The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

There will then be no tramps, no paupers, no women compelled to sell their persons; and as poverty, gloom, and hardship are the chief sources of intemperance, we may anticipate, as another consequence, an immense diminution of the liquor traffic, when the Department of Productive Labor shall have gotten into full operation. Moral gloom and the bad passions impel men to intemperance, and when they acquire the happy and gentle temperament of woman they will also acquire her temperance.

Mr. Bellamy’s idea of the nation as the employer may not be practicable, but the Department of Productive Labor is an obvious method of initiating the principle of national co-operation, which an urgent necessity has compelled the British government to initiate in Ireland. But we cannot safely wait, like England, until famine is threatening.

The pauperization of labor depends on the monopoly of land combined with the monopoly of machinery. It cannot occur in a new country, but must develop when all the land is monopolized and worth a hundred dollars an acre. The independence of the laborer owing to cheap vacant land is more than restored by a Department of Productive Labor which establishes a minimum of wages below which they cannot be forced, and gives a standing ground on which exaction can be resisted permanently by the laborer.

The Department of Productive Labor may be made a charming feature of the government, on which philanthropists may expend their skill; and its beautiful plantations, especially in the highlands of the Carolinas and Georgia, and in California, may be looked to as a haven of repose by all who are disappointed in life, who may find in these rural homes something more attractive than the co-operative societies to which some are rushing now. The voice of the red flag anarchist will be quieted, and the agitators who endeavor to stir up dissension will find most of their grievances redressed when the laborer has an assured home.

There is no obstructive limit to the achievements of the army of labor. Aside from agriculture and manufactures, there are roads to be built, buildings to be erected, improvements of many kinds, and there are about a thousand million acres of arid land, needing irrigation, the necessary works for which could employ more than would probably apply, for the wages should not be such as to attract men from profitable employments. The army of labor may not at first be wisely managed, but anything is better than the vast national losses by enforced idleness. It is not extravagant to anticipate an ultimate governmental administration of railroads, mines, manufactures, and government farms that may employ many hundred thousands. There is no apparent hindrance to the extension of the Department of Productive Labor until it shall embrace all who desire the comfort and security it gives, while those who prefer the strife of competition can remain outside of the experiment, and thus the governmental and the individual systems be fairly tried in competition with each other. Thus far no formidable difficulty appears in abolishing pauperism, but we find a more difficult task when we propose the abolition of Plutocracy, by what may be called a revolutionary measure.

Having thus gotten rid of the increasing army of paupers and tramps, providing, as it seems, a sound basis for a republic, we have the other problem of getting rid of the growing aristocracy—the plutocratic princes, the syndicates and trusts, who constitute the other great danger,—of whom we may say we must either master them or they will master us by managing our senators, governors, and presidents. They have already swallowed some such legislatures as we have been able to elect, with such facility as to show that it will not be long before they can swallow the entire government, and when it has been swallowed it may not be as fortunate as Jonah in getting out again, for there is some very important legislation necessary to this republic which the plutocracy may be expected to resist with all its power, and when the conflict comes it will be a grand one.

They will probably combat with all their might the doctrine which must sometime be presented, that the nation must rule itself on democratic principles, and that the dead shall not rule the living by entail, mortmain, or will. When a child is born it must become a member of the republic on conditions compatible with the safety of that republic. It cannot be allowed to come in as the born master of a hundred thousand fellow-citizens equally competent to serve the republic. Our young citizens approach us from a generation that has passed away.

It sleeps in the graveyard, or it leads a better life in the better world. It has left vast masses of wealth, surrounded by wretched areas of desolate poverty. Was it wise or just to do so,—to ignore brotherhood of man, and to perpetuate all possible inequality? No, a thousand times no. There is not one, perhaps, of the millionnaire dwellers in the better world who does not regret and mourn his earthly selfishness, and who would not order a more just and generous distribution of his estate if his voice could be heard.

But we need not ask them. We know what is just and we will correct the mistakes of the departed. We know that this hoarding in families is unjust to the republic and unjust to the Brotherhood of Humanity,—an injury to all, a benefit to none. Therefore it must not be permitted.

Already the law is beginning to recognize this principle, which is destined to revolutionize all the world; but we are not the leaders in this democracy, because our plutocracy is too strong. Switzerland in its mountain homes carries the banner of democracy, and has gone farther than any other country in asserting the rights of the commonwealth over inherited wealth. New York has ordained a little infinitesimal inheritance tax which, according to the Herald, in 1886 produced $60,000, in 1887 $500,000, in 1888 over a million. That will be enough to build schoolhouses for the 20,000 children kept out of school in the city of New York for want of room. The proposition is under discussion in Massachusetts, and if we do our duty Massachusetts may set the example of the greatest social revolution ever accomplished by law. If Boston received the benefit of such a tax on its own population, it might be adjusted to raise from one million to more than ten millions a year; at any rate a succession tax might produce more than all other taxes produce at present, and it would bring about such radical changes that it would be expedient to make the change gradual, and gradual it must be, for it will meet determined opposition, and we must enforce our principle by every argument of justice and expediency, for it is both just and expedient. What right have the millionnaires to say how the world shall be managed after they have left it? What right to say that when they have established a dangerous inequality, posterity shall be compelled to make it perpetual. The robber barons established inequality by the sword, and by the same power made it perpetual. The posterity of kings and barons, however worthless, corrupt, criminal, or imbecile, continue to occupy the saddle upon the public donkey. But inherited royalty is going, and inherited aristocracy must also go. We who survive are the responsible parties, and (as the Romans charged their rulers in times of danger) we must see that the republic does not suffer, and that aristocracy shall not be its permanent master.

What right has the millionnaire to direct from the grave, that the wealth which he has left shall be used in the manner most dangerous and most injurious to society. He has no such right. He has no right in the matter, but what we in our justice or in our good-nature may give him. If these views are just, they must in time rule the world, but they are not yet asserted by those to whom the world looks for counsel.3

The sacred right of the living citizen in that which his industry has created, has no application here. It is a totally different case. It is the question what right has he to rule the world after he has enjoyed his full share and more, and gone away. We do not ask whether he got his wealth by fraud, or robbery, or industry. He has left it; he is done with it; he is dead in fact and ought to be dead in law! The law has no jurisdiction over him now, and he has no possible interest in what is done, nor any power to rectify his mistakes. To perpetuate his fictitious personality, and make the opinions which he has left in writing an authority like the acts of a living man, is a tremendous stretch of the imagination, much like the old superstitions which made a law by the preface “thus saith the Lord.”

I know the claim will be made that the wealth which the millionnaires could not carry away was truly theirs, and therefore that while they lived they had a right to dispose of it. But I deny it. In the highest sense of justice, it was not theirs, and even if it was, it was justly forfeited by their treason to humanity; for I hold that neither genius nor the business capacity that produces wealth ever releases a man from his obligations to society. In time of war to defend the city or State, we take every man’s property, so far as needed, and require him, in addition, to offer his life in battle to protect the community; and surely in the grand battle which every republic has to meet against its foes,—on the one hand oligarchy and despotism, and on the other social disorder and convulsions between capital and impoverished labor,—in this battle, I say, every man may be required to defend the republic with his money, his honor, and his life, if need be, and he should think himself very lightly released if society demands only to become his legatee, after he has provided for his family. He thus relinquishes what is nothing to him but everything to society.

Wealth is the product of the nation—of all its work of brain and muscle. No one man by himself ever accumulated wealth. But in the entangled social co-operation, struggle, and battle, wealth is scattered strangely and gathered in heaps like the money at a gaming table. One man seizes a gold mine, another seizes for a trifle a piece of parchment giving the title to land where a million are going to settle, and both become millionnaire princes at the expense of the commonwealth. There would be very few rich men if the real production of each was all that he could hold. To seize by a legal fiction a mine that yields a million annually is simply a robbery of the commonwealth. The robbery of the commonwealth and the toiler is our chronic condition. The urban population, strong in capital and skilful in combination and chicanery, has drained the agricultural regions, until agriculture,4 toil, and poverty, are closely associated, while urban wealth displays its ostentatious ease, and farmers are driven by the million into a desperate political struggle for self-protection.

The great mass of accumulated wealth was all unearned. It was the donation of absurd law to monopolists,—to men who procured the titles to lands. Their value came from the entire community, created by the people, and when that amount is rescued from landlordism, the millions vanish and society reclaims its own. Thus do I assert the ownership of the community in millionnaire hoards. And when the tenant for life has gone, to whom the law has been by far too generous, and left his hoards, out of which he has already squandered more than he was entitled to—the commonwealth from which this wealth was gathered may rightly step in and reclaim it.

It is but a waif on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these wreckers are entitled to the cargo,—to goods which they did not produce, and whether it is safe and patriotic to allow them to carry off what is substantially in the majority of cases morally and justly the property of the commonwealth. There may be some exceptions to these general statements as to property, but when we recollect how land monopoly and other monopolies have robbed the commonwealth, I hold that the commonwealth is bound to reclaim the stolen wealth wherever it can find it, and certainly wherever the commonwealth can find it abandoned by the claimant, the action of trover should come in when the tenant for life has ceased to exist.

Perhaps the devotees of precedent may be bold enough to call this robbery, but it is simply reclamation of that which has too long been lost or stolen. For the chief foundations of large fortunes, the chief source of the great flood of accumulated wealth, has been the taxation of the people by the monopoly of land and monopoly of mines—the monopoly by private individuals of what justly belonged to the commonwealth, but was captured by the sword or by law—aided by cunning financial operations which stand on no higher plane than gambling or fraud.

The British peerage draw an annual rental from their lands of $66,000,000, and the American princes draw far more, but I have not had time to find the statistics.5 It will not be long before foreign landlords shall draw $50,000,000 annually from the United States, if they do not already, for they hold more than 20,000,000 acres, and on these they may practise the eviction of tenants in the Irish fashion. The wrongs of Irish tenants elicit universal sympathy, but they are far surpassed now in America without outcry or comment. About twenty-four thousand evictions occurred last year in the city of New York, and this indicated more than a hundred thousand human beings turned homeless into the streets, generally in a penniless condition! The distressing evictions of the great cities, and the selling out of thousands of western farmers under foreclosing mortgages, are preparing a terrible mass of discontented population to whom a social convulsion would not be alarming. Those who live under the pressure of a terrible social system will not be sorry if it is overthrown by violence.

A large portion of the city of New York is held at values ($50 a foot) which would make its annual ground rental over $100,000 a year for a single acre. When we think of the vast sums which have been accumulating for centuries in the form of rent—say, for example, the land rents of England, which, outside of mines, amount to $330,000,000 a year,—it will be apparent that the grand flood-tide of wealth, which has passed into the possession of private individuals who have been fortunate enough to acquire land titles long ago, and their successors, exceeds by more than a hundred times all the wealth that has not been squandered and remains in sight to-day.

But it is gone—squandered—and we never can reclaim it; and there is another mountain mass of wealth not quite expended yet, which came from corrupt financial monopoly, which has sometimes generated financial lords more rapidly than land monopoly. Upon questions of finance and political economy, our people have been as blind as they have upon the land question, and our entire financial legislation has been but a trap to catch the commonwealth and rob it, and the commonwealth has been caught, and robbed of far more than two thousand millions.6

The follies and crimes of the past cannot be readjusted—but its legacy of robbery to the present must submit to the arbitration of justice, and the demands of philanthropy. The millions exacted from the tenants of England and Ireland by the descendants of the robber barons and brigand soldiers, who took the soil by the sword, still cry aloud for justice.

If we grant that an individual may by his own exertions justly acquire a hundred thousand dollars, which is an ample competence, and that as an encouragement and reward for his industry, society may justly allow him to dispose of it by will, which I think is a liberal concession, I see no sufficient reason for extending his authority beyond that amount. All above that amount, I hold, should belong to the commonwealth in justice, for two reasons—first, because it was taken from the commonwealth, and second, because the commonwealth suffers from two dangerous classes, which ought not to exist,7—the tramps becoming demoralized and desperate, and the idlers, becoming demoralized and worthless, who think themselves a privileged class, born with a right to live in everlasting idleness upon the toil of those who are not thus well born. This division into the aristocracy, the proletariat, and the middle class struggling to become the aristocracy, does not make a republic. It is an ancient falsehood and injustice established by absurd laws of inheritance (as absurd as the Hindoo castes), which have cursed the world, and will continue to curse it until America shall establish democratic justice. Yet as experience shows that men’s opinions in all things are swayed by their interests, there must be but few of the patrician class who can perceive these truths, and we must rely for their appreciation upon the vast majority who are not born to wealth.

What policy the commonwealth may observe,—whether it shall allow the millionnaire to dispose of ten, twenty, or fifty per cent. as an encouragement and reward for his accumulations,—is a debatable question. To give him post-mortem control of fifty per cent. would be, it seems to me, an act of prodigal generosity to millionnaire heirs. That a dead man of a hundred millions should be allowed to keep fifty millions hoarded in private possession appears to me an extravagant claim, for even ten per cent. of that amount would be enough to spoil his children and unfit them for good citizenship. I believe it would be better for society if all inheritance of wealth were forbidden, and every boy and girl required to begin life with a few hundred dollars, and gain the position they deserved by their own abilities alone.

This reclamation of millionnaire estates by the commonwealth would not be so necessary but for the fact that the world has been ruled by false principles, and in all past ages millionnaires have, with few exceptions, regarded their vast possessions as something on which the public had no claim in justice, as being the true sources of wealth—something on which the brotherhood of humanity had no claim—something which was not a sacred trust for the benefit of mankind—something which they should clutch with an iron grasp, as long as possible, to keep it intact and unbroken, and still speaking from the grave, hold it protected from all the claims of humanity, to magnify their own names in their descendants, and keep their offspring the lords dominant of society,—thus making it really a curse instead of a blessing; and as neither the moralists nor the clergy have ever taught them anything else, such is still their tendency, with a few such exceptions as Peter Cooper and George Peabody. But when society substitutes rational ethics and simple justice for old traditions and debasing customs, the destruction of wealth will be recognized as a crime, no matter how it was obtained; and such profligates as the Prince of Wales, who spends half a million yearly, and then calls upon his avaricious mother for one or two millions to silence the clamor of creditors whom he has defrauded, will be no longer feasted, admired, and imitated, for justice will be embodied in law and the race of profligates will have been exterminated.

If any owner of these hoards, when he is compelled to give them up, politely throws out five per cent. or even two per cent. for something that he considers worthy, it is received with great laudation as something not to have been expected. A Cleveland millionnaire was lauded for a petty donation, less than he had expended on his old wife’s laces. As philanthropists millionnaires are generally great failures. They did not study the public welfare through life, and they do not know how to promote it; their benefactions generally go to institutions that perpetuate the old order of mediæval conservatism, and delay the progress of humanity. They are incompetent as trustees. One man with the wealth of an Astor or a Rockefeller, and the overflowing love guided by the wisdom of intuition (so conspicuous in Jesus that men have worshipped him as a God, and elevated their own natures by the worship), could accomplish more than all that American wealth has ever done upon this continent.

Therefore by that right of eminent domain which is good over lands occupied by the living, and far better over estates abandoned by the dead, it becomes the duty of society to maintain the republic, to assert the supreme law of justice, and thereby teach the doctrine so long forgotten by followers of Christianity, that all our powers and resources beyond our own necessities belong to our brothers. Such are the principles of every real Christian. Such was the sentiment of John Wesley; and his expression, if I recollect rightly, was that he would consider himself a thief if he died with more than ten pounds in his possession.

These doctrines are not entirely strange—the world is beginning to look in this direction already. The heirship of the state is an idea already broached in France, sustained by Clemenceau, Pelletan, and many other distinguished citizens, and discussed in the Chamber of Deputies. The proposition was to limit the law of inheritance, and substitute the heirship of the state for all collateral heirs. That eminent and practical philanthropist, M. Godin, whose name has been immortalized by the Industrial Palace at Guise, warmly espoused this idea in all its breadth, and said:—

“When an individual dies, society has then the right to take to itself what he leaves, for it has been the chief aid of the deceased. Without its aid, without its institutions, he could never have been able to amass the riches of which he is at his death the holder. Society inherits wealth, then, to use for the same work of social progress already accomplished; that is to say to allow others, the surviving in general (not the privileged strangers to the creation of the existing riches), to continue their labor and co-operation in the common social work. The heredity of the State is then just, both in principle and in fact.”

The two measures which are necessary now are the Department of Productive Labor and the law of inheritance by the commonwealth, which limits the transmission of estates above a hundred thousand dollars, giving the commonwealth a share, rising from one to ninety-nine per cent. according to the magnitude of the estate—or some other form of taxation (if there be a better) producing equivalent results.

I do not propose these measures as the remedy par excellence for our unhappy social condition. Not at all. They are merely the gigantic blows from the right arm of the commonwealth, by which the curses established in the dark and bloody past, crushing man and woman to the earth, shall be hurled into oblivion. The true, absolute, and complete remedy is that industrial, intellectual, hygienic, and ethical training of all, which I have published as the “New Education” which will make new men. These are bold and revolutionary measures,8 but the surgery of the knife is sometimes what humanity demands. The mad riot of rivalry and selfishness must be restrained before it brings the republic to ruin. The power of land monopoly must be broken by a land tax, and the post-mortem despotism which perpetuates accumulated evils must be thrown off by just and practicable legislation.

We must act upon the undisguised truth that individual humanity is not yet properly educated, and not yet qualified to exercise its trusteeship of wealth, for the hard struggles against the oppressive power of poverty, sickness, robbery, fraud, and sudden calamity have made the self-protective faculties predominant, and the sharp rivalry and competition of business has so increased their predominance that the thought of public welfare is never paramount, and is but an occasional glimmer, and the death-bed surrender of wealth, if it considers the welfare of society at all, considers it so blindly that a large proportion of the benevolent endowments are of little real value.

It is, therefore, necessary that the outcry of suffering and the warning of danger should rouse the public conscience to nobler principles, and that society in its maximum wisdom, which embraces a few earnest philanthropists, many capable financiers and economists, very many tender-hearted women who will not consent to suffering, and who are destined to participate in government, as well as a great many who are personally conscious of wrongs that need rectifying, should assume the administration of the superfluous wealth abnormally accumulated.