Читать книгу Our Benevolent Feudalism - William J. Ghent - Страница 15

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“Business” is the main thought, and the apotheosis of “business” the main cult of the new magnates. “Of gods, friends, learnings, of the uncomprehended civilization which they overrun,” indignantly writes Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, “they ask but one question: How much? What is a good time to sell? What is a good time to buy?... Their heathen eyes see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing but an intelligence office, and hired men to help them burglarize the treasures accumulated for a thousand years at the altars of liberty and justice, that they may burn their marble for the lime of commerce.”

Though a forcible, it is an extreme view, for it leaves out of consideration the high professions of morality, the frequent appeal to Christian ideals, the tender solicitude for honesty, integrity, law and order, with which our new magnates gild their worship of “business.” Such of them as have recently invaded literature give edifying glimpses of the new seigniorial attitude. The artistic career, writes Mr. Andrew Carnegie in his entertaining volume, “The Empire of Business,” is most narrowing, and produces “petty jealousies, unbounded vanities, and spitefulness”; the learned professions also produce narrowness, albeit often a high specialization of faculty and knowledge. But “business,” properly pursued, broadens and develops the whole man. It is a view echoed to greater or less extent by the other literary magnates, particularly Mr. James J. Hill, Mr. Russell Sage, Mr. S. C. T. Dodd, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Hon. Marcus A. Hanna, and Mr. Charles R. Flint.

A flattering unction that all lay to their souls is the dictum that success in business is a matter of honesty, intelligence, and energy. “There is no line of business,” writes Mr. Carnegie, “in which success is not attainable. It is a simple matter of honest work, ability, and concentration.” “To rail against the accumulation of wealth,” writes Mr. Sage, in the Independent, “is to rail against the decrees of justice. Intelligence, industry, honesty, and thrift produce wealth.... So long as some men have more sense and more self-control than others, just so long will such men be wealthy, while others will be poor.” Mr. Dodd, in his address to the students of Syracuse University, adds this contribution: “Why is there still so much poverty? One reason is because nature or the devil has made some men weak and imbecile and others lazy and worthless, and neither man nor God can do much for one who will do nothing for himself.” Mr. Rockefeller appeals both to evolution and to divine sanction. “The growth of a large business,” he is reported as declaring in one of his Sunday-school addresses, “is merely a survival of the fittest.... The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”

It matters not that many millions of men, tirelessly energetic and reasonably intelligent, can be shown to have toiled all their lives without winning even a competence. Nor does it matter that some of these, in addition to being energetic and intelligent, have been reasonably honest. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand; and the fact that most of the greater affairs of the business world sooner or later find their way into the courts, for the testing of the amount and quality of honesty involved therein, might well cause some hesitation in positing this virtue as a necessary qualification for “business.” But the notion is not to be argued with; it is a characteristic outcropping of the seigniorial mind.

The praise of labor is the antiphony to the praise of “business,” and the lyres of all the magnates are strung tensely when chanting tributes to toil.

“Round swings the hammer of industry, quickly the sharp chisel rings,

And the heart of the toiler has throbbings that stir not the bosom of kings,”

warbles Mr. Flint in his article on “Combinations and Critics,” in “The Trust: Its Book.” Toil is the foundation of wealth, they all aver, though the rhapsodical nature of the tributes prevents a clear and definite utterance on the question, Of whose wealth is it the foundation? But there is no lack of definiteness regarding their attitude toward those defensive societies, the trade-unions, which the toilers organize to secure a larger part of their product to themselves. Mr. Flint, indeed, somewhat cautiously acknowledges an element for good in the unions, but the general attitude of the seigniorial mind is distinctly inimical. The recent interesting correspondence between the coal magnates and President Mitchell is an instance in point; so are the frequent utterances on the subject by the president of the steel trust, and any number of examples could be given of a like character. A crowning example of a distinctly feudal attitude is furnished by a letter from a prominent New York merchant, printed in the issue of June 9, 1902, of a newspaper which makes a considerable to-do about the printing of such of the news as it sees fit to print. The prominent merchant objects very strongly to labor leaders and walking delegates, describing them in almost as temperate and judicial language as that of United States District Judge Jackson. The flower of his contribution is his seigniorial remedy for strikes:—

“The only remedy, in my opinion, for strikes is to get as many men as there are officers in the different [labor] associations admitted to their meetings, where they would have a chance to talk to the men in a businesslike way, explaining matters to them in such a manner as to bring the effects of a strike very plainly before them.”

Moral suasion, however, is not the only method suggested for bringing sense to the workers. A hint of more forcible means is occasionally broached. A New York newspaper, which makes a boast of printing unimpeachable interviews, reports, in its issue of July 31st last, a significant warning from the president of the New York, Ontario and Western Railroad. This is one of the coal-carrying railroads, and the reference is to the anthracite strike. “After the men return to work,” he said, “I believe that legal steps will be taken in the United States courts against those who are responsible for the loss occasioned by the strike.” The Hon. Abram S. Hewitt echoed this interesting suggestion in an interview of August 25th. “The consequences of such strikes,” he says, “are so disastrous, not merely to the parties directly concerned, but to the whole community, that every effort should be made as soon as the existing strike has been called off and the excitement is abated to prevent by appropriate legislation the recurrence of such calamitous conflicts where everybody is injured and no one is benefited.” Criminal codes, it may be said generally, depend largely on the economic conditions of the time and place where they obtain: horse-stealing, in a community girdled by trolley lines, degenerates to petty larceny, while in Wyoming or Arabia it is a capital offence. In the new order, which requires peace and stability for its proper operation, it may readily enough come about that voluntary leaving of work will be severely penalized.