Our Benevolent Feudalism

The argument that the gifted produce all, and the assumption that the wealthy and the gifted are the same persons lead up to the fervid praise of inequality of condition which in recent years is so often heard. Our literary magnates began the strain, doubtless with the motive of self-justification. Since then it has been taken up by our professional instructors – from what motive is not precisely known – and the result is a mighty chorus of many voices. Says Professor Sumner: —

“If we could get rid of some of our notions about liberty and equality, and could lay aside this eighteenth-century philosophy, according to which human society is to be brought into a state of blessedness, we might get some insight into the might of the societal organization: what it does for us and what it makes us do… If we are willing to be taught by the facts, then the phenomena of the concentration of wealth which we see about us will convince us that they are just what the situation calls for. They ought to be because they are, and because nothing else would serve the interests of society… I often see statements published in which the objectors lay stress upon the great inequalities of fortune, and having set forth the contrast between rich and poor, they rest their case. What law of nature, religion, ethics, or the State is violated by inequalities of fortune? The inequalities prove nothing.”

Professor John B. Clark, of Columbia University, also sees in vast inequalities of fortune the basis of a happy state. Aristotle taught differently, it is true. “In human societies,” he wrote, “extremes of wealth and poverty are the main sources of evil. The one brings arrogance and a lack of capacity to obey; the other brings slavishness and a lack of capacity to command. Where a population is divided into the two classes of very rich and very poor, there can be no real state; for there can be no real friendship between the classes, and friendship is the essential principle of all association.” But Professor Clark, touched by prophetic fire, pictures a new society in which inequality is the great blessing. “The world of the near future,” he writes in his recent article on “The Society of the Future,” “will not be one with inequalities levelled out of it; and to any persons to whom inequality of possessions seems inherently evil, this world will not be satisfactory. It will present a condition of vast and ever growing inequality. With a democracy that depends on a likeness of material possessions it will have nothing in common. The rich will continually grow richer, and the multi-millionnaires will approach the billion-dollar standard… If an earthly Eden is to come through competition, it will come not in spite of, but by means of, an enormous increase of inequality of outward possessions.”

We must hear from Professor Peck again – and for the last time. “When men by temper and training,” he writes in his recent paper on “The Social Advantages of the Concentration of Wealth,” “come to possess the ability to do large things in this direct and simple way [i. e., the characteristic way, of the magnates], they have an immense advantage over those who can work only in committees, or boards, or companies, and they will inevitably dominate them and use them quite at will… This [concentration] means, in the first place and as a first result, the aggrandizement of individuals; but in the end it means the wide diffusion of a golden stream through every artery and vein of our national and individual life. America has already been enormously enriched; yet the actualities of the present are nothing when compared with the potentialities of the future. Timid minds which are appalled rather than inspired by the vastness and magnificence of the whole thing shrink back and croak out puling prophecies of evil. They cannot rise to the greatness of it all because they lack the dauntless courage of the typical American, who, in Kipling’s vivid phrase, can always —

“‘Turn a keen, untroubled faceHome to the instant need of things.’”

III

So much for a consensus of some of our notable instructors of the public on things political and social. That these opinions produce a powerful influence on the mass, no one will deny. The wide respect in which our teachers – particularly our commissioned teachers – are held; the general recognition of their learning, their profundity, their unquestioned liberty to speak what they will, their insulated freedom from the influences arising out of seigniorial endowments, compel a popular deference to their judgments. It is, therefore, with pained surprise that an American reads an uncharitable comment on their ability and learning. Such a comment is that which appeared last February in the conservative and ably edited Paris Temps. “It is true,” writes its editor, “that American universities pay great attention to social and political sciences. It is no less true that they have at their disposal considerable financial resources for the publication of reviews. But the question is to know what the reviews and teachings are worth… I believe myself sufficiently conversant with the matter. By professional duty I read, not everything which is printed on the other side of the Atlantic concerning these subjects, but a notable part of the work which is considered the most weighty. With a few honorable exceptions – honorable, but rare – I must venture to say that these publications are, for the most part, without originality and without any real value.

“I imagine American professors will be the first to feel surprise at the great honor [the establishment of a French school in America] which it is proposed to do them. They have a very keen feeling of what they owe to European culture. They keep in close touch with all that is published in their respective specialties in France, Germany, England, and Italy. They profit by such publications, of which their own are sometimes – let us say things as they are – only adaptations or reflections. Many of them have had their intellectual training in old Europe, and had, at their start, no other ambition than to model themselves on their masters and repeat them. The development of social and political studies is immense – on the surface – in the United States. In depth it is not quite the same.”

The Temps, it may be remarked, is not, on the one hand, radical, nor on the other, anti-democratic or anti-American; and so the reasons for its illiberal and discourteous judgment must be left undiscerned. Its startling declaration, that the sociological pronouncements of our distinguished teachers “are, for the most part, without originality and without any real value,” rises to the dignity of a national affront, and rightly calls for emphatic action from our strenuous State Department.

IV

It may be doubted if our commissioned teachers exert so great an influence upon opinion as do our newspapers. “The newspaper to-day,” said Archbishop Ireland recently before the National Educational Association, “is preëminently the mentor of the people; it is read by all; it is believed by nearly all. Its influence is paramount; its responsibility is tremendous.” There is much truth in this dictum, though something of qualification is needed. The newspaper, though not “read by all,” nor “believed by nearly all,” is indeed more widely read than ever before. If the census is to be believed, the circulation per issue of all daily, tri-weekly, semi-weekly, and weekly publications has grown in the last ten years from 38,000,000 to 58,000,000 copies. This is certainly a tremendous showing; but it is doubtful if the newspapers exert the direct sway over men’s minds which was exerted in earlier years. The influence effected is due less to the formal expression of opinion than to the color habitually given by them to the news. The eager question, “What does old Greeley say?” which was once so often heard, was a tribute to the power of an individual in whose rectitude and wisdom many thousands put a rarely wavering faith. Many a lesser editor had also his reverent disciples, who believed as he taught and voted as he urged.

But in our day the direct appeal of the newspaper is more hesitatingly obeyed. Frequently it has happened, in municipal elections, that a candidate or candidates have been elected in the face of an almost solid opposition of the press. A newspaper may be patronized for this or that special feature by persons who pay no attention to its editorials, by others who read them merely to learn an opposing view of things, and by others still – a far larger class – who, reading between the lines, choose for themselves what to rely upon and what to doubt. All the larger cities, and perhaps most of the smaller, have instances of newspapers which, appealing to some special interest, secure a considerable number of readers antipathetic to the political views expressed. It happens that radicals often read conservative publications, and that conservatives sometimes look upon radical print. The faithful devotees of a certain mercurial New York newspaper probably read it as eagerly in 1884, when it supported General Butler for the Presidency, as in 1892, when it supported Mr. Cleveland, or in 1896, when it went over to Major McKinley. But reliance upon editorial opinions is a wavering faith. A wiser discrimination is employed, a more cynical scepticism is maintained. When the New York newspaper which boasts of printing all the fit news publishes in its editorial columns the dictum that “the oversupply of labor in the anthracite region is due to the great attractiveness of the wages and the conditions of work,” none but the willing are convinced; and so for all the misjudgments, ignorant or deliberate, that are daily put forth by newspapers of all classes there are scoffers and sceptics as well as credulous believers.

For the recognition has become general that the average newspaper is owned and operated as a commercial property. As Mr. Brooke Fisher, in a recent number of the Atlantic, writes, the days when the editor hired the publisher are gone; it is now the publisher who hires the editor, and the counting-room determines the policy. Advertising is the material mainstay, and the merchants and magnates who have largesse to distribute must be humored. “Publishers,” says the interesting census bulletin on “Printing and Publishing,” “are depending more on advertising and less on subscriptions and sales for financial return.” Whether it be the sensational “yellows,” or the less sensational but characterless “pinks,” or the staid and ponderous “grays” of the press, the same rule holds. Even the religious journals make a like appeal. “A superfluity of religious weeklies,” says the best-known publication of that class, giving itself a left-handed pat on the shoulder, “with no other basis for existence than sectional or partisan pride, will not be tolerated nor supported by the laity; nor will advertisers much longer fail to discriminate between religious journals that are progressive [meaning, for example, itself] and are reaching well-to-do and intelligent people, and those which are not.” Statements of enormous sales, of vast subscription lists, are published in glaring type, and the phrase “greatest circulation in the city,” or State, or nation, or world, is trumpeted to the ears of the buyers of advertising space. There is still an appeal to the giver of largesse even when a publication cannot honestly boast of great circulation; the argument is then one of a “select” patronage – of “fit audience, though few,” but inferentially of great purchasing power.

The pressure upon editorial policy of this deference to the advertiser is constant and effective, and the result is apparent to most readers. Even the more rampant of the “yellows,” which daily shriek against political and social injustice, are affected by it. As mournful a philosopher as Heraclitus might have found food for humor in the manœuvres of the metropolitan newspapers some six years ago during the agitation for the passage of the Andrews bill. This measure required seats for women workers in all mercantile establishments. Now it happened that the heads of the department stores were in nearly every instance violently opposed to the bill, and it also happened that the amount of advertising from the great stores cut a very pretty figure in the income of the average metropolitan newspaper. To complete the dilemma the bill won great favor from the public. How the masterful purveyors of news and opinions to the people managed to extricate themselves from the difficulty, would make too long a story in the telling. But that they triumphantly surmounted it, is a matter of history.

With the advertiser in so commanding a position, it is not needed that a newspaper shall be owned by a magnate in order that it shall faithfully reflect the special interests of “business.” Yet that seigniorial funds are back of many of our important newspapers is a fact which to a person of intelligence needs no proof. The census bulletin, revealing the characteristic optimism of the compilers of the Twelfth Census, will have it that individual ownership is still the rule. The proportion of individually owned and operated publications is given as 63.3 per cent, of partnership concerns as 19.7 per cent, and of corporate concerns as 17 per cent. “These figures indicate,” we are told, “the complete absence of the extended combinations and consolidations so frequently encountered in other industries.” Yet there are combinations, whether individually or jointly owned, – the Hearst newspapers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, the Ochs newspapers of Chattanooga, New York, and Philadelphia, the Belo newspapers of Texas, and those of the Scripps-McRae concern in the middle West. Only this last summer public announcement was made of a projected combination – under the control of Mr. P. F. Collier, and with a capital of $1,000,000 – of a large number of country newspapers in the State of New York. The project has for the time been given up, but others of a like nature may fairly be expected for the future. Moreover, some of the features of the industrial combinations – identity of product, for instance – are discoverable in the so-called coöperative newspapers, which make use of plate matter or “patent-insides.” More than half of all the periodicals of the country are in this class. Finally, the chief commodity of newspapers of all classes – the news – is a trust product, a commodity in which the Associated Press serves the function of gatherer of raw material and manufacturer, and the periodical the function of assorter and retailer.

But the census figures reveal little or nothing to the point. Seigniorial backing, when actually given, is not usually made visible in the form of investment in newspaper stock. It is not to the best interests of the purveyor of news and opinions that it should be; for the public, with a fine sense of its own independence of judgment, requires that seigniorial influence shall be less obviously shown. The odor of Standard oil, the fumes of American tobacco, have proved fatal to more than one newspaper enterprise, and even the taint of railroad support has been shown to be harmful. There is thus the greatest need of discretion in arranging the nominal ownership; and the result is, that in many cases it is easier to discover the actual ownership of a policy game than the actual ownership of a newspaper. The curious can but surmise and wonder. When a chaste and well-ordered daily publication gives to a particular magnate’s house-warming the space of a column and a half, while its rivals – even the “yellows,” which deal in that sort of thing – consider the event worth no more than a half-column; or when another magnate is persistently “boomed” for a high office, or when for another a franchise grant is skilfully proposed, one may put two and two together, and apply the natural inferences. Inferences, however, are not proof, and the conclusion must remain doubtful.

But whether through the influence of potential advertising or of secret ownership, the magnate, or the magnate class, exercises a large measure of control, and the matter which appears is that which, on the whole, is agreeable to seigniorial minds. The coal magnates may be criticised, but it is not so much on account of their refusal to grant concessions to their men as for their failure to operate in defiance of their men. So, too, the trusts come in for occasional rough handling; but it is the abstract trust that is at fault: the individual trust usually goes scathless. Certain of the “yellows” furnish some exception to the general rule, though here, too, the influence of the great advertiser is shown, and one may vainly read the columns of the most radical of the anti-monopoly dailies for a suggestion that the great department stores are other than abodes of comfort and joy for all the souls employed therein.

Such is the newspaper bias, and the product of the hired writer must conform. Whether editing news or writing opinions, he must recognize the divinity that hedges in the magnate class. It was a savage, and in some respects extravagant, picture of the function of the hired newspaper worker which a brilliant journalist, now deceased, gave to the world a few years ago: —

“There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in the country towns. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Other editors are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello’s, would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for about the same thing, his salary. We are the tools of vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

But though in certain respects extravagant, it has yet faithful and accurate touches which are recognizable by every undeluded person who earns his living in the employment of the daily press. Perhaps, indeed, there are not many of the undeluded; for the recoil upon themselves of the character of their tasks does not, to say the least, sharpen the edge of conscience, and the service of a few years is generally believed to be effective in indurating the finest sensibilities.

It is not, as has been said, so much through their editorial expressions as through their coloring of the news that the weeklies and dailies mould the opinions of the mass. A growing scepticism averts the former influence; but against the latter there is no prophylactic. News is assorted, pruned, improved, to accord with a predetermined policy. From an anti-imperialist publication one gets small notion of other happenings in the Philippines than devastations, rapes, battle, murder, and sudden death; and from an administration organ one may learn only of Peace piping her “languid note,” of the diffusion of education, and the progress of industry, varied only now and then by slight outbreaks from a few ladrones. In the far more important matter of the irrepressible class conflict here at home, like influences color the news; and as ninety-nine out of every one hundred periodicals support, in greater or less degree, the existing régime, the impress upon the public mind is overwhelming. Some of the “yellows” set up a bar to the universal pervasion of this influence; and the activities of the social reformers, through their weekly journals, their tracts, and their public discussions, somewhat affect it. But, on the whole, these effects are but a ripple on the deep and powerful stream that fertilizes the opinions of the public.

V

Our laudatory stump orators have their measure of influence on social thought, no doubt; but it is one that surely declines, and the subject may be passed with but scant mention. Likewise, the heterogeneous small fry of seigniorial retainers in the various walks of life, whose business it is, in season and out, to glorify the prevailing régime, may be noticed and dismissed in a sentence. The influence of the pulpit, however, is a subject that requires some attention. This influence, while greater than that of either of the groups just mentioned, is unquestionably less than that of either the editors or the professional lay publicists. Among practical men in the upper orders there is a widespread prejudice against pastoral interference in social and political matters, unless it be directed solely to seigniorial justification. The shoemaker should stick to his last, runs the adage; and no less it is urged that the pastor should stick to his text. He should, furthermore, discriminate and sort his texts, making careful avoidance of the ethical precepts of Jesus. For these are needlessly disturbing to the code that prevails in commerce and politics, and both politicians and magnates resent their citation. A future “popular” version of the Bible may eliminate them, and thus do away with a fertile cause of discord; but until that is done the better part of pastoral valor will continue to lie in discretion.

The sentiments of the politicians and the magnates toward the pulpit filter down to the common mass of the laity, and still further weaken pastoral influence. But weakened as it has been, it is yet felt by the magnates to be an instrument of social control which by proper use can be made to perform a needed service. A constant pressure is, therefore, brought to bear upon pastoral utterances. It is the “safe” men who are in most request to fill pulpits; and it is the “safe” men who draw to their churches the largest endowments. Under the influence of this pressure there has gradually been developed a code of pulpit ethics, outside the limits of which no prudent minister will dare range. The minister may be “long” on spirituality, but he must be “short” on social precepts. He may preach faith, hope, and charity, and also the future punishment of the unregenerate, so long as unregeneracy is depicted in general terms; but he must avoid, with the nicest delicacy, the mention of tax-dodging and stock-watering as punishable sins. He may denounce violence, and for a modern instance he may cite the occasional riotous conduct of striking workmen; but let him at his peril cite such venial backslidings from grace as the blowing up of a competitor’s refinery, the seizure of a street for track-laying, or the employment of armed mercenaries for a private purpose. Political evils may be denounced in the abstract, and the bribery of voters in the concrete. The latter is an offence usually committed by irreverent ward politicians, and may justly receive, without injury to the State and to society, the scathing anathemas of the pulpit. But he that in a moment of inadvertence miscalls by the name bribes the “gentle rewards,” the “gratuities,” as they were known in Bacon’s time, which magnates frequently bestow upon legislators and judges, had best resign his pastorate and seek some other field. Nor must any slight be thrown upon any of the conventional practices in the ordinary daily conduct of “business.” These are hallowed by custom, and are beyond criticism. Such a declaration as that of a certain minister in a recent number of the Christian Endeavor World– “What we call Napoleonic genius in business is sometimes simply whitewashed highway robbery on a gigantic scale” – verges closely upon contumacy. It is relieved slightly by the qualifying “sometimes,” – much virtue in your “sometimes,” as the immortal bard would remark, – but for all that, it is a dangerous utterance, and one apt to cause its enunciator grave trouble.

But pastoral pronouncements on social questions are permitted – nay, welcomed – if only they properly rebuke the occasional discontent and unquiet of the masses and the aggression of those foes of order, the labor unions. Such a pronouncement, for instance, is that of the Rev. Lyman Abbott, put forth in his recent philosophical disquisition, “The Rights of Man.” “Trades-unions … are ruled over generally,” he declares, “by a directory scarcely less absolute than that which governed the revolutionists in the day of Mirabeau.” This is unexceptionably decorous, and runs no risk whatever of seigniorial censorship. The recent coal strike brought forth a large number of pastoral utterances of a like character, which must ultimately redound to the great glory of the declaimers. The good Bishop Potter, in his address before the Diocesan convention in New York City, September 24, felt called upon to rebuke envy and hatred and to deny the existence of social classes in the republic: “Wealth is unequally distributed, we are told, and the sophistries that are born of envy and hatred are hawked about the streets to influence, in a land which refuses to enthrone one class above another, the passions of the less clever or thrifty or industrious against those who are more so.” The eminent Dr. Ethelbert Talbot, Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Central Pennsylvania, according to his public letter of September 28, saw in the coal strike only a demand upon the part of the miners “that the operators shall no longer manage their own business.” “How can the question of whether a man has a right to conduct his own business,” he asks, with painfully defective forethought for what subsequently happened, “be submitted to arbitration?” The no less eminent Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, in his recent address before the Chicago Society of New York, demanded a wall of bayonets from Washington to Wilkesbarre. The Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah also called for arms instead of arbitration, and the Rev. Dr. W. R. Huntington of Grace Church echoed the good Bishop Talbot’s opinion, and “from the point of view of simple justice” could not see “that we have any reason to blame the mine-owners for refusing to allow the management of their own business to be taken out of their hands.” From Calvary, too, – or at least from the Calvary Baptist Church of New York, – came a further demand for soldiery. “These labor leaders,” declared the Rev. Dr. R. S. MacArthur, “with their large salaries, are forcing the men to be idle. They are more tyrannical than the Czar of Russia.” These are but samples of the “safe” utterances on social questions – the kind that involve no penalties, but on the contrary, reap sure harvests of glory and recompense.