyle, sitting in the shade
of elms before an old country house, will
head another chapter, "Printed Paper,"
and describe the war made with words upon
the crumbling ideals and ideas of an age.
He will tell how a nation from worshipping
wealth on Monday learned to hate it on
Saturday. He will relate how it came that
myriads of poor, blessing the alms giver
as they fell asleep in low hovels and crowded
tenements, awoke with their hearts full
of bitterness and hatred for those whom
[1131
The Passing of the Idle Rich
they had worshipped. He will humorously
describe how the plutocracy itself, alarmed
beyond power of expression, sought to
disgorge its ill-gotten gains upon the mul-
titude; its primal virtue, acquisition, trans-
formed to the crime, possession. He will
recall for the amusement of students of
history the frantic endeavour of the dem-
agogue to raise himself in public esteem
through decrying the idle rich.
To us, who, through the heyday of our
popularity, simply sat in the sunshine and
throve and grew fat in happiness, it came
as a terrible shock, this change of the popu-
lar attitude. At first we laughed at it;
then we preached little sermons about it,
half jesting, half serious; then we began
to talk about it among ourselves; and we
held indignation meetings every time we
met our friends, and called down the wrath
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The Awakening of Society
of heaven on these sharp-eyed and glib-
tongued investigators.
Finally and here lies the heart of the
matter we began to read these out-
pourings of the popular sentiment very
seriously indeed. They came, at last,
from sources that we dared not disregard.
Instead of mere muck-raking expeditions
they assumed the proportions of crusades.
Instead of the frantic mouthings of mere
sensation mongers there confronted us
in the columns of the press and in the more
sedate and orderly pages of the magazines
the speeches of a President, or sane, sober
editorials written by men who knew both
sides, and who commanded our respect as
well as the respect and admiration of the
crowd. We recognized those of us who
thought, and saw, and felt that instead of
being a passing phase, as we had dreamed
[1151
The Passing of the Idle Rich
or hoped, this change of popular sentiment
was the beginning of a revolution.
I hesitate to say how deep this arrow
struck. Perhaps I can illustrate it best
by telling a story that came to my ears this
past winter. A lady of the old school was
sending her daughter, a young girl, to one
of the preparatory schools here in the East.
She went herself to look at the college and
to talk with some of the professors. In
conversation with the principal, she said:
"I want Estelle, right from the begin-
ning of her course, to get a full understand-
ing of where wealth comes from. I want
her year by year to learn of the debt and
the responsibility that she, personally,
owes to the people that work. Are these
things taught in your courses?'*
The principal was astounded. She pro-
tested that such education was entirely
[116]
The Awakening of Society
out of line with the principles and precepts
of that college. Very delicately and tact-
fully she intimated that one of the founda-
tions of a social education was the constant
instillation into the minds of the young of
the idea of the superiority of the aristoc-
racy over the masses. To teach Estelle
that she and her class are really dependent
upon the grimy men who labour with their
hands would be to turn upside down the cur-
riculum of that college.
The upshot of it was that Estelle to-
day is enrolled as a student in a high school
in New York City. Her mother believes
that the salvation of the wealthy classes
in this country depends upon the coming
generation understanding the true relation-
ship between capital and labour.
This is, perhaps, an extreme case, for
only a very few years ago that matron her-
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self was absolutely immersed in the whirl-
pools of the most frivolous Society which has
a real right to use the term in talking about
itself. Always she was a woman of a
most active mind, of broad sympathies,
of excellent benevolent character; but her
mind found its full exercise in the pursuit
of social fads, her sympathies found outlet
in sporadic raids upon the strongholds of
misery and poverty, and her benevolence
satisfied itself with much hidden largess
to various and sundry charities. She did
not really understand any of the problems
of the day.
The first awakening of this one woman
came about through chance. Bored to
death at a summer resort, half sick, and
therefore restricted in her activities, a
friend who stopped on the piazza to extend
her sympathies happened to leave on the
[118]
The Awakening of Society
table a book. The lady picked it up and
began, half absently, to turn the pages
from back to front, as one will. A heading
caught her eye. Here it is:
"OUR BARBARIANS FROM ABOVE."
She did not understand it; and her habit
of mind led her to investigate. She had
lost the page, but she searched until she
found it. Then she read the paragraph:
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. With-
out restraints of culture, experience, the
pride or even the inherited caution of class
or rank, these intoxicated men think they
are the wave instead of the float. To them,
science is but a never-ending repertoire
of investments stored up by nature for
the syndicates, government but a fountain
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
of franchises, the nations but customers in
squads, and the million the unit of a new
arithmetic of wealth written for them.
She read on and on. She finished the
book, and turned back to its beginning.
She could not read it all; but she read
enough to realize her profound ignorance
of facts. That night, at dinner, she as-
tounded her husband in this wise:
"Who is Henry Demarest Lloyd?"
"He is a Socialist writer," was the an-
swer, "who amuses himself attacking our
class. "
"I wish," she said, "you would get me
all his books. "
From that time on her mind found new
occupations, new interests, new ideas. A
world that she did not know existed came
swiftly over her horizon. She did not rush
madly into extremes she has not to this
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The Awakening of Society
day but her life has changed consider-
ably. We who knew her so little time ago
as one of the typical, clever, brilliant, and
flashy purveyors of cheer and social joy
find her to-day no less charming in the
matter of mere entertainment; but we
expect, when we meet her, to find in her
mind many other and more serious things.
She never appears in print, she is not a
suffragist, she has dropped her little fads.
She is not that strange abnormality of her
sex that neglects the old pursuits of
women to follow the strange gods of men;
but she is, in every sense, a student of the
true conditions that surround her. The
mists of golden tradition have cleared from
her eyes.
To-day she has plenty of company in
her own set. She did not convert them.
She detests the role of a propagandist.
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
They simply came of their own accord to
read and learn. And when the educated
classes really become interested, I think
they study things more deeply than any
other class. Even the most violent and
anarchistic of the publications that pre-
tend to portray the facts of the class rela-
tionships have thousands of readers among
the very wealthy.
I remember a case in point. Mr. Up-
ton Sinclair, a pronounced Socialist of the
flamboyant type, was invited to lunch
one day, by a mutual acquaintance, with
a young man of the most exclusive set in
this city. They met in a private dining-
room at the Lawyers' Club. In the course
of the lunch Mr. Sinclair referred to an
article he had published in Wilshire's
Magazine, a Socialist sheet of the noisy class.
"Yes," said the other, "I read it."
[122]
The Awakening of Society
"You read it?" exclaimed Mr. Sinclair,
in complete surprise.
"Oh, yes I always read it," said the
other, in a matter-of-fact way.
There are many like him. Five years
ago you probably could have counted on
the fingers of two hands the men in the
wealthy classes who read the literature
that comes from below. To-day it is
a very common occurrence to hear in the
best clubs of New York wealthy men
discussing with intense earnestness and
real economic sense articles of which they
never would have heard five years ago.
It is not that many of us really feel the
danger that impends. It is simply that
our armour of complacency and self-sat-
isfaction has been pierced, and our pride
has been wounded.
"I used to think," said a clubman to
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
me last winter, "that we were well beloved;
but I guess our class is the best hated class
in the land. I am only beginning to find
out why. "
Of course, I do not want to give the reader
the idea that the muck-raker wrought
this change. As a matter of fact, he is
but the skirmish line. The wealthy classes
would have weathered his attack without
much trouble and gone upon their all-
complacent way if he had been the culmi-
nation, instead of the mere beginning, of the
hard attack. But after him, as I have
said, came a great army of sober, sedate,
forceful writers, hurling volleys of stinging
facts upon our careless trenches. We
roused ourselves to meet the real attack.
Fiercely it swept upon us. Yet even that
we might have met and gone back in the
end into the peace and security of our age-
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The Awakening of Society
long self-confidence, no whit the worse for
the battle.
Worse or better was to come.
When the pulpit and the press had done
their worst or best the heavy artillery
opened. Senators on the floor of the senate,
governors from the chair of office, mighty
lawyers before the bar, judges from the
bench, and, last, a President from the
White House, raked our outworn defences,
and even the silliest and most fatuous of
men within the walls knew, at least, that
we were under fire.
To-day there is a lull. Many of those
who awakened to the sound of battle
but two or three years ago are slipping back
into fancied security. The older heads
know better. We see the forces of labour
and poverty forming new lines upon the
plains and hill sides. We see them lashed
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
to new fury by the whip of rising prices;
we hear the stern, stentorian voices of their
tribunes calling them to battle for their
lives and liberties; we smell the reek of them
as they crowd from the dusty mines and
sweaty factories.
We do not flatter ourselves, even those
of us most drunk with the strong liquor of
power and the sweet wine of indolence,
that the forces of attack are weakened or
weakening. We know full well that this
great lull of renewed national prosperity
has been used by the forces of the men that
labour to make themselves stronger, cleaner,
better caparisoned for the long battle of
to-morrow.
In the midst of the peace and calm of
high prosperity we hear the rumble of the
thunder of war. We read in the papers
that a great manufacturing city of the
[126]
The Awakening of Society
Middle West has chosen a Socialist mayor.
Over the wires there comes to us the news
that an anti-corporation campaign in Den-
ver has broken to atoms the organized
power of both the great political parties
which, for generations, we have used as
pawns in mightier games than theirs. An
able public servant is openly and publicly
branded a thief and a betrayer of trust,
because, the people say, he works with the
larger capitalists to help their plans to
completion. Public clamour and disap-
probation greet the plan of one of the richest
of men to incorporate his charities in order
that they may be more efficient. The
people refuse absolutely to believe that
there is no ulterior project behind the
incorporation.
These are incidents of warfare, not of
peace. Here, as in Denver and Mil-
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
waukee, it is an attack upon an outpost,
a skirmish in force. There, as in the case
of the Rockefeller Foundation, it is a
determined effort to block what the leaders
of popular thought believe to be a strength-
ening of the redoubts of wealth.
Strange, it seems to me, it is that still
within the gates of gold there dwells a
great host of people barely roused. For I
have failed of my aim if I have given the
impression that Society is to-day wholly
roused, wholly armed, wholly awake to
its danger. It is, alas! not true. It is
no more true than it was true before the
rebellion that the people of the South were
all in sympathy with Helper. There were
a few, to be sure, but the rank and file of
the slave-holders called him a visionary
and an alarmist.
So to-day, perchance, the vast majority
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The Awakening of Society
of the men of wealth in this and other
cities will call me a visionary and an
alarmist. I wish it were true. Would
that I could bring myself to believe that
the things I see about me are but the
passing phases of a natural adjustment. I
have tried for many years to persuade
myself that all is well. I have failed.
[129]
"Six years ago no proposition to which the great
corporation interests of the country were strongly
opposed was looked upon as having any practical
chance of being realized. . . . The killing and
maiming or stifling of bills of this kind in com-
mittee was a foregone conclusion, and the only
answer to protests was Tweed's old query: 'What
are you going to do about it?' "
FBANKLIN FABIAN.
Chapter Six
FOR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER
I have, in previous chapters, touched very
briefly upon some of the vile excrescences
that have found a resting place within the
gates of our once so fair city of Society.
Again, I have sketched in the briefest out-
line the process by which the idle class was
created. I have shown how the seed was
planted in the too fertile soil of American
industry. I have dwelt, but briefly, upon
the simple fact that we of the older orders
have come to find out something about
that planting and the manner of the growth.
I turn with something like dismay from
a sketch of the methods of the culture of
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
this growth. For it is watered with the
bloody sweat of labour and the salt tears
of bitter poverty and suffering; and it is
fertilized with the dead bodies of men and
women outworn in the grim battle of life.
Tended and watched it is by a foul horde
of underlings, hired judges in the law,
panders in politics, prostitutes in the pul-
pit, lickspittles in college chancelleries,
Judases in the press, blackmailers in busi-
ness, and miserable, time-serving parasites
clinging like filthy leeches upon the ad-
ministrative bodies of the nation.
To my mind, as I have studied this ques-
tion, there has come a sad conviction:
This nation is betrayed. The planting
of the seed of our industrial system, whose
fine flower has been reached in our class of
idle rich, was quite possible without any
betrayal of the people. Even its growth
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
for two decades was possible without a
conscious effort on the part of the keepers
of the public citadels to throw open the
doors to a public enemy. May a thinking
man dare to say that the growth of this
system since 1890 could have been possible
without criminal negligence on the part of
those public servants sworn to guard the
true and lawful interests of the people
of this nation?
For it was perfectly evident, years ago,
that the industrial evolution of this coun-
try was a process of exploitation. It was
the knowledge of this fact that lay behind
the Sherman Law of 1890; and again the
Interstate Commerce Act, which sought to
restrain, to a limited extent at least, the
boundless license to plunder which had
been taken unto themselves by the rail-
roads. No broad-minded man can read
[135]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
with an open mind the facts with regard
to the Homestead strike, the Pullman
strike, the war in the Coeur d'Alene, or
the coal strike of very recent years, with-
out coming to the conclusion that no mat-
ter who was in the wrong in the immediate
circumstances leading to those national
catastrophes, the real underlying cause
was a revolt on the part of a subjugated
people against the hardships of industrial
slavery.
Without going into details, let us ex-
amine, in the light of history, a few of the
cardinal facts that have so far made possi-
ble a continuance, indeed, a constant widen-
ing and deepening, of this process of
exploitation. Let us remember always,
as we face the facts, that the primary cause
of this condition lay in that evolution, which
was probably inevitable, from the house-
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
hold stage of manufacturing in this coun-
try to the stage that is represented by the
modern trust. That evolution stands to-
day completed. It was, as a matter of
fact, completed on the day when the
American Sugar Refining Company as-
sumed the dominating position in the sugar
trade. Subsequent developments have
been but a repetition, sometimes on a
larger scale, sometimes on a smaller, of
that climax. What, then, makes possi-
ble the continuance of this process in the
face of the ever-growing public knowledge
of its existence?
The answer is our public shame. This
process, openly recognized by the public,
thoroughly analyzed day by day and year
by year by brilliant writers in press and
periodical, exposed again and again in
excellently written books by college econo-
[1371
The Passing of the Idle Rich
mists, has gone on and on through climax
after climax for the simple reason that the
one power in the world that could stop it
the will of the American people has
been turned from its purpose, defeated
in its honest efforts, and betrayed in its
administration, through the fact that in
our democratic political world the power
of mobilized wealth has been sufficient to
restrain the hands of our political parties
and prevent the striking of the blows that
would have put an end to the process.
To-day, in America, the people elect their
statesmen; but the exercise of the people's
power through these statesmen is curbed,
directed, and controlled by groups of
moneyed interests. This is a statement
that many will challenge; it is a statement
that cannot be proved or disproved. I
give it as my opinion, based upon long,
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
careful study, and based, too, on personal
knowledge.
America, then, is a plutocracy. Always
politically, the power of a plutocracy de-
pends upon the maintenance of the status
quo. It has come into being through the
operation of certain industrial or commer-
cial conditions. It lives by virtue of the
continuance of those conditions, and by
virtue of their freedom from attack by
the one power strong enough to destroy
them namely, the people.
To maintain this status quo has been
the gigantic task successfully carried out by
the financial interests of the United States.
It is not my intention indeed, it is not
within my power to go into any complete
details of the methods and machinery
used for this end. It has not all been ac-
complished, by any means, through direct
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
political corruption, though much of it has
been accomplished in that way. The few
scattered and unimportant instances of
conviction are enough by themselves, with-
out going into surmise at all, to establish
the fact that in almost every state of the
Union, and at the seat of the central
government itself, there has been for thirty
years past widespread corruption of
political parties.
Deeper than this, more sinister even than
the most recent example of an administra-
tive officer bound like a slave to the wheel
of his master's chariot, has been the in-
direct subornation of public opinion through
a subsidized press, subsidized pulpits, and
subsidized public speakers. We have heard
a great deal of demagogues and wicked
Socialistic leaders of the mob. We do
not hear much of that other phenomenon,
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
the oily sycophant who talks to the people
with words of cheer and paragraphs of
exhortation, having in his mind always the
one single idea how best he may serve the
moneyed interests that stand behind him.
It is strange to me, and it has always
been strange to other men who have studied
these things, that the interests of a plu-
tocracy can be so long maintained; for
a plutocracy, of its very nature, is the
weakest possible form of government. It
lives either by force or by fraud. It lived
in Rome before the days of Marius by force
alone; and the lower orders of Rome were
slaves. It lived in Paris before the Terror,
by a combination of force and fraud; and
the lower orders of France became fiendish
brutes. It lives in America by fraud alone;
and what may we say of the people of this
nation who permit it to live?
[141]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
For, strange and incongruous as it may
seem, a plutocracy rarely if ever develops
a real leader save in the crisis of its lifetime.
In Rome, as Ferrero so well points out in
his book, "The Greatness and Decline
of Rome," Sulla came into his leadership
of the plutocracy only after the people
in the person of Marius had seized from
the hands of the plutocracy all the power of
government. In France, the plutocracy
absolutely failed to develop a leader. In
England to-day, almost in the dawn of a
revolution, the propertied classes lack a
single person of commanding power. In
America, no single man, no group of men,
represent in their persons the power of the
plutocracy.
It is the tendency of the great and wealthy
to divide into rival camps. For some years
past, in the one single subdivision of the
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
world of wealth that is represented by
Wall Street finance, there have been at
least two great leaders of the golden host,
bitterly antagonistic, fiercely at odds,
each striving to draw to himself new re-
inforcements, not with the idea of strength-
ening the world of money as a whole, but
rather with the single idea of building up
his own power to break down or destroy the
power of other leaders in that world. To-
day, in this single section of the world of
business, there seems to be but one man who
stands like a giant among pygmies. Far
more nearly than any other in our history
does he, in his magnificent personal power
and his splendid executive wisdom, ap-
proach the magnitude of a real leader in
a plutocracy.
In the political world it is physically
next to impossible that any man can arise
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
in a country where the people vote who will
be able to assume at once political power
as a servant of the people and plutocratic
rule as a representative of moneyed in-
terests. In the never-ceasing conflict be-
tween the people and their exploiters no
man by serving two sides can achieve
greatness. Therefore, the wealthy classes
of America have never sought, and are not
seeking to-day, leaders from the political
arena. In that arena, it is true, they have
chosen to associate themselves, from time
to time, with men who, through their
ability or through the public confidence
reposed in then, exercise great political
authority. In that way, more than by any
other, the plutocracy of America has main-
tained the status quo; but every citizen of
the United States who in his own mind is
persuaded that this is true of any one man
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For Thirty Pieces of Silver
who can be named in the political world
despises that man, contemns his authority,
and sets him down in the list of a nation's
traitors.
It is a losing fight, this struggle of a plu-
tocracy against a people. Against organ-
ized political opposition in a free coun-
try, where citizens have a right to vote,
it must crumble into dust when once the
people seriously begin the organization of
political opposition. For how different is
the position of the people from the position
of a plutocracy in the matter of individual
leadership! Never in the history of the
world, in any but a nation of slaves, have the
people lacked a leader. Marius in Rome,
Danton and Robespierre in Paris, Cromwell
in England, you may multiply the list a hun-
dred fold if you care to study the pages of
history. In all ages, leaders like this, when
[145]
The Passing of the Idle Rick
once they are fired with enthusiasm for a
cause, have been able, when they cared
to do so, to strike out policies direct and
strong, and to lead the minds of the people
as they willed. Such lines of political
cleavage as these do not transpire easily.
In almost every case in history there has
been transition only through war, riot,
and revolution. We need a leader. He
will surely come.
In this country, already, opposition ex-
ists. Labour union parties, reform parties,
Socialistic parties, have come into being,
faded away, and died. To-day, the only
independent party working in the political
world of the United States is so inextri-
cably bound up with and wedded to a host
of economic fallacies that the sober com-
mon sense of the American people as a
whole, feeling as they do that the
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great political parties of the country are
hopelessly inefficient and corrupt, will
not endorse it.
We have not yet in this country marked
out clearly the line of political cleavage
along which the mighty rift must be made.
Perhaps one may find the first faint trac-
ings of it in the rise of the insurgents in
the last session of congress. From what I
have learned of the sentiment in the power-
ful Middle West, which more than any other
part of the Union represents an average
of the people of the United States, lam
more than half convinced that this is
true. If it be so, many things may
happen within the next few years, and
there may be very good reason indeed
for the wide spread of uneasiness in the
plutocracy.
I am not a politician. I look at this
[147]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
matter of political power much as any other
sober American business man looks at it.
Among my own people I seldom hear purely
political discussions. When we are discus-
sing pro and con the relative merits of candi-
dates or the relative importance of political
policies, the discussion almost invariably
comes down to a question of business
efficiency. We care absolutely nothing
about statehood bills, pension agitation,
waterway appropriations, "pork barrels,"
state rights, or any other political question,
save inasmuch as it threatens or fortifies
existing business conditions. Touch the
question of the tariff, touch the issue of the
income tax, touch the problem of railroad
regulation, or touch that most vital
of all business matters, the question of
general federal regulation of industrial
corporations, and the people amongst whom
[148]
Far Thirty Pieces of Silver
I live my life become immediately rabid
partisans.
It matters not one iota what political
party is in power, or what President holds
the reins of office. We are not politicians,
or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own
America; we got it, God knows how; but
we intend to keep it if we can by throwing
all the tremendous weight of our support,
our influence, our money, our political con-
nection, our purchased senators, our hun-
gry congressmen, and our public-speaking
demagogues into the scale against any
legislation, any political platform, any
Presidential campaign, that threatens the
integrity of our estate.
I have said that the class I represent
cares nothing for politics. In a single
season a plutocratic leader hurled his in-
fluence and his money into the scale to
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
elect a Republican governor on the Pacific
coast, and a Democratic governor on the
Atlantic. The same moneyed interest that
he represented has held undisputed sway
through many administrations, Republican
and Democratic, in a state in which it had
large railroad interests. Judge Lindsey,
hi his latest book, "The Beast," has shown
in indisputable detail how the corporation
interests of Denver played with both great
political parties. Truly can I say that
wealth has no politics save its own
interests.
[150
"Poverty is a bitter thing, but it is not as bitter
as the existence of restless vacuity and physical,
moral, and intellectual flabbiness to which those
doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in
that vainest of all pursuits, the pursuit of mere pleasure
as a sufficient end in itself"
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
Chapter Seven
THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
Sometimes an honest man of my class,
reading the news of the day, awakes to a
sudden realization of the grim political
truth. During the time of the public
discussion over the late tariff readjustment
I remember such an incident. We were
three men, sitting together in the smoking-
room of an uptown club. One of us had
brought in a copy of a sane and honest
afternoon paper, containing a quiet, dig-
nified, careful but powerful analysis of the
results brought about under the tariff re-
form measure. He had been struck by
the article. He called it to the attention
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
of the third member of the group, who sat
down to read it.
He read it through, while my friend and
I talked about trivial things. After quite
a long period of silence he handed the paper
back to the giver.
" What do you think of it? " he was asked.
His cigar had gone out. He lit it before
he replied. Then he said, gravely:
"America needs a Marius, a Pitt, and
a Peel. Before long it must get one or
all of them, or it will surely breed a Danton
and a Robespierre. "
It may have been mere epigram, but the
two of us who heard it were startled. For
the man who said it was a leader of the
world of fashion, powerful in the world of
business, and descended from four genera-
tions of the purest-blooded aristocracy
this country owns.
[154]
The Tribune of the People
Think, then, of the meaning of this
sentiment from such a man at such a time!
Marius, a plebeian, led the slaves of Rome
to the seats of political power, broke down
the age-old barriers of an aristocratic
plutocracy, and wrote into the history of
the world one of its earliest chapters on the
revolt of a subjugated nation held in
chains for the benefit of a few. Pitt,
Lord Chatham,^the "Great Commoner,"
hurled from office by the combined power
of a king, a plutocratic class, and a subser-
vient political machine, was forced back
into office by the will of the people, un-
organized, in the face of all the banded
powers against him, and in spite of a con-
dition of political corruption that made his
return seem a miracle. Peel gave the peo-
ple of England free corn against the banded
powers of commercial greed.
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
And to-day, in America, an aristocrat
and a member of the plutocratic class,
sitting in a great city club of fashion,
reading an editorial from a paper that is
published and edited to meet the demands
of that very class, gives it as his opinion
that in this country we must raise a Marius,
a Pitt, and a Peel! And the alternative
the days of the Terror, the bloody hands,
the brutish mob, the wild-eyed, frantic
leaders of the hosts that stormed the
Bastile, set up the guillotine so runs the
mind of an aristocrat and a plutocrat,
reading the Evening Post in a rich man's
club on upper Fifth Avenue!
I believe that he was right. Without
referring specifically to the tariff reform
for this is no political document that
I am writing I believe that the catalogue
of legislative enactments by our adminis-
[156]
The Tribune of the People
trative machine over the past twenty
years reveals beyond the shadow of a
doubt that the will of the people is subser-
vient to the will of the plutocracy. How
can we further blind ourselves to the truth?
When such a fact is known as gospel to
the people, from Maine to California, pub-
lished in every section of the press, from
the gutter-snipe class to the scholarly
review, how may the best educated class
in the United States go on upon its care-
less way ignoring the fact?
The result is perfectly obvious in the
light of history. The plutocracy, stripped
of the artificial screens behind which it
grew to power, stands exposed to-day in
the full glare of the search-light of public
knowledge. Under such circumstances,
even in slave-holding nations, there has
never lacked a tribune of the people. So
[1571
The Passing of the Idle Rich
sprung the Gracchi from the dust to lead
the first great battle in Rome. So, even
in the dawn of popular liberty, came a
Tyler and a Cade, before their hour had
struck, it is true, yet, even so, with power
to call to their backs armies of men willing
to die and conquerable only by accident or
guile. So, in the fullness of time, came
other greater men, a Marius, a Pitt, a
Peel, who led the people onward and up-
ward against the citadels of plutocracy.
To-day we of the class that rules, that
draws unearned profits from the toil of
other men, know full well that the time is
almost here when there must be a true ac-
counting. The fortunes that have been
made are made; and that is all of it. The
fortunes that are in the making through
misuse of political power, through ex-
tortionate exploitation of the people and
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The Tribune of the People
the people's heritage, through industrial
oppression and industrial denial of the
rights of man these must be checked.
To-morrow, in this land, the door of op-
portunity must be again unsealed.
We cannot go back and create more free
land to take the place of the millions upon
millions of acres thrown away by a lavish,
stupid, careless, traitorous government.
We cannot fill again the plundered mines
of Michigan or Montana or Pennsylvania.
We cannot clothe the hills of Maine
and Michigan again with pine, or the broad
bottoms of Ohio with walnut. We cannot
turn backward the hands of the clock,
or re-create the economic factors that
have been eliminated to make of their frag-
ments the wealth and the social world
to-day enjoyed by the exploiters and
their descendants.
[159]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
It is not so that evolution works. That
rare civilization of the Aztecs which Cortez
crushed can never be restored. Only echoes
from the tombs of Lucumons, after the
lapse of twenty centuries, attest the fact
that once, in Etruria, there existed a civili-
zation distinctive, splendid, brilliant,
until the tempest of Sulla's vengeance
blotted it from the face of the earth.
Only the ashes in the urn of history
remain of Pharaoh's Egypt, Athens, Baby-
lon, Persia.
So, too, the golden opportunity of yes-
terday is gone, never to return within our
borders. The lesson of America, however,
is burned deep into the records of time.
In Canada, such a man as Laurier reads
it clearly. In the greater of the Latin re-
publics in South America, they strive to-
day to prevent the very condition we now
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The Tribune of the People
find in free America. In this matter
of the real substance of rulership, the
United States is to-day an example to the
nations of a democracy which has delib-
erately squandered its birthright.
Yet, for all our lost opportunities, much
remains that can be done and will be done.
It is not my purpose here to sketch the
process of salvation that is yet possible.
Only, at this point in my writings, I would
warn the people of my class, those of them
who do not yet think about these things or
understand them, that the moment has
arrived when the people demand a Marius
a tribune who shall lead them onward
into freedom, a man who shall stand before
the world untrammelled by the golden
chains of wealth, undefiled by the pollution
of time-serving politics, filled with the in-
spiration of the people's will, courageous
[1611
The Passing of the Idle Rich
to battle to the very bitter end for the
rights that the people demand.
Only the morally and intellectually deaf
cannot hear the sound of the call of the
people. It sweeps from the plains of
Kansas in the breath of the rustling corn; it
swells from the hills of Montana in the thud
of the drill and the rising and falling of
picks in the mines; it whirs from the looms
of the South and the North, where child
slaves earn the bread of labour; it moans
from the lofts of New York, in the voice
of the slaves of the sweat shop; it shrieks
from the forges of Pittsburg, the charnels
of Packingtown, the terrible mines of the
mountains of coal.
It is a call for a leader to freedom the
freedom we bought with our blood and
signed away in ignorance. I care not where
you turn, the voices of the people crying
[1621
The Tribune of the People
for their rights rise stronger, fuller, more
threatening, year by year. Day by day
they organize. A meeting of farmers at
St. Louis files formal protest against the
profits of the middleman, and forms a
committee to investigate and report, and
puts together a League of Reform. A
machine-made politician in New York,
in Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, is
crushed by the votes of the people he fondly
had dreamed he owned. A firmly en-
trenched public officer is branded a liar and
a thief, no matter what committees may
whitewash him. A public document pub-
lished to clear the skirts of a ruling party
of the charge of being in part responsible
for the rising prices is laughed out of court
by the people themselves.
A daring and preposterous attempt on
the part of organized railroad owners to
[163]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
advance rates to the general public, while
holding them down for the" big interests,"
is met by a storm of organized protest.
Chambers of commerce, industrial clubs,
manufacturers' guilds, consumers' leagues,
spring up all over the country, expostulat-
ing, pleading, threatening, hurling legal
thunderbolts. A President yields to the
clamour, and an attorney -general launches
the thunder of Washington against a move
that, ten years ago, would have met only
the scattered, sporadic, half-hearted, hope-
less invective of the private citizen. The
railroads yield, and begin the revision of
rates "at the top," by making agreements
with the big organized shippers, the trusts.
The time is ripe, or nearly ripe; the
fight begins. The status quo is to be changed.
In the political arena all is confusion.
Already, from the lips of the old, trained
[164]
The Tribune of the People
leaders, who, through long periods, have
served the interests of the plutocracy
while wearing the livery of the people,
come hesitating phrases of fear and con-
fusion. One announces that he will retire
after his present term. Another goes down
to defeat, fighting to the last for his mas-
ters. A third, branded a corruptionist,
sees ruin stalking him amid the shadows
of the coming day. Another, reading the
papers, dubs them traitors, and madly curses
them before the eyes and in the ears of
all the people.
And, meantime, we need a Marius, a
Lincoln, a strong man of the people, in
whose hands will be the threads of polit-
ical destiny. Events are opening to this
strong man the gates of mighty power.
When he comes (and he is sure to come),
he will hear the clear, unmistakable call of
[165J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
destiny to its chosen. Can he help but
heed? History supplies the answer. Go
read it, you who rest secure within your
flimsy barriers of self-interest, self-con-
fidence, and gold. When another Lincoln
comes, we shall know him.
[166]
"Of all the cankers of human happiness none
corrodes with so silent yet so baneful an influence,
as indolence. Body and mind both unemployed,
our being becomes a burthen, and every object about
us loathsome, even the dearest. Idleness begets
ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased
body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.
Exercise and application produce order in our affairs,
health of body, and cheerfulness of mind; all these
make us precious to our friends. It is while we are
young that the habit of industry is formed. If not
then, it never is afterwards. The fortune of our lives,
therefore, depends on employing well the short period
of youth. "
THOMAS JEFFERSON.
Chapter Eight
FIGHTING FOR LIFE
The very first direct result of the growing
consciousness of conditions throughout the
country is a sudden growth in the volume
of money devoted to charity, and a sudden
and quite extraordinary increase in the
personal interest shown by the wealthy in
the matter of reform.
It is perfectly natural that this should
be so. In every nation, in all periods of
history, it has been true. Sometimes this
impulse toward charity and reform, which
grows out of real personal study of the
problems of poverty, goes very far toward
saving a nation from ruin. No student
[169]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
of political economy can afford to ignore
this impulse toward charity, and sweep
it away as most thoughtless writers to-day
are inclined to sweep it away, as though it
were merely a conscious effort on the part
of the rich to buy their way into the king-
dom of heaven, to escape the accusing
finger of the poor, and to avoid the pay-
ment of a debt to humanity long overdue.
One must recall that, in the twenty years
from 1742 to 1762, an impulse toward
charity, based really on conditions very
similar in their nature to our own, went far
toward saving the nation of England from
almost certain ruin. The rich at that
time had forsaken religion, had plunged
into immorality far deeper and far more
general than the wealthy classes in the
United States to-day, and come to sneer
at purity and fidelity to the marriage vow,
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Fighting for Life
and openly boasted of their profligacy. The
poor, on the other hand, had sunk to
depths of ignorance and brutality abso-
lutely unknown in this land of ours. The
tremendous growth of manufacturing towns
was the cause that widened the rift between
these two classes. It was, in fact, exactly
our phenomenon, differing only in degree.
Society had come to live in deadly fear
of the masses, so that the statute books of
the land were filled with laws dealing death
upon the poor for the most trivial of offences.
It was a capital crime to cut down a cherry-
tree; it was a capital crime to steal.
Mark well the sequel : Society was forced
in its own defence to begin the study of
the problem of wealth and poverty. Men
and women who, through all their earlier
years, had been carefully and sedulously
trained to regard the poor as a different
[1711
The Passing of the Idle Rich
species, and to look with scorn and indif-
ference upon their suffering, went into the
streets of the industrial cities to learn.
Ministers of God who had seen their
churches empty year by year went out into
the lanes and alleys of England to seek
their flock. Hence sprung Whitfield and
John Wesley, and hence the Methodist
Church, which, whatever any one may think
of its doctrine, could have justified its
existence in the world by the work
it did in the first twenty years of its
lifetime.
A very little later, as a result of this same
impulse of charity, growing out of a fight
for life on the part of the higher classes,
Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, founded in
England his system of Sunday schools,
the very beginning of popular education.
Hannah More, a noble woman of the time,
[172]
Fighting for Life
devoted the better part of her life to laying
bare the horrible conditions of agricultural
labour. Out of the same movement came
Clarkson and Wilberforce with their tre-
mendous anti-slavery campaign that was
in the end to lead England to a peaceful
if expensive emancipation. Before that
era John Howard was a quiet country
gentleman, wealthy and happy, and blindly
ignorant of poverty and crime. At the
end of it he took his place at the top of
the list of the world's great reformers;
and the prisons of England, from that day
to this, have never sunk to the depths of
ignominy and shame in which they lay
when John Howard first was moved to
study them. Hospitals sprang up all over
the land. Organized charity began in
England. The poor of England, from
that day to this, have at least been con-
[173]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
sidered human beings, instead of mere
beasts that perish.
Therefore, let me repeat, it is fatuous to
dismiss the present tendency toward char-
ity and reform as if it were mere time-
serving. It may be, indeed, that it is one
of the greatest economic facts in America
to-day. It may be that, as it spreads and
grows and brings into the battle thousands
upon thousands of devoted men and women,
hundreds of millions of dollars of hoarded
wealth, social reform upon social reform,
it will act as a check and an offset to the
tremendous industrial discontent that is
spreading over the country. It may be
that, as in England, it will bridge the chasm
between the rich and the poor, or, at the
worst, prevent its widening to the point
of open war.
I hesitate to undertake any extensive
[1741
Fighting for Life
review of the great charities and reforms
that have sprung out of this new impulse
that has moved the rich to study the poor.
I hesitate not because there is dearth of
material, but because of my own knowledge.
I know that the facts of record are but
a very small part of all the facts in the
case. The tremendous benefactions of a
Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Mrs. Sage,
do not begin to measure the organized
and unorganized charities that have been
inaugurated by the wealthy within the
past ten years.
Personally, I do not think very much
about the forms of charity that are to-day
most prevalent amongst the wealthy.
Millions of dollars every year are poured
indiscriminately into all sorts of hoppers
here in New York, in the vain hope that
they will help to bring about better con-
[1751
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ditions. Money-charity, if I may call it
so, seems to me a beautiful thing if it is
really done in a spirit of helpfulness but,
alas, how vain it is! I do not know but
that, in the case of more than half the re-
cipients of charity of this indiscriminate
sort, it does more harm than good. This
I do know, that, according to the best es-
timates obtainable, from eighteen per cent,
to twenty-five per cent, of the people of
New York State accept charity every year.
This is a matter of record. How many
more are the recipients of unrecorded char-
ity I do not know, but I should not be
surprised if forty per cent, of the popula-
tion of the greatest state of the Union are
the beneficiaries of charity, of one sort
and another, in such a year as 1908, for
instance.
Professor Bushnell, in an estimate made
[176]
Fighting for Life
some years ago, estimated that nearly
two hundred million dollars a year was
spent upon the maintenance of abnormal
dependents in the United States. Think,
then, of the amount of money that must be
lavished upon the thousand and one indis-
criminate charities extended to people who
cannot be classed as dependents at all.
Charity, beautiful as it is in many in-
stances, is a hopeless answer to the ques-
tions of the day. The wonderful growth
of it in the past three or four years in the
social world to which I belong is hopeful,
not because of the actual good it has ac-
complished or can accomplish, but simply
because it is another index of the times,
another indubitable sign that the wealthy
men and women of Society are really throw-
ing their hearts and minds into the mighty
problem of adjusting the relationship
[177]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
between the classes which are so rapidly
drifting apart.
Of all the charities I know, I think that
the sanest, the most far-sighted, and the
most surely pregnant with good is the
Sage Foundation. Perhaps my opinion is
little more than conceit. I myself have
given so much time and effort to studying
the causes of the growth of poverty in this
country that perhaps an institution founded
with a tremendous fund of money behind it
to carry on an exhaustive and scientific
research into the causes of poverty strikes
me as the most intelligent of all the chari-
ties I have ever seen, merely because it
fits in with my own personal ideas, and is
the very charity I myself would have
founded had I had the disposition toward
charity and the means to put it into effect.
I cannot speak with authority of the
[178]
Fighting for Life
actual work that the Sage Foundation
is doing; but I fancy, if one could to-day
take an inventory of actual results accom-
plished, he would find that the foundation
has barely been begun, and that these
artisans of the millennium have not yet
even drawn tentative plans for the super-
structure. I have, however, read with
extreme interest a report made by the
trustees as the result of an investigation
of the living conditions in families in New
York City, and I do not hesitate to say
that, in the compilation of that report
alone, the Sage Foundation has accom-
plished a work of great practical utility.
People of my class, when they read a
book, seldom write to the author and give
him their impressions. In all human prob-
ability the compilers of this report do not
know whether any one in the wealthy class
[179]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
of New York Society has read the book. I
can assure them that it has been excellently
read. One night, in a company of about
a dozen, I mentioned it. All but two in the
party had read extracts from it in the news-
papers, two had read it in full for informa-
tion, and one raised a laugh by saying that
his secretary had tried in vain to buy it
at four book stores.
This work, in my opinion, will bear a
tremendous crop of fruit. We need facts,
and we need them very badly. Frankly,
we are afraid of such estimates as those
contained in Mr. Robert Hunter's "Pov-
erty," full as it is of vague, loose, and in-
accurate statements, academic estimates
in round millions, and glittering generali-
ties of all sorts. We cannot find knowledge
in the Socialist libraries, for we distrust
the Socialist propaganda intensely. We
[180]
Fighting for Life
must have sane, clear, dispassionate analy-
sis of the situation, or we shall stumble
blindly on as we are stumbling to-day,
wasting our millions on foolish charities,
debauching honest men and women by
unnecessary gifts, pandering to laziness,
and actually increasing in this land of
industry the army of dependent paupers.
I hope that the time will come when the
Sage Foundation will be, as it were, a guid-
ing light upon the sea of charity.
I can hardly pass from this subject
without a word of praise for the work in
behalf of the public health. The active,
intelligent labour of such men as Professor
Irving Fisher on the propagandist side, and
Doctor Flexner and Doctor Stiles on the
practical side, cannot be praised too highly.
It is made possible by charity. Both
Messrs. Rockefeller and Morgan, ad-
[1811
The Passing of the Idle Rich
mittedly two of the greatest of our capi-
talists, have given millions to this work.
Every year other uncounted millions pour
into it from men and women in every city
in the land. The work is spreading, grow-
ing wider, drawing into itself better medi-
cal talent, greater surgical skill, and deeper
and deeper devotion on the part of its
backers. Help of this sort does not de-
bauch the masses, for it does not lessen
the self-respect of its recipients. The hospi-
tals that are springing up all over the land,
built and supported by private capital,
are milestones in the march of progress,
and I would give full honour to the men
that plant them.
In my own circle I know a good many
people who think that they are charitable;
and I know a few charitable people. It is
a habit of my mind to ridicule the fads
[182]
Fighting for Life
and fancies of my class; and I am sorry to
be obliged to admit that, in the vast
majority of cases with which I come per-
sonally in contact, the charity of my
class is one of two things : it is either simply
a fad, with little real genuine spirit of
helpfulness behind it, or else it is, as it were,
a sop to fear. A good many people seem
to think that it is up to the rich to dis-
tribute largess to the poor, whether the
poor want it or not. They ignore the
economics of the matter, if indeed they
know them. They have come to be afraid
of the growing pressure from below, and
they think that by indiscriminate charity
they can lessen it.
So they give ships of -corn to the masses.
You remember, perhaps, that, in the later
plutocracy of Rome, after the triumph
of Sulla, it came to be a regular habit,
[183]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
when frenzied mobs of Romans or would-
be Romans threatened death and ruin
to the plutocrats, for various and sundry
men to buy shiploads of corn in Egypt
and distribute them gratis to the Roman
plebs. It is true that, in all human prob-
ability, the plutocracy of Rome prolonged
its life for more than half a century by
just such means. If a mob of slaves is
hungry, and you give them something to
eat, they will go home and eat it; and, in
the meantime, if you happen to be a
Roman senator with plenty of money,
your hired thugs may be able to find the
leaders of the delayed revolution and put
them beyond any possibility of raising
further trouble.
You forget, when you try the process
in America, that the plebs of America are
not slaves, and that their leaders, of whom
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Fighting for Life
there is a host, are pretty nearly as well
educated, are certainly as shrewd, and are
probably as strong, legally, as you are. I
fail to see how in this land charity of this
sort can have any real effect. I am
sorry to say that there is far too much of it.
Let me pass on to the second weapon of
defence. High society is becoming a ram-
pant reformer. It will reform anything on
a moment's notice. When I read in the
papers, and heard in the club, that a dozen
women of great wealth were standing along
Broadway handing bills and encouragement
to the girl shirt-waist strikers of last winter,
I was not a bit surprised. It is just what
you might have expected. Nowadays
I can hardly go to a reception or a ball
without being buttonholed by somebody
and led over into a corner to be told all
about some wonderful new reform. It is
[1851
The Passing of the Idle Rich
perfectly amazing, this plague of reform, in
its variety, in its volume, and in the inten-
sity of earnestness with which it is pushed.
Not long ago a professor of economics
in a great university, lecturing on "Social
Reform," openly advocated almost every
imaginable variety of labour legislation.
I do not believe he understood exactly
what he was saying when he gave as a
reason for such advocacy that the support
of such legislation by the wealthy classes
would tend to check the spread of certain
vague but dangerous movements amongst
the people, which he did not describe in
detail, but which, to any intelligent man,
simply meant the widespread Socialistic
movement. I wonder, does that college
professor really think that the enactment
of all sorts of legislative reforms for labour
would have any such tendency?
[186]
Fighting for Life
Give Lazarus crumbs, and he will crawl
for them. Give him nothing, and he will
demand bread, and then a steady job.
After a time we will be visited by Mr.
Lazarus, walking delegate of the labour
union, requesting an eight-hour day and
higher wages for his constituency. Dives
will probably answer by building a church
and a museum for Lazarus, and forcing
Mrs. Lazarus to turn over her garbage
to the public scavenger. After that
you may be sure of the result. Every
Lazarus in the land will demand to be
made a co-partner in the business of the
nation. That college professor may know
quite a bit about economics, but he
couldn't hold a job for a week handling
a bunch of half a dozen railroad navvies
on a construction job.
It is the same old story. There are too
[187]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
many among the idle rich who jump at
the first obvious conclusion. They see
the strange phenomenon that I have noted
as arising out of our industrial evolution,
and they say to themselves; "The nation,
indeed, faces a crisis. We are in danger of
falling. The world should continue as
it is. It is pleasant to be booted, spurred,
and in the saddle. No oats for the horse,
and we shall be thrown down. The mob
must be appeased. Feed the hungry and
we shall be saved. Cure Society of its most
evident disorders and the public mind will
forget the rest. "
So said the plutocrats of Rome. So
argued the hangers-on of Louis of France.
So Charles the First of England fell. You
may find a good many other illustrations,
if you like, in Athens, Italy, and Russia.
I challenge any gentleman to instance a
[188]
Fighting for Life
single case in history where petty reforms
and petty charities thrown indiscriminately
to the mob have ever established any
permanent betterment of social conditions,
or failed to be followed in the end by a
terrific reckoning.
It is true that, amongst the wealthy,
many men to-day are honestly advocating
and honestly working for real, deep-planted,
permanent reform.
It is almost astounding to read a para-
graph like the following signed with the
name of Andrew Carnegie :
Whatever the future may have in store
for labour, the evolutionist, who sees noth-
ing but certain and steady progress for the
race, will never attempt to set bounds to
its triumph, even to its final form of
complete and universal industrial cooper-
ation, which I hope is some day to be
reached.
By industrial cooperation Mr. Carnegie
[189]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
explains that he means the slow process
of selling or giving actual ownership of
manufacturing industries to the workmen.
He claims that they began this experiment
in this country when the Carnegie Steel
Company took in from time to time forty
odd young partners, none of whom contri-
buted a penny of money, the company
taking their notes payable only out of
profits.
A dozen other instances could be ad-
duced, beginning with the United States
Steel Corporation itself, the giant among
the trusts. There is no doubt whatever
that this reform is spreading. What is
more, I believe it is an honest reform, and
that most of the men who have introduced
it into their companies have done it from
an honest belief that it would elevate the
workingman and solve in each separate
[190]
Fighting for Life
instance the most dangerous of our indus-
trial problems.
I am not myself a manufacturer, and I
do not feel competent either to praise or
to criticize this particular solution of par-
ticular industrial problems. I know that
John Stuart Mill in his "Political Econ-
omy " vaguely hints at some such ultimate
evolution of the wage-worker; and I know
also that in many cases the cooperative
idea, in actual practice, has succeeded
very well indeed. In my own mind, know-
ing the habits of a plutocracy, I cannot
help doubting whether widespread coop-
eration between wage workers and capital,
particularly between the lower orders of
the wage workers and the larger masters
of capital, would not simply afford
to dishonest, disreputable, or unprin-
cipled captains of industry a fuller
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
opportunity than they now enjoy to hold
down the wages and profits of wage
workers.
Yet I would but express this doubt as
a personal feeling of my own, rather than
as a conviction founded upon research or
upon broad knowledge of the subject. It
is not germane to my theme to enter upon
a detailed discussion either of this possible
reform or of any other. I would simply
point out as illustrations two or three of
the greater reforms that I hear month
by month discussed more and more among
the people of my class.
Personally, I am a bit tired of reform;
for Society, as I have said, will plunge
en masse through any door that has a reform
label sticking on it anywhere. Often, as I
think of the long list of reforms advocated
by distinguished individuals, churches,
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Fighting for Life
educators, civic associations, politicians, and
societies, I wonder what would happen if
they all succeeded. I won't be here to
find out; but if, in some future existence,
no matter what my destination, I hear
that it has come to pass, I am quite sure
that I shall be glad to be away.
In passing from this subject I cannot
refrain from reiterating the note of warning
contained in an earlier paragraph. To
my charitable friends of the upper classes
whose heads are full of reforms and alms-
giving I would say, give not at all if, in
giving, or in supporting reforms, you hope
or expect thereby to gain the favour of the
mob. Remember that in Rome the masses
were a race of parasites who could be
fed or crushed as the occasion demanded.
In America, on the contrary, the masses
are the producing elements of the nation,
[193]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
and you are the parasites. Between the
cry of the Roman multitude for coin and
the demand of the working American for
wages there is an intensity and seriousness
as much different as between the humming
of the mosquito and the thunder of an
earthquake.
r 1941
"When the public deliberates concerning any
regulation of commerce or police, the proprietors of
land never can mislead it, with a view to promote the
interest of their own particular order; at least, if they
have any tolerable knowledge of that interest. They are,
indeed, too often defective in this tolerable knowledge.
They are the only one of the three orders whose revenue
costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them,
as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any
plan or project of their own. That indolence, the
natural effect of the ease and security of their situa-
tion, renders them too often not only ignorant, but
incapable of the application of mind necessary in
order to foresee and understand the consequences
of any public regulation. "
ADAM SMITH.
Chapter Nine
THE SOCIAL NEMESIS
I have shown, in the previous chapter,
how futile and empty are most of the
struggles toward charity and reform carried
on by the wealthy class. This brings me,
in my train of thought, to one of the most
melancholy reflections that can be con-
ceived. It has come to me very often, un-
der all sorts of circumstances.
The fact of the matter is that wealthy
Society in America, as everywhere else, is
pursued by a demon of futility. It does
not matter what we do, whether we work
like any other man or woman, whether we
play like normal men, whether we study,
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
whether we idle, or whether we work as
other men, or fritter away our time in
idleness; whether we spend our money
on charity and reforms, or throw it away
in the pursuit of pleasure; whether we study
hard and seriously, or merely regale our
minds and appetites with frivolous novels
and salacious plays; whether we play or
whether we don't nothing seems real,
nothing seems earnest, nothing has any
result. Too often our lives are empty of
anything permanent, anything honest, any-
thing simple and human.
We live in a world of dreams, peopled
with passing phantoms men and women
that come and go and leave in our hearts
no trace of real affection, no honest, sin-
cere, and heart-felt impulse of friendship,
no lasting shadow of reality. It all seems
sham and pretence. It cloys in time, and
often in sheer desperation we plunge into
[108]
The Social Nemesis
extremes for which we have no genuine
taste, no real desire, no inborn impulse
at all.
But of all the futile things in the world
none is more futile than wealth itself. If
you rest on the things you have won, and
set yourself down in idleness to enjoy them,
they turn to ashes on your lips. They are
flat, tasteless, like fruit picked long ago.
I remember an incident in which I took a
part, not very long ago, that showed me
the opposite results in all its horrid
semblance.
I was at a very brilliant social function
in the London social world. I met at that
reception a woman whose name I had
heard as a household word in Society for
many years. She was esteemed a brilliant
woman; she was reckoned a leader in the
most splendid Society of the world. She was
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
wealthy beyond all human need. She
occupied a powerful place in a political
world where everything human had its
part. She was a companion of princes
and the equal of peers. We were talking
alone, immediately after our introduction,
when she said :
"Oh, Mr. Martin, you are an American.
You are a Wall Street man. You could
help me to get some of your American gold ! "
I was astounded, and I showed it in my
answer:
"Why, my dear lady, surely you have
gold enough. If I am not mistaken, you
rank amongst the wealthiest women of the
nation. Why should you want gold?
Moreover, you have social standing and
are famous throughout England. Of
what possible use could more gold be
to you?"
[200]
The Social Nemesis
I can still see the haggard face, the quiv-
ering lips, the blazing eyes of this great
Society woman as she answered me.
"Oh, Mr. Martin, you do not know me
I am almost ashamed to confess the
truth. I dream night and day of gold.
I want to have a room at the top of my
house filled with it filled with gold
sovereigns. I would like to go into that
room night after night, when every one
else is asleep, and bury myself in yellow
sovereigns up to my neck, and play with
them, toss them about, to hear the jingling
music of the thing I love the best!"
Think of it! Picture a woman, wife of a
man, mother of splendid children, born
with the beautiful instincts innate in her
sex, sinking to such a depth as that ! Think
of the awful shallow emptiness of a life and
a training that bore such fruit as this!
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
Yet, it is all so very natural. Most
men and women in this world are kept
clean, sane, and normal in the pursuit of
little things. The trivial household joys
that fill so full the happy life of the normal
woman, the little business triumphs that
keep alive in the heart of the normal man
the spirit of personal ambition, the human
lust for a fight, the ever-changing, ever-
interesting, ever-luring struggle for ad-
vantage these are at once the burden
and the safety of mankind. In them is
true happiness; in them is true humanity.
The class of which I write has lost them
in its very birth. The mother of a boy
in the middle class looks forward with de-
light to the day when that boy will go
forth into the world to battle against cir-
cumstances. From his earliest childhood
onward he learns the necessity of labour,
[202]
The Social Nemesis
he comes to regard it as his birthright.
With eagerness he prepares for it. The
little triumphs of boyhood, the trivial
victories of college days, are joy unbounded
to his mind, because they are but steps in
that long climb toward greatness, renown
and wealth, that are his birthright; and
when at last he goes forth from college
halls, from labour on the farm, from some
little clerical position that he has held in
his adolescence, to strike out for himself
into the great open world, to blaze out
paths of his own choosing, his life is filled
in its every moment with new thrills of
excitement, of happiness, of accomplish-
ment of hie, real life, not imitation.
Look at the other side. Think of the
boy born, as they say, with a golden spoon
in his mouth. Perhaps, in his infancy, he
does not know that he can have everything
[203]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
in the world for which he asks. Perhaps
his parents are humanly wise for many
of the wealthy are; yet, even in his very
tender boyhood, the truth will come home
to him. He will learn before he is ten years
old that there is a difference between him
and other boys whom he sees at play in the
park. He will discover that the difference is
money. He will discover that his parents
can get whatever they like, spend as
much as they please, waste fortunes on their
pleasures, throw gold away as though it
were dross. He will learn, on the other
hand, that the children of the poor can
have no expensive toys like his, that they
cannot be dressed as he is dressed, that
their parents must win every dollar that
they spend by some hard work, while his own
parents, apparently, receive as much as they
want and more without any labour whatever.
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The Social Nemesis
That boy will be more than human if,
by the time he is a young man, he has not
passed the entrance to the paths where
the true happiness of life is to be found.
Either money will mean nothing to him,
and he will have settled down to be one of
the idle rich, simply taking what the gods
send him and doing his best to enjoy it,
or else a most unholy lust for gold will have
taken possession of his soul. Eliminate
the necessity for struggle, and you re-
move from money all its true value. It
becomes either dross, to be thrown away
for other things better worth while, or
it becomes an idol, a god, the very sum and
substance of the world's desire.
I know, of course, that there are marked
exceptions. I have in my mind as I write
a young man of a Western city, born to
an enormous fortune, married to another,
[205]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
and trained and nurtured in the lap of
luxury. Almost everything conspired to
make him either an idler or a money
worshipper. He is neither. It is an ac-
cident. In his early youth he became an
invalid, and was sent out by his father to
live on a ranch. The ranchman's wife
was a real woman, and instinct taught
her how to handle that boy. He was put
to work. At first, when his father learned
through his letters that he was spending
his time mending fences, feeding pigs,
watering horses, and milking cows, he
objected strongly. He wrote to the ranch-
man to this effect. The ranchman re-
buked his wife, and set the boy to work
at other gentler things.
A week later the boy wrote an indignant
letter to his father to the effect that he
was coming home if he couldn't go back
[206]
The Social Nemesis
to real work. The father saw a great light;
and free permission was given to the ranch-
man's wife to do whatever she liked with
the boy. When he went home a year and
a half later he was the makings of a real
man. To-day his father is dead, and he
has succeeded to the command of a mighty
estate. He holds his place in the best
Society of the land, but he holds, too, his
place amongst the workers. At the age of
twenty-eight he had twice refused polit-
ical office, and has refused also the presi-
dency of a bank which he controls and of
which he is a director, on the ground that
as a director he will not vote for the ap-
pointment of a dummy officer. He is a
deep, clear-headed student of events, and
money, to him, has been but the lever to
move the world.
The same is true to a certain extent of
[207]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
the daughters of the rich. Some of them,
in spite of their wealth, are splendid women,
but too often wealth has destroyed in them
the clear and beautiful springs of life.
Either they worship it as a god or they
despise it, throwing it away like water.
Of the two vices, I do not know which is
the worse. I do not know, in sane and
sober judgment, whether I, as a man
of wealth and fashion (and yet a man of
business and of some knowledge), despise
more deeply the outright worshipper of
Mammon, or the reckless, extravagant,
and foolish idle rich. Thank God, I am
not obliged to choose my friends from
either, for still within the barriers of gold
there lies a little leaven of the old Society.
And if futility clings very closely to the
very gold that is the basis of our class and
our estate, it clings, too, to almost every-
[208]
The Social Nemesis
thing else that we do. Come with me to a
fashionable restaurant or the dining-room
of a great hotel. At the dinner hour it
is crowded with hundreds of people. One
might think that they are hungry and
that they come to eat. It is hardly so.
They come to hear the orchestra, to talk
with their friends, to play with food and
drink of a kind and a quantity far beyond
their needs. Dinner is but an excuse.
The whole occasion is a diversion, nothing
more. Contrast an occasion like that with
the homely gathering of a few choice
spirits out in a simple country home, or
in the middle-class city home if you like,
and note the marvellous difference. It
has been my good fortune, on far too few
occasions it is true, to be admitted as a
friend into what I might call a middle-
class home the home of an author, not by
[209]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
any means rich. I will simply say, without
going into details, that every time I went
there it made me homesick, and I stopped
it for that reason. I do not think I could
say more if I wrote a book about it.
Of all the melancholy travesties on fun,
I think that the sports and games of the
wealthy young men and women of our day
are the finest parody ever written or acted.
Drive through a country district to a
fashionable out-of-town club. At half a
dozen places on your way you will see
groups of boys and girls playing ball,
flying kites, paddling, rowing, or doing
something else in the natural human way.
You will hear shouts, quarrels perhaps,
signs of intense and natural rivalry. When
you come to your journey's end you will
find other groups of pleasure seekers. Go
join the groups of young men and women
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The Social Nemesis
in beautiful summer costumes playing golf
or tennis; or sit on the piazzas over the sea
and watch a game of bridge. Listen for
the shouts of joy such as you heard down
the road, and you will hear the cawing of
the crows. Catch the drift of the conver-
sation. In a very great number of cases
the subject matter of it is that it would be
a lot more fun to do something else at some
other time in some other place. The dreary
pleasures of the idle rich, yachting, horse-
racing, golf, tennis, hunting these are
not sports; they are schemes devised to
keep us from being bored to death by
the mere fact of living.
I met a man down town the other day
who told me he had bought a farm in Al-
berta. For a great many years past I have
met him at all sorts of functions in all the
big cities of the East, in London, and in
[211]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Paris. I asked him what in the world
he was going to do with a farm. At
first he wouldn't reply, afraid that he
might hurt my feelings, but finally he
told me.
"I'm sick. There isn't much the matter
with me, but I have simply got to have a
change. My nerves have gone all to pieces.
Playing bridge gives me the "willies."
I'd sooner pick rags than go to another
dance. Golf the way we play it in the
summer is worse than ping-pong. Late
suppers have got on my nerves. The races
are a horrible bore. I'd sooner go to
Hoboken than Paris. I've got to do some-
thing or I will die. Last winter in London
I made friends with a young fellow twenty-
one years old who last month got into
disgrace and was banished to Alberta.
Last month I heard from him and that
[2121
The Social Nemesis
settled me. He swears he has found the
antidote. I'm going out to try it. "
He went. I don't suppose he'll stay
there, because he never stayed in any place
in his life for any length of time, and I
presume before long he'll come back and
spend a lot of money on manicures and
make his hands look as if he had never
worked before he plunges again into the
same Dead Sea: but, sometimes, I wish
I had the nerve to follow him, or to buy
his farm from him when he grows tired
of it.
If our wealth, and our pleasures, turn
at last to nothing and weary us beyond
expression, no less in the more sacred
things of life real life, I mean does
this same miserable demon of futility pur-
sue us. As the world has read these past
two or three years the low, horrible, de-
[213]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
praved story of the marital relationships
of scion after scion of one of our wealthiest
families, the world has turned with dis-
gust from the paltry record of intrigue,
vile lust, dishonour, and shame. That
story is but one of many. It is true that
in this, the dearest and tenderest of all
the relationships of life, we are haunted by
futility. Our young men and maidens
marry in honour and hope in a world of
hope, lighted by the eternal fires of love.
Too often, alas! romance becomes tragedy,
or comedy, if you look at it that way.
It is the same old story. Everything is
far too easy. All the comforts, all the
luxuries, all the pleasures for which nor-
mal men and women have to work, drop,
like over-ripe fruit, into their waiting hands.
There is no struggle to hold their minds
together. There is no common ambition
[214]
The Social Nemesis
to fill their hearts and souls with a desire
for mutual help. It is all empty, frivolous,
and vain. In time it is easy to slip away
from the paths of convention into habits
of looseness and even of vice. The old-
fashioned religion is dead among us, and
so one great protector of the home has
passed and gone.
I cannot find it in my heart to condemn
as strongly as I should the lapses of the
idle rich from the paths of virtue; for I
know exactly how it is. It is futile. It
is empty. It is a restriction of freedom.
It is a chain about your neck. You try,
at first, to loosen it; at last you determine
to break it. Then the patient world is
treated to another tale of infidelity, of
misery, of little picayune human weakness
a tale to laugh at, or to weep over,
according as you will.
[2151
The Passing of the Idle Rich
I am not going to dwell upon this theme;
for it is a beastly thing. I have only
mentioned it because it is a logical climax
to this chapter on FUTILITY. And I
regard futility as the real nemesis of Society.
It turns our lives to nothing; it makes of
our fairest garden a desert; it robs us, in
our very cradles, of our lives, our liberties,
and our happiness. It leaves us groping
about in a world of shadows, longing for
the substance, dreaming of realities we
never can know, wishing always for change,
sighing always for worlds that are out of
our reach. Of all the grim jokes that ever
were perpetrated, the grimmest of all, in
my estimation, is the time-honoured coup-
ling of the words wealth and happiness in
the formal blessing of a new-made bride.
[216
"If the wealthy classes so often come off second best
in a struggle with the democracy, the cause is generally
to be found in their disinclination to submit to leader-
ship. It has always been a failing of rich and edu-
cated men to have too high an opinion of their own
abilities. The prospect which faced the Roman
Conservatives at this moment (88 B. C.) when the
Revolution, in the person of Marius, had made itself
complete master of the State, was indeed dark enough
to close up the party ranks. Yet it was only by
accident that they discovered in Sutta a fit champion
for their cause. "
FERRERO.
Chapter Ten
THE DEATH KNELL OF IDLENESS
As I write, I am, myself oppressed by this
nemesis of futility. Half a dozen times while
I was writing this book I stopped to reason
with myself to the effect that it wouldn't
do any good, that the rich will not read it,
and that, even if they do, it cannot pierce
through the armour of self-conceit, vanity,
and arrogance. Yet I have persevered,
in the hope that perhaps some few will
read and understand, and, instead of set-
ting me down as an alarmist and an agita-
tor, will at least consider me honest, and
perhaps set to work for themselves to find
out the truth about these things.
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The Passing of the Idle Rich
That grim truth is that we as a class are
condemned to death. We have outlived
our time. It is not necessary, as it was
in the earlier ages of the world's history,
that the mass of the people should be en-
slaved to give leisure to an upper class in
the pursuit of luxuries, of refinement, of
the factors that go to the making of civili-
zation. Instead of being the roof and
crown of things, the wealthy class in
America to-day has sunk to the level of
the parasite. The time has come when
the producing classes are about to bring it
to judgment. In fact, to-day we stand
indicted before the court of civilization.
We are charged openly with being parasites;
and the mass of evidence against us is so
overwhelming that there is no doubt
whatever about the verdict of history, if
indeed it must come to a verdict.
[220]
The Death Knell of Idleness
Idleness is doomed as a vocation. Of
that I am perfectly certain. Even in the
social world it is becoming unfashion-
able. Not so very long ago, in the fashion-
able world of New York, it was considered
bad taste, in fact, it was a decided breach
of etiquette, to inquire amongst the men
of your acquaintance what anybody did
for a living. Within the past five years
there has been a very decided change in
this respect, and I constantly hear that
very question asked, without rebuke, in
the most fashionable clubs of the city.
A man whom I know pretty well, him-
self a member of the highest social order,
but a man of indefatigable energy, recently
put very neatly this fact that many of the
quondam idle class are now engaging them-
selves in useful pursuits. On the street one
day he met a young man, a confirmed idler
[221]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
of long standing. He exchanged the time
of day with him, and was told that he was
about to go to Europe to join in the social
season of London. He congratulated him
and said he thought it was a good thing
to do.
A few nights later, talking to me about
him, he said:
"I feel sorry for Charlie. He seems so
lonely. He can't find any one to play with
him!"
In a measure, that is true. The con-
firmed idler of the social world is slowly
coming to be despised instead of envied.
He still infests a few of the up-town
clubs, but even here he is more and more
relegated to the bottom of the social list.
It is harder and harder every social year
to fill up the ranks for social entertainment.
A dinner or an early reception can be man-
The Death Knell of Idleness
aged very well, for the young men who work
will go to such functions, perhaps as freely
as they ever went. It is far different with
the late dance or the late reception.
If you could go down into Wall Street
and call the roll of the bond houses, it
would astound you to discover how many
young men of the highest social class are
working very hard right at the bottom of
the ladder of industry learning the financial
business. A friend of mine, a fairly well-
to-do man of a small city in the Middle
West, sent his son to me a year or so ago
with a letter asking me to introduce him
in Wall Street with a view to his learning
the bond business. He had chosen that
as his vocation in life, and he had taken a
special course in college as a preparation for
it. I sent him, with personal letters, to
half a dozen friends of mine, partners in
[223]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
various houses. I told him simply to
look around, at first, and to talk freely and
frankly to these gentlemen about the
chances for a young man in that line of
business.
He came back to me in the course of a
week, considerably crestfallen. He had
looked forward to earning his living in an
honourable way. He found the conditions
in this labour market most deplorable from
his point of view. According to his story,
every one of these big bond houses an-
nounced itself able to get all the apprentice
labour that it needed at from five dollars to
ten dollars a week. His report interested me
so much that I went around myself to some
of my friends to learn the causes of this
strange condition.
In the case of one bond house I discovered
that it had one very skilful and very high
[2241
The Death Knell of Idleness
paid man selling bonds at retail through-
out the city. Working under him were
three young men learning the bond busi-
ness. I knew them all, personally, socially.
They belonged to one of the best of the
younger sets. Two of them went out a good
deal, and the third had a reputation as
something of a student. One of them I
knew to be the happy possessor of four
automobiles and a small stable of horses.
Both the others owned automobiles, and
belonged to some of the most expensive,
as well as the best, of the up-town clubs.
One of these young men and none of
them was so very young at that received
the salary of fifteen dollars a week. The
other two were getting ten dollars apiece.
All three were college men. My friend in
this bond house told me that two of them
were making good; but the third has the
[225]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
" ten o'clock in the morning habit," and will
not last very long. Of course, none of
them can begin to live on the money he
receives for his work. I do not think
that any one of them could pay his tailor
and haberdashery bill with his salary,
and even the bond house clerk has to eat,
you know.
Further investigation showed me that
there is a perfect flood of these young men
turned loose each year upon the financial
districts of this country, not only here, but
in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and St.
Louis. They go to work for trivial sal-
aries, because they care little or nothing
about the amount that they receive. They
are not working for wages, but they are
working for emancipation. They do not
want to be idlers, because they know that
in these days idleness is doomed. They
[226]
The Death Knell of Idleness
pick out Wall Street, particularly, I think,
the bond department of Wall Street, be-
cause that is recognized as a world of real
work that is fitted to the tastes and abili-
ties of a well-educated but not too rigor-
ously trained young man.
These young men are by no means effete
dilletanti. They are strong, vigorous young
men, and they plunge into what they know
to be a competitive field with a full knowl-
edge that they are not likely to go very
far unless they earn their way. For in
these same offices, and working in the field
in hot competition with them, there is
still an army of young men from the prov-
inces, so to speak, who actually do live
upon the proceeds of their work. It gave
a real personal joy to discover that, in
several of the banking houses which I
looked into, the poor young man who starts
[227]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
out into the world in competition with
these scions of the wealthy aristocracy is
paid a better salary at the beginning than
is his moneyed competitor, and has at
least an equal chance for advancement.
Indeed it is recognized that the wealthy
young man has a marked advantage through
his personal acquaintance with men of
money, and more is expected of him in
return from his training than is expected
of the self-supporting clerk. As a rule,
however, the real workers are given out-
lying districts of the country to canvass,
while the aristocracy of the profession does
its work in the city.
I sketch this phenomenon in some detail,
because I think it is a very significant thing
in its bearing upon the subject of this
book. Perhaps more than any other one
outlet it is an avenue leading toward hon-
[228]
The Death Knell of Idleness
curable labour, suited to the capacity and
the taste of our wealthy young men. That
the market is crowded to-day, and has been
crowded for five years past, more than it
ever was crowded before in the history of
the financial profession, speaks far more
eloquently than I can speak of the change
of sentiment amongst the wealthy.
In the Harvard Club, of a Saturday
afternoon in winter, you will find groups
of young men sitting around and talking,
just as you would have found them fifteen
years ago. There is one marked difference.
Fifteen years ago they would have been
talking about social events, the sports,
and various other trivial things that went
in those days to make up the sum and sub-
stance of a fashionable young man's career.
Nowadays many of these groups are ear-
nestly discussing finance, not in its relation
[229]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
to their own private fortunes or misfor-
tunes in the stock market, but in its
broader aspect. You hear such phrases
as "gold supply," "premium bond," "over-
production of securities," "diversion of
money from the legitimate market," "in-
trinsic value," "investment outlook," etc.
They are, in fact, talking shop; and I do
not think I have ever met any other class
of men more addicted to the habit than
these novitiates of the financial game.
Even their sisters, nurtured in luxury,
and taught, as they still unhappily are,
that elegant idleness is the proper portion
of the sex, are beginning to rebel. They
are seeking knowledge eagerly, sometimes
in places and under circumstances that
promise not the best of results. More
particularly during the past five or ten
years there has been the really extraor-
[230]
The Death Knell of Idleness
dinary propaganda amongst the women
of the younger set in our great cities
looking toward the strengthening of the
body and the building up of a vigorous
and buoyant health that would have been
considered actually vulgar in the generation
that preceded them. Health, in fact, in
many of the younger sets, has become al-
most a religion, a sort of fetich. They
study hygiene, biology, and the mystery
of life. Perhaps they are coming to know
too much at too early an age, but in ex-
cuse let it be said that it is far better to
know too much than to know too little.
On the other hand, I have already writ-
ten of the tendency of the fashionable young
women of the day toward charity and re-
form. They follow fads madly, working
as hard and using up as much nerve force
in this pursuit as any young woman of the
[231J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
middle class gives to her household work,
or even to her bread-winning activities.
I could name a dozen young women of the
finest families in New York who within
the past twelve months have actually
thrown themselves into this sort of function
with such fiery ardour and zeal that they
have either totally neglected their social
activities or broken down completely under
the strain of double labour. Such in-
stances are more numerous year by year.
I do not know that I fully approve it,
but I set it down here for the judgment
of the world.
So, on the one hand, the ranks of the
doomed class are being swiftly depleted
by what I must call rank out and out de-
sertion. The idle rich, particularly the
younger set, are depleted year by year by
squadrons of young men and women who
[232]
The Death Knell of Idleness
go over to the army of workers. I do not
know that there is any one single sign in
the world in which I live that gives me
greater hope than this. The dishonour of
inactivity, sloth, and idleness is coming to
be widely recognized in the very best
classes of Society. Old prejudices are
breaking down under the demands of the
younger men for something to do. Even
labour with the hands is not beneath them.
As I pause to think, I could name at least
half a dozen young men of my own set
who within the past two or three years
have gone into the railroad business, carried
chains with engineering gangs in the field,
or done other real manual labour. To-
day the son of one of the oldest and noblest
families in New York is superintending the
laying of sewers in a New England town
under a municipal contract.
[233J
The Passing of the Idle Rich
If actual desertion is thinning the ranks
of the idle rich, there is another and even
greater cause which will tend in the future,
as it is tending to-day, to limit the number
of this class. It lies much deeper than the
mere phenomenon of desertion. It is,
in fact, nothing more nor less than the
removal of the means of making gigan-
tic fortunes through the exploitation of
men.
I do not intend to dwell upon this phase
of the passing of the idle rich to any great
extent, because its effects are necessarily
slow. Indeed, they will not be felt for
many years to come. Yet I would point
out one or two phases of this question that
seem to me to be intensely interesting and
vastly important. In the first place, the
opportunities for the making of gigantic
fortunes are being limited more and more by
[234]
The Death Knell of Idleness
the world-embracing activities of those who
already possess gigantic wealth.
Let any man discover in the mountains
of Mexico, in the forbidding ridges of
Alaska, or on the plains of the Yukon, great
new deposits of iron, or coal, or oil, and
immediately, almost before the news of
such discovery has reached the world at
large, a dozen secret agents rush to inves-
tigate. They represent the Pearsons, of
London; the Guggenheims or Morgans,
of New York; the Rockefellers or the Roth-
schilds, of New York or Germany. They
are the first in the field; they preempt, for
fortunes already far beyond competition,
the opportunity of making a tremendous
fortune out of the new discovery.
Think of the raw materials of commerce
sugar, meat, oil, iron, coal, copper,
cotton, wheat, corn, lumber is it not
[235]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
absolutely true that in the manufacture
and exploitation of this tremendous mass
of the raw material of wealth the possibility
of amassing enormous fortunes is almost
hopelessly limited by the activities and
the world-girdling power of capitalist
groups already far beyond the reach of
competition?
The free land of America is gone. All
these great staples that have been in gener-
ations past the vehicles in which men have
been carried upon the road to lordly for-
tunes are already in the hands of a few
hundred families. This fact, sinister as
it undoubtedly is in its broader aspect upon
the economic conditions of the country,
must certainly tend to eliminate more and
more the possibility for the creation of
additional gigantic industrial fortunes in
this country. In so far as this is true it
[2361/
The Death Knell of Idleness
is a very important item indeed among the
forces that tend toward the elimination of
the idle rich.
More than this, as I have pointed out
already in a phrase, the growing knowledge
on the part of the people of the ways and
means by which they have been exploited
for the creation of wealth will surely pre-
vent any further long-continued growth of
this same process. Men are being sent up to
congress year by year sworn to break up
and destroy the coordinate political ma-
chine that has made possible the growth
of the power of the trusts. Earnest
fighters like La Follette may well be
watched, for though no little of his
work and his talk is based on fallacy, yet
in this at least he represents the temper
of the whole United States, that he is a
bitter and an ardent enemy of the concen-
[237]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
tration of wealth. The agitation over the
Guggenheim claims in Alaska, the bursts
of popular acclaim over land-fraud pros-
ecutions in the West, the sardonic joy of
the people over the retrieving of enormous
coal land areas stolen by railroads, the warm
enthusiasm of the West for government
reclamation, conservation, and preemption
these are signs of the times all point-
ing in the one direction.
They do not mark the end of the idle
rich, to-day existent. They do point un-
mistakably toward the prevention of a
new crop of great American fortunes won
through exploitation of government prop-
erty and popular rights. If you couple
with them the ever-growing movement
toward Socialism, and the hundred and one
private propaganda along strange and often
faulty economic lines, you cannot help
[238]
The Death Knell of Idleness
but feel as I feel, that even if there were
a revolution, in a hundred years, when
the present great fortunes of America
are subdivided, split up, and scattered
among a thousand heirs, the wealth of
America will certainly not be held ninety-
five per cent, in the hands of five per
cent, of the people and five per cent, in
the hands of the rest of the people. And
it is self-evident that since the gathering
together of wealth in the hands of the few
gave us the idle rich, the natural scattering
of that wealth into more and more hands
as the years go on must tend in the other
direction.
[239]
The days of the idle rich in America are as a tale
that is told. To-morrow in this land there will be
one of two things, either an evolution or a revolution.
. . . The class I represent will again be merged
into and assimilated by the body of the nation. . . .
We shall reenact in this land some qf the most
terrible tragedies qf history.
Chapter Eleven
THE END OF THE STORY
We have come to the end of the story.
The days of the idle rich in America are
as a tale that is told. To-morrow in this
land there will be one of two things: either
an evolution or a revolution. Either by one
of those characteristically swift and mar-
vellous changes for which the history of
our race is noted, the class which I repre-
sent will again be merged into and assim-
ilated by the body of the nation, as it was
half a century ago, or we shall stand face
to face with the forces of anarchy, Socialism,
trade unionism, and a hundred other cults
that either do represent or claim to represent
[243]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
the spirit of this mighty people, and we
shall reenact in this land some of the most
terrible tragedies of history.
I do not believe a middle course is possible.
I know, of course, that the rank and file
of the class I represent are blind and care-
less. I know that many of them, if they
read this book, will lay it aside with a
smile, calling it hysterical, calling it un-
true. Wealth never yet in history has
recognized its true position in the world,
and I suppose it never will. Yet I am
bound to say the things I think, and I can
only trust that some few at least will be
impelled to study facts and come before
the tribunal of public opinion within the
next few years armed and prepared for
their own vindication.
I have written in vain if I have not made
it clear that while the class of the wealthy
[244]
The End of the Story
has been increasing steadily during the
past five years, faster than it ever increased
in a similar period before, that growth in
numbers has been accompanied also by
an ever-increasing knowledge on the part
of the wiser heads in the social world, by a
serious, sober, and careful analysis of the
real conditions among the wealthy them-
selves, and by a genuine adaptation of
the minds of the wealthy to these new
conditions as they come home to us.
This is the one hope of American Society.
It is not conclusive, but at least it points
the way toward the future of America.
I do not want to be considered an alarm-
ist or to cry panic from the house tops.
Yet, in the light of facts, and in the face
of the terrific changes that must take place
within the next decade in our social and
business structure, I cannot see how the
[245]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
business world of America can long escape
a reckoning that has for years been over-
due. There has to be in this country an
adjustment that will shake the financial
and business world to its foundations. It
is possible, though not probable, that the
necessary social changes of the next de-
cade could be accomplished without a
cataclysm; but with the concurrent business
changes, the necessary shifting of the bases
of our industrial system, the inevitable
scaling down of the extravagance to which
the nation as a whole has become ac-
customed, it is, I should say, utterly im-
possible that we can go through without an
industrial disturbance that will strike far
deeper than any we have known since 1893.
For the poison of gold has debauched
and corrupted American Society, it has
brought within our gates new armies of
[246]
The End of the Story
parasites, it has led to a degree of osten-
tation and of luxury, and even of vice and
profligacy, comparable with that of the
Roman Empire under Heliogabalus. I said
in a former chapter that the middle class
in America has almost if not quite lost its
power. One of the most vital reasons for
this fact is that much of that middle class
has become confused with the lower fringes
of the wealthy class, has learned to ape
its habits and its luxuries, has come to
live with ostentation and display, and has
given up its traditional habits of frugality
and thrift to waste its substance on a
riotous form of living that is, as it were,
but a faint and unworthy imitation of the
habits of life of the wealthy.
In the process of adjustment that is
unavoidable this drunkenness must pass.
The great professional class, which in all
[247]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ages has produced so many thinkers, writers,
and makers of a nation's history, must
come back into its own; it must learn again
the lesson of thrift and providence which it
has learned so well in France and Germany,
and which, forty years ago, were the most
striking features of its character here in
this land. If, as is true, the class I repre-
sent has very much to learn, I take it to
be equally true that every other class in
the land also has its lessons to learn. The
process of learning is not to be an easy one.
It may be that we as a nation will be tried
in the fiery furnace of adversity, immersed
in the gloomy depths of business depression,
and crushed beneath a load of debt and
repudiation before we have learned the
first small principles upon which the newer
order of things in America must be founded.
It is not my business, however, to talk
[248]
The End of the Story
to the people of America at large. I
am addressing this book to Society, to the
men and women whom I know, to the boys
and girls who are to take our places in the
social world as years go by. To them,
in all sincerity, I am preaching a sermon
of warning. I am calling them to gird
themselves for battle a battle the like
of which has never been fought in this land
before a battle for life.
My appeal, if it were merely an appeal
to save ourselves, would be sordid indeed.
For it is ours to think of saving others.
The bugle of the assured destiny of our
race should quicken us to the service of a
great and holy cause. The call is the call
of the future, and the cause is the cause of
humanity. I covet for you, my friends and
members of my class, a higher destiny than
the mere panic-stricken flight to safety. I
[249]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
am aware not only of your views, but of
your virtues. Never before has there been
such an opportunity for real service to
mankind. You have the means, you have
the power, you have the position, you have
all, save only the will. I feel confident
that if you give the matter study, and do
not throw away this book as mere idle
talk, the will to serve will come to you.
I know that the great bulk of Society
can be reconstructed only by one agency,
and that is death. To-day, in the South,
there linger here and there many old men
and women who never yet have ceased
to call down curses from heaven upon the
head and memory of Lincoln. It is per-
fectly self-evident that in this other cause
of which I write, and that has come to
be so near to me, the army of the unrecon-
structed must remain for many years
[250]
The End of the Story
tremendous. Particularly is this true of
the newer recruits within the golden gates
of the city of wealth. You may note
that we are still enjoying the company of
the first generation of the captains of in-
dustry. The second generation marches
swiftly upon us. It will not be satisfied,
it will not be sated, until it has reached
the mellowness of age. It will follow the
will-of-the-wisp of society to the bitter
end. It is more stubborn, I think, than
even that ancient culture of Boston and
Philadelphia. Most certainly it is much
more offensive to the public at large. In
fact, more than any other specific sub-
division of the army of wealth, it flaunts
its glaring banners in the faces of the
people.
I often think, as I watch the young men
and women of my class trying to enjoy
[251]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
themselves, what a terrible problem we
have bequeathed to them. I am no longer
young; even my friends call me middle
aged. At any rate, I have reached a
stage in life where I can stop and weigh
the facts, and come to a conclusion un-
biased by the mere joy of living. There-
fore I am moved to pity as I watch the
very young of my class at play. For I
am positively certain that three out of
four of them will face, in the fulness of
their lives, many bitter and heart-search-
ing problems. Already the shadow of
impending events falls heavily upon them.
Many of them, even in their very tender
youth, have learned that they belong to
a hated class. How different is their lot
from mine! For I, as a boy, was taught to
consider myself the heir of all the ages. I
was taught that I belonged to a class loved
[252]
The End of the Story
and respected for its virtues, envied and
looked up to for its opportunites. I was
taught that the women of my class were
models and examplars to all the world.
I was taught that the men were the
uncrowned kings of America, leaders of
thought, leaders of action, masters of
destiny, masters of business.
To-day, in New York, the girls of our
class cannot read the newspapers without
learning the fearful lesson that their fathers
are despised by the people and their mothers
are suspected by the women of the nation.
Ridicule, slander, sarcasm, and obloquy
are poured upon us day by day. I some-
times wonder how the class can survive it.
It is a fearful thing for a young girl to be
brought up to womanhood in an atmosphere
like this. It must breed either careless,
heartless indifference, or a spirit of dis-
[253]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
content. I hope it is the latter, but, alas !
I very much fear it is more likely to be
the former.
What are we going to do about it? I
wish I could answer the question in one
great, sweeping generality. Unfortunately,
I do not believe it can be answered so. I
know that the author of "The Trust: Its
Book" has found an answer in a Utopian
partnership between capital and labour.
I know that Mr. Carnegie has found the
answer in cooperation. I know that such
skilful writers as Lloyd and Wells have
solved the riddle by Socialism. I know
that many thousands of the hardest think-
ing, hardest working citizens of this coun-
try are pledged already to the doctrine
of government ownership of the sources
of wealth. I know that Danton and Robes-
pierre thought that they had found it
[254]
The End of the Story
when they set up the guillotine in Paris.
I know that the Terrorists of Russia have
worked out their own solution. I know
that the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Sage Foundation, and a thousand other
mighty charities are intended as an an-
swer. I know that Samuel Gompers and
John Mitchell think that the extension of
trade unionism will solve it. Above all,
I know that many of the seasoned leaders
of the social world believe that it will
swiftly solve itself. I believe that Mr.
Morgan and his wonderful group of as-
sociates thought they had taken a long step
toward the solution when they threw the
entire money power of the United States
into the fight against panic in 1907. They
believed that they had earned from the
people of this country undying admiration,
endless devotion, and an end of all war-
[255]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
fare, because they thought they had stepped
between panic and its victims.
Yet I cannot believe that any one
of these solutions is the right one. No
permanent change in the social struc-
ture of this nation can be accomplished
except by a revolution or by the process
of evolution, at which I have vaguely
hinted here and there throughout this
book.
Education must go on. The professional
reformer, the sycophant who bows before
us, the parasite who eats our bread and
dispenses the wisdom of the ages in re-
turn, harp upon this theme. Only, to
their mind, education means simply the
training of the lower classes into a tra-
ditional habit of mind that will permit the
continuance of the present conditions. To
me education has no such meaning. More
[256]
The End of the Story
than any other class in the United States,
we, the rich, need it. We must get it.
We must learn the truth about ourselves,
our strength, our weakness, our true posi-
tion in the world. We must learn the
truth about our nation, our political in-
stitutions, our laws, our misuse of special
privilege, our brigandage of the people's
rights at Washington and at every state cap-
ital in the land. We must learn the truth
about the people, their rights, their
wrongs, their power, and their weakness.
And, as we learn, we must act. We
must ourselves eradicate the worst of our
faults. We must ourselves condemn to
death the idle rich. We must see to it
that as our young men and women grow
to maturity they learn to condemn and to
scorn the sort of ostentatious display, the
miserable vices, the degenerate luxuries,
[257]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
and the positive moral crimes that to-day
are so rampant among us. We must,
if we are to save ourselves and the world
that we inherited, go back to the tradi-
tions of our fathers. We must reestablish
in the social world of America the Spartan
principles that marked that world in the
days of Lincoln.
The age of arrogance is ended. That is
a hard lesson. The idle rich of America,
with the bitter voice of poverty and the
deep tones of science alike ringing in their
ears challenges of their existence as a
class, may well tremble at the tones of
that other voice which, though seeming
silent, yet speaks aloud. The nation's
greatest builder, Lincoln, built as unto
liberty. That temple from which he drove
the idle driver of slaves, for these long
years dedicated to the uses of Mammon,
[258]
The End of the Story
yet looms large in the visions of the disin-
herited.
Above all else that we may do on the
positive side there remains the privilege
of putting our study to practical work in
the amelioration of the conditions that
exist and the prevention of the recurrence
of the phenomena that gave us these con-
ditions. As a class we are, to-day, ob-
structionists. It is our class conservatism,
you may say, that impels us to look with
suspicion upon the rising of the people
against, for instance, such a political de-
bauch as has ruled Rhode Island for so
long. We, on the contrary, should stand
in the front ranks of such a battle as that.
First of all, we, the people of this country,
should detect political corruption, we should
recognize the symptoms of the palsying
touch of gold and we should stand out
[259]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
before the world as the sworn champions
of justice, equality, and honour.
For I do not believe that the march of
progress in this land is to be turned back-
ward. I cannot believe that the nation as
a nation is to sink into the depths as Eng-
land sank in the middle of the eighteenth
century. I take it for granted that the
wiping out of the idle rich is to be one of
the first steps in a programme of national
advancement, greater, more splendid, and
far more universal than any other period
of advancement and progress in the his-
tory of the nation. The idle rich are an
obstacle in the way; therefore they must be
eliminated or destroyed. Whether we, all
the rich, as a class, are to share with them in
that destruction depends upon whether or
not we too set ourselves up as an obstacle in
the path of the nation's development.
[260]
The End of the Story
As I have said, I cannot name a panacea,
or dispose in a few rounded paragraphs
of the problems that confront us. Per-
sonally I am convinced that many measures
to which my class is to-day unalterably
opposed will within the next few years
take their places as laws upon our statute
books. I am persuaded that sooner or
later the solid opposition of the Eastern
states to a graduated income tax will be
broken down. I fully expect to see before
I die the inauguration of inheritance taxes
and legacy taxes in this country that will
tend at least to level in the course of time
the tremendous discrepancies that have
grown up under our present system of
taxation.
I do not expect to see a general triumph
of pure Socialism. It may be that ul-
timately we shall experiment with govern-
[261]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
ment ownership of railroads and public
utilities, but I should look forward with
terror to any such experiment. It may
be that in the remedying of the defects
of our civilization we as a nation shall be
impelled into excesses of this sort for at
least a brief period of our history. If it
be so, the nation will be quick to remedy
its mistakes when once it has tried them
out and found them wanting.
I do not expect to see the great industrial
consolidations destroyed. I do expect
to see in the very near future a period in
which the wholesale exploitation of the
raw materials of wealth both labour and
the products with which it works will be
curtailed. I do expect to see a very de-
cided limitation placed upon the growth
of tremendous industrial fortunes.
Granting such limitation, and granting
[262]
The End of the Story
patience upon the part of the people, I
know that many of our defects will cure
themselves. It is an old saying in this
land that it is but three generations from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves. That phrase
is no mere generalization. It is based upon
scientific data. Twenty years ago, in the
old city of Worcester, Massachusetts, Mr.
Joseph H. Walker carried on an investi-
gation along this line. He discovered that
out of seventy-five manufacturers in that
city in 1850 only thirty died or retired
with property; while of the sons of these
manufacturers only six, in 1890, held any
property or had died in the meantime in
possession of such. In 1878 there were one
hundred and seventy-six men engaged in the
ten leading manufacturing trades of that
city, and of these only fifteen had inherited
the trade that they were carrying on.
[263]
The Passing of the Idle Rich
Give us time and we shall solve all the
problems of the age. The makers of Amer-
ica to-day are almost without exception
men who have made themselves. That
is an American tradition that we shall
carry on throughout the ages. I cannot
help but hope, even against the evidence
of my own eyes and ears, that this plutoc-
racy which to-day threatens the very life
of the nation can be passed into American
history without an epoch-marking revolu-
tion. Only, we of the wealthy class have
many things to learn, and we must learn
them faithfully, sitting at the feet of the
historians.
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