Our Benevolent Feudalism

Instead of the personal fidelity that characterized the older Feudalism, we are rapidly developing a class fidelity. History may repeat itself, as the adage runs; but not by identical forms and events. It is not likely that personal fidelity, as once known, can ever be restored: the long period of dislodgment from the land, the diffusion of learning, the exercise of the franchise, and the training in individual effort have left a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the past and the present forms. But though personal fidelity, in the old sense, is improbable, group fidelity, founded upon the conscious dependence of a class, is already observable, and it grows apace. Out of the sense of class dependence arises the extreme deference which we yield, the rapt homage which we pay – not as individuals, but as units of a class – to the men of wealth. We do not know them personally, and we have no sense of personal attachment. But in most things we grant them priority. We send them or their legates to the Senate to make our laws; we permit them to name our administrators and our judiciary; we listen with eager attention to their utterances, and we abide by their judgment. When the venerable Mr. Hewitt, brought forth like the holy man Onias, in the Judean civil war between Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, to denounce the opposing faction, utters his anathema against the minions of Mr. Mitchell, we listen in awe and are convinced. A three-line interview with the chief of the magnates is read with an eagerness wholly wanting in our perusal of an official pronunciamento by the most strenuous of Presidents. Our racial sense of humor, it must be confessed, saves us from the more slavish forms of deference; we jest about solemn themes and take in vain the names of great beings. Even the name of the great magnate is more or less humorously played upon; and our latest national pastime of “trust-busting” reveals a like levity, though an innocent one. It shows, moreover, how far we have reacted from our Puritan forefathers. For it is pursued not on account of the pain it gives the trusts, but for the harmless pleasure it gives both participants and spectators. But our subserviency, though less formal than that of old, is withal more real and fundamental.

VI

Current passivity has, however, a reverse side. To many persons a recognition of the changing conditions brings demoralization or despair. All are not won by the lure of “success.” To an increasing number the dangling prize in the distance is but a mirage, and oppressed by a sense of the bankruptcy of life they seek an oblivious relief. There is a drift toward the twin dissipations of drink and gambling, and there is an increase of suicide. The greater drink consumption is a matter of common observation, and it is amply attested by statistics. Mr. J. Holt Schooling’s figures in a recent issue of the Fortnightly Review show an increased consumption in the United States of 20 per cent for the years 1896-1900, as against the years 1886-90. The percentage of increase is slightly less than that of those industrially exploited nations, Germany and France, but considerably more than that of Great Britain and Ireland. The annual figures published in the World Almanac for 1902 give more pertinent lessons. The unsettled and troublous year, 1893, witnessed an enormous increase in drink consumption; but the succeeding hard times of 1894 and 1895, when drink-money was increasingly hard to obtain, induced a greater sobriety. With 1896 drinking became more general, or at least more energetic; and except for a slight falling off in 1899, the consumption of liquors and wines has risen steadily, reaching the enormous total of 1,349,176,033 gallons in 1900. Much of this gain is confined to beer, the cheapest of alcoholic beverages; but there has also been a phenomenal increase in the consumption of spirits. From 71,051,877 gallons consumed in 1896 there has been a steady annual rise to the total of 97,248,382 gallons in 1900, a gain of 36.8 per cent.

The recent increase of petty gambling is still more noticeable. Playing for high stakes, a custom common enough in the late years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, has long been given over or transferred to the domain of “business.” But what is colloquially known as “tin-horn” gambling has advanced, these last five years, by leaps and bounds. Doubtless the high precedent of our national Monte Carlos, the stock exchanges, is ample cause for much of it; but other causes are also in operation. With those persons that hearken to, but heed not, the seigniorial exhortation to bestir themselves and conquer “success,” petty gambling is an expression of unbelief. They know that the prizes advertised in the great industrial game are not to be won; they see nothing ahead but a dull routine of poorly remunerated labor, and they turn to gambling partly for recreation and partly for profit. With those, on the other hand, who not only hearken but heed, gambling is merely the application of their ambitious plans to the branch of industry which promises, however vainly, the most immediate returns.

Faro, keno, and roulette may have suffered some decline in favor. If so, statutes and the police, instead of a growing aversion to gambling, must be held responsible. It is one of those conventional puzzles which none can explain, that it is possible in our cities to restrict table and wheel gambling, but seemingly impossible to restrict certain other forms. Poker, for instance, maintains its hold, unawed by statute and unhampered by authority; while policy and race-betting, the special refuges of the desperately poor and the desperately fatuous, win new and lasting converts day by day. Indeed, the growth of race-betting is one of the striking phenomena of our time. It has become a habit, a disease; and its confirmed victims are held in as slavish a thraldom as are the victims of opium and hasheesh. One need not penetrate to a pool-room or journey to a race-track to discover evidences of its general diffusion. He may hear of it on every side, and he may find definitive proof in the daily journals. In nearly all of these the space given to the reports of races, the lists of betting odds and accounts of great winnings, is generous; and in some three or four of the metropolitan dailies the subject rises to the rank of a specialty. The flaunting advertisements of the “tipsters” in one of these newspapers rival in extent of space used and opulence of bargains offered, the announcements of the dry-goods merchants. The glittering lures dangled before the multitude by the seigniors seem trivial by comparison. Uncertain, and at best remote, they prove no match for the near-at-hand prizes to be won in gambling; and as a consequence tens of thousands pin their hope of “success” in this world to a series of fortunate winnings.

The meaning of the increase of suicide is clouded by a number of factors, and it is impossible to ascribe the tendency to one cause alone. Were we to accept the explanation of the pulpit, we should see in it the awful consequences of the decline of faith. Pathologists, however, while not denying this influence, enumerate many others. Racial and temperamental factors, drink and vice, are all concerned in the matter, and even climates and seasons are influential. But whatever the effect of these may be, the intensifying struggle for life these last few years, and what appears to many minds a darkening outlook for the future, must be acknowledged as powerful agents in increasing the rate of self-destruction. The rate is highest in the great industrial centres, where the struggle is fiercest, where the richest stakes are won and lost, where luxury is most flaunting and poverty most galling; and it is least where the struggle is in some measure relaxed. The recent census shows for the decade an increased rate per 100,000 of population from 8.8 to 9.9 in the States where registration of deaths is required, from 11 to 12.7 in registration cities, and from 10.3 to 11.8 for the entire registration record. There are a few anomalies in the figures which are difficult of explanation; the workaday cities of Fall River and Allegheny have low rates of suicide, the residence city of Los Angeles a high rate, while San Francisco reveals the abnormal rate of 49 per 100,000. With all allowances, however, the rule holds good: the more distinctly industrial and commercial cities have remarkably high rates, the less distinctly industrial and commercial cities remarkably low rates. In the first group are Chicago, with a rate of 21.8; Milwaukee, 21; St. Louis, 19.1; Boston, 14.4; Cincinnati, 13.5; New York, 13.1; Philadelphia, 12.2; Baltimore, 12; Pittsburg, 9.3. In the second group may be instanced Atlanta, with a rate of 6.6; Denver, 6; Albany, 3.2; Hartford, 1.3; Richmond, 1.2. These suicides are the unfit, say the complacent philosophers of the day, and are quite as well off dead as alive; but they prove at least that some slight qualification is needed to Professor Sumner’s optimistic generalization that “an air of contentment and enthusiastic cheerfulness … characterizes our society.” The winners in the race are doubtless enthusiastically cheerful, and the great mass that keeps steadily on, fed by the delusion of ultimate “success,” are at least cheerful without enthusiasm; but back of these are the losers and the many who have seen the hollowness of the world’s promise, whose outlook upon life is one of intensifying despair.

VII

All of our general institutions reflect the changes in public thought, taste, and feeling consequent upon the changing conditions of the social régime. But on none of them are these changes writ more clearly or in larger characters than on the institution of letters. Along with the morganization of industry steadily proceeds the munseyization of literature. We are a free people, our politicians tell us, and are strenuously resolved to remain so. But if we are to be judged by our popular literature, the verdict can hardly be other than that we have reached an advanced stage of subserviency, and that the normal mood of the overwhelming majority is one of complacence with its lot. Our popular magazines regularly keep before us a justification, actual or inferential, of things as they are; and though it is couched in less argumentative phrasing than that of the newspapers, it is, no doubt, for that very reason, a more plausible and effective expression of the plea. There are panegyrics on our captains of industry, tales of their exploits in the great industrial battle, descriptions of their town-houses and country-seats, – all, in fact, that makes for the emulation of their wisdom and virtues, and particularly of their faculty of acquisitiveness, – with a multitude of recipes for the winning of “success.” Along with this is provided a vaudeville of idle entertainment: wonder tales, short stories, a gallery of pictures of stage-folk, who, whatever their merits may be, bear but a problematic relation to literature; and finally an amorphous compound of sedative miscellany that not only charms the mind from serious thinking, but in time paralyzes the very power of thought.

Such of these publications as indulge in the gentle art of reviewing give further evidence of changing conditions. Reviewing, as now practised, studies the amenities of life, with a particular regard for the counting office, “wherein doth sit the dread and fear” of the publisher who has advertising to distribute. With a few notable exceptions the reviewing journals make it their business to be “nice.” They do not damn, not even with faint praise; they commend or extol. It is not that they praise insincerely a bad book – reviewing is too highly developed a craft for such crudity. But in a bad book all that the widest exercise of charity can pronounce even passably good comes in for praise; and what is weak or poor, or inclusive under old John Dennis’s favorite term of “clotted nonsense,” is mercifully omitted from mention. So it is when the advertising publisher is a factor in the game. But a reviewing journal must uphold a reputation for impartial judgment, and must thus mingle blame with praise. Its opportunity comes when some inglorious Milton of Penobscot or Butte prints his verses at home at his own expense. A copy drifts into the reviewing office and effects a transformation. The angelic temper upon which so many and such large drafts are made becomes exhausted, and the humble poet is treated to the sort of thing which Gifford used to deal out to the Della Cruscans and the ireful Dennis to the poetasters of Queen Anne’s time. It was perhaps the last regret of the late J. Gordon Coogler, of Columbia, S.C., that instead of printing his amiable verses on his own press, he had not guaranteed the cost of their production, and secured their publication by a metropolitan firm.

The literary distinction of former days has taken wings. Whether or not Wordsworth was right in his lament over the state of England in 1803 may be questioned; but a like lament uttered for our own land and time would be in large part justified. We have the two extremes of exceedingly plain living and of wildly extravagant living; but high thinking seems to be the accompaniment of neither. For several years the only really salable books have been novels, and among these popular favor has centred almost wholly on the kind called historical – called so not because the stories bear any relation to history, but because in them the action is put in a past time. Lately, it is true, there have been signs of a reaction; but let none imagine that it is due to a growing taste for stronger meat. Rather it is an evidence that in our love of novelty we have tired of one trifle and now demand another in its stead.

For the recent indications of declining favor for the historical novel are accompanied by no signs of reviving favor for more serious works. The Huxley Memoirs, it is true, unexpectedly achieved the degree of favor usually given to a fifth-rate novel; but the work, despite its science, philosophy, and religious controversy, was yet an entertaining story, and won its way for that reason. No more in fiction than in other branches of literature is there promise of better things. Even the “problem” novel, which, though often crude or hysterical, was yet an attempt to deal with some of the deeper facts of life, has been banished, and is not to be permitted to return. “Our publishers,” says the well-known literary supplement of a New York daily newspaper, “are seeking on all sides for wholesome stories, dealing optimistically with life, and reaching happy conclusions.” It is a true judgment, and reveals most clearly the present standards of public taste.

Our popular magazines most accurately reflect the public mind. Pictures and stories are the substance of its childish delight. Among periodicals we have nothing in any way comparable to the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Nineteenth Century, the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Athenæum, the Spectator, the Saturday Review, or even the Academy. Whatever tendencies of late have seemed to indicate the future planting of such reviews on these shores, have very recently been extinguished. Of three publications in which articles of some thought and some importance were occasionally printed, two have recently found a monthly issue more frequent than the public taste required, and have accordingly transformed themselves into quarterlies, while the third has been forced to make concessions to the general demand for “lightness and brightness.” For these are the qualities which pay. “Make it light and bright,” is the order which the literary contributor hears in the editorial offices when he submits his wares; and though the terms may be variously interpreted, he understands what is meant: he must write down to the level of childish minds and complacent natures. Accordingly, he writes so, to the best of his ability, and so, to that limit, do all his fellows. The collective result is seen in the character of the greater number of our books, our magazines, our Saturday and Sunday supplements. On all sides is poured forth a flood of print which deludes the hope or flatters the vanity of the mass, and which insures a state of mental subserviency, – the necessary requisite of the economic subserviency imposed by the ruling class.

CHAPTER IX

Transition and Fulfilment

Upon all the heterogeneous but coalescing units of the social mass the group of magnates imposes its collective will. There are still disputes and rivalries among the rulers, and may ever be; but these are for the most part minor differences, to be settled among themselves and their mutual arbitrators, the judges, and qualify in no way the facts of a recognized community of interests and of collective purposes and plans. Whatever the individual rivalries, they result in no deliberate betrayal of class interest; practically every magnate maintains, at all hazards, his fidelity to the group. A sense of group honor may in most instances prompt this fidelity, but a lively sense of apprehension is also influential. For should any magnate become possessed of heretical notions, and thereupon make common cause with the public against a particular interest of his class, he would by that act banish himself from communion with his fellows, and jeopard his possessions to the last dime. There is, as every one knows, a definite seigniorial resolve that no strike of workmen on transportation lines or in public utilities shall succeed; and when such a strike occurs, every resource of the magnate class is brought to bear to resist and defeat it. Often there are attendant circumstances which might tempt a rival, for his own interests, to interfere on behalf of the workers. But the thing is never done; and he who should do it would declass himself as effectually as a mediæval nobleman would have done by enlisting in a peasants’ rebellion. There is, furthermore, a definite seigniorial determination to withstand to the utmost the agitation for public ownership; every magnate, with his intellectual retainers behind him, makes of himself a modern Stonewall Jackson in resistance to this movement. Here, again, industrial rivalry might at times prompt a desertion to the public cause. But there is no such case; here, as elsewhere, the ruling class maintains its integrity. As is known, great strikes are sometimes won; and occasionally, in isolated places, an advance is made in the direction of public ownership. But neither is accomplished through desertions in the seigniorial group, and the instances prove only that its rule has not yet become supreme.

I

The new Feudalism will be but an orderly outgrowth of present tendencies and conditions. All societies evolve naturally out of their predecessors. In sociology, as in biology, there is no cell without a parent cell. The society of each generation develops a multitude of spontaneous and acquired variations, and out of these, by a blending process of natural and conscious selection, the succeeding society is evolved. The new order will differ in no important respects from the present, except in the completer development of its more salient features. The visitor from another planet who had known the old and should see the new would note but few changes. Alter et idem– another yet the same – he would say. From magnate to baron, from workman to villein, from publicist to court agent and retainer, will be changes of state and function so slight as to elude all but the keenest eyes.

An increased power, a more concentrated control, will be seen. But these have their limitations, which must not be disregarded. A sense of the latent strength of democracy will restrain the full exercise of baronial powers, and a growing sense of ethics will guide baronial activities somewhat toward the channels of social betterment. For democracy will endure, in spite of the new order. “Like death,” said Disraeli, “it gives back nothing.” Something of its substance it gives back, it must be confessed; but of its outer forms it yields nothing, and thus it retains the potentiality of exerting its will in whatever direction it may see fit. And this fact, though now but feebly recognized, will be better understood as time runs on, and the barons will bear in mind the limit of popular patience. It is an elastic limit, of a truth; for the mass of mankind are more ready to endure known ills than to fly to others that they know not. It is a limit which, to be heeded, needs only to be carefully studied. Macaulay’s famous dictum, that the privileged classes, when their rule is threatened, always bring about their own ruin by making further exactions, is likely, in this case, to prove untrue. A wiser forethought begins to prevail among the autocrats of to-day – a forethought destined to grow and expand and to prove of inestimable value when bequeathed to their successors. Our nobility will thus temper their exactions to an endurable limit; and they will distribute benefits to a degree that makes a tolerant, if not a satisfied, people. They may even make a working principle of Bentham’s maxim, and after, of course, appropriating the first and choicest fruits of industry to themselves, may seek to promote the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” For therein will lie their greater security.

The Positivists, in their prediction of social changes, give us the phrase, “the moralization of capital,” and some of the more hopeful theologians, not to be outdone, have prophesied “the Christianization of capital.” So far there is not much to be said confirmatory of either expectation. Yet it is not to be denied that the faint stirrings of an ethical sense are observable among the men of millions, and that the principle of the “trusteeship of great wealth” has won a number of adherents. The enormous benefactions for social purposes, the construction of “model workshops” and “model villages,” though in many cases prompted by self-interest and in others by a love of ostentation, are at least sometimes due to a new sense of social responsibility. A duty to society has been apprehended, and these are its first fruits. It is a duty, true enough, which is but dimly seen and imperfectly fulfilled. The greater part of these benefactions, as has already been pointed out, is directed to purposes which have but a slight or indirect bearing upon the relief of social distress, the restraint of injustice, or the mitigation of remediable hardships. The giving is even often economically false, and if carried to an extreme would prove disastrous to the community; for in many cases it is a transmutation of wealth from a status of active capital, wherein it makes possible a greater diffusion of comfort, to a status of comparative sterility. But, though often mistaken as is the conception and futile the fulfilment of this duty, the fact that it is apprehended at all is one of considerable importance, and one that carries the promise of baronial security in the days to come.

II

Bondage to the land was the basis of villeinage in the old régime; bondage to the job will be the basis of villeinage in the new. The new régime, absolving itself from all general responsibility to its workers, extends a measure of protection, solely as an act of grace, only to those who are faithful and obedient; and it holds the entire mass of its employed underlings to the terms of day-by-day service. The growth of industries has overshadowed the importance of agriculture, which is ever being pushed back into the West and into other and remote countries; and the new order finds its larger interests and its greater measure of control in the workshops rather than on the farms. The oil wells, the mines, the grain fields, the forests, and the great thoroughfares of the land are its ultimate sources of revenue; but its strongholds are in the cities. It is in these centres of activity, with their warehouses, where the harvests are hoarded; their workshops, where the metals and woods are fashioned into articles of use; their great distributing houses; their exchanges; their enormously valuable franchises to be had for the asking or the seizing, and their pressure of population, which forces an hourly increase in the exorbitant value of land, that the new Feudalism finds the field best adapted for its main operations.

Bondage to the job will be the basis of the new villeinage. The wage-system will endure, for it is a simpler and more effective means of determining the baron’s volume of profits than were the “boon-works,” the “week-works,” and the corvées of old. But with increasing concentration on the one hand, and the fiercer competition for employment on the other, the secured job will become the laborer’s fortress, which he will hardly dare to evacuate. The hope of bettering his condition by surrendering one place in the expectation of getting another will be qualified by a restraining prudence. He will no longer trust his individual strength, but when he protests against ill conditions, or, in the last resort, strikes, it will be only in company with a formidable host of his fellows. And even the collective assertion of his demands will be restrained more and more as he considers the constantly recurring failures of his efforts. Moreover, concentration gives opportunity for an almost indefinite extension of the black-list: a person of offensive activity may be denied work in every feudal shop and on every feudal farm from one end of the country to the other. He will be a hardy and reckless industrial villein indeed who will dare incur the enmity of the Duke of the Oil Trust when he knows that his actions will be promptly communicated to the banded autocracy of dukes, earls, and marquises of the steel, coal, iron, window glass, lumber, and traffic industries.