Читать книгу Our Benevolent Feudalism - William J. Ghent - Страница 11

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Such facts, however, do not carry on the surface their real import. Independent capital persists as a force, but the units that compose it melt like bubbles in a stream. These companies are but the raw or “partly manufactured” material out of which the great combinations are made. Formation, growth, and absorption into a trust are generally the three terms in their life-history; or if, through ill environment or spirited warfare waged against them, they fail to get secure footing, they soon slip back into the slough of disaster. The fate of independent tobacco factories, sugar and oil refineries, railroads, independent companies of one kind or another, is constantly before us. If they are worth having, they are more or less benevolently assimilated; and if they are not worth having, they are permitted to struggle onward to the almost inevitable collapse.

Neither do small holdings in agriculture mean economic independence. As the late census reveals, they mean tenantry. The number of farms operated by owners is decreasing; tenantry is becoming more and more common, and so is salaried management of great estates. Of the 5,739,657 farms of the nation, tenants now operate 2,026,286. Owners operated 74.5 per cent of all farms in 1880, 71.6 per cent in 1890, 64.7 per cent in 1900. The tendency is general, and applies to all sections. Since 1880 tenantry has relatively increased in every State and Territory (no comparative data are given for the Indian Territory) except Arizona, Florida, and New Hampshire. Since 1890 it has increased in Arizona. In twenty years it has increased 49.4 per cent in Florida, though the unloading of “orange groves” and other tropical paradises on the too susceptible Northerner has increased ownership by a slightly greater ratio; while in New Hampshire, where 2857 farms have been given up in the last twenty years, tenantry has decreased by but five-tenths of 1 per cent since 1890, and but six-tenths of 1 per cent since 1880.

So, too, with petty industries and the small retailers. M. Emile Vandervelde, in his sterling work, “Collectivism and Industrial Evolution,” has well shown how “small trade is the special refuge of the cripples of capitalism.” It is the particular refuge “of all who prefer, in place of the hard labor of production, the scanty gleaning of the middleman, or who, no longer finding a sufficient revenue in industry or farming, desire to add a string to their bow by opening a little shop.” But it would be a mistake, he continues, to suppose that these miniature establishments, which the census officials characterize as distinct enterprises, can be generally regarded as the personal property of those who carry them on. “A great number of them, and a number constantly increasing, as capitalism develops, have only a phantom of independence, and are really in the hands of a few great money lenders, manufacturers, or merchants.”

Though M. Vandervelde argues on the basis of these phenomena as observed in Belgium, France, Germany, and England, the same conclusions are applicable in the United States. Our national census figures are practically useless as illuminators on the subject, and one must get his data from the observation or investigation of himself or others. It is generally known that small industries the product of which is more or less ingenious or artistic manage to survive; that those the product of which is common or usual are sooner or later extinguished; and that the petty retailers represent so many heterogeneous elements that it is impossible to predicate anything of them as a class. Of these latter there is a moderate number who, by furnishing a needful social service, make profits; there is a large and constantly changing number who, through ease of credit, manage to obtain stock without capital, and who almost invariably succumb; there is then a larger number whose little shops are run by women and children, the husbands and fathers working at some trade or office job, and hopefully expending their weekly earnings in the vain attempt to “build up a business”; finally, there is a class, the numbers and relative importance of which it is impossible to estimate, whose businesses are owned, directly or indirectly, by other men or by companies.