The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Unpopular Review Vol. IThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Unpopular Review Vol. IAuthor: VariousEditor: Henry HoltRelease date: February 15, 2015 [eBook #48268]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Judith Wirawan, Tor Martin Kristiansen and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net(This file was produced from images generously madeavailable by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW VOL. I ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Unpopular Review Vol. IAuthor: VariousEditor: Henry HoltRelease date: February 15, 2015 [eBook #48268]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Judith Wirawan, Tor Martin Kristiansen and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net(This file was produced from images generously madeavailable by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Title: The Unpopular Review Vol. I
Author: VariousEditor: Henry Holt
Author: Various
Editor: Henry Holt
Release date: February 15, 2015 [eBook #48268]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Judith Wirawan, Tor Martin Kristiansen and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net(This file was produced from images generously madeavailable by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW VOL. I ***
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PUBLISHED QUARTERLY
VOL. I
JANUARY-JUNE
1914
NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1913, 1914,byHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
The New Irrepressible ConflictThe Editor1The Majority JuggernautFabian Franklin22The Democrat ReflectsGrant Showerman34The New MoralityPaul Elmer More47Professor Bergson and Psychical ResearchThe Editor63Two Neglected VirtuesF. J. Mather, Jr.112The Unfermented CabinetE. S. Martin124A Needed Unpopular ReformH. B. Brougham133Our Tobacco: Its CostHenry W. Farnam145Our Alcohol: Its UseClayton Hamilton163The MicrobophobiacGrant Showerman175The Standing Incentives to WarDavid Starr Jordan185The Machinery for PeaceH. B. Brougham200En Casserole: Tobacco and Alcohol—Answering Big Questions—Decency and the Stage—What's the Matter with our Colleges? (Vernon L. Kellogg)—Proportionate News (F. J. Mather, Jr.)—Simplified Spelling212
The Soul of CapitalismAlvin S. Johnson227A Sociological NightmareW. P. Trent245Social Untruth and the Social UnrestFabian Franklin252Natural AristocracyPaul Elmer More272The Right to be AmusedF. J. Mather, Jr.297How Woman Suffrage has WorkedH. B. Brougham307The Baby and the BeeVernon L. Kellogg333The Case for Pigeon-HolesGrant Showerman343The Greeks on Religion and MoralsEmily J. Putnam358Our Sublime Faith in SchoolingCalvin Thomas375The Barbarian InvasionWarner Fite389Trust-Busting as a National PastimeHenry R. Seager406Our Government Subvention to LiteratureCharles W. Burrows415En Casserole: Special to our Readers—A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation—A Model of Divinatory Criticism (Calvin Thomas)—Some Deserving "Climbers"—Simplified Spelling431
The Unpopular ReviewVOL. 1JANUARY, 1914NO. 1
We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun—which statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.
The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be as long as life is worth living in it—and longer. There was one between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery. Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy, order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.
That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by those in front enslaving those behind—the minority enslaving the majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization—as we regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot were getting on the other leg—the majority trying to enslave the minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what Athens started will stop.But probably the result of the conflict will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times, however—say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe, and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and letters and the arts—when in two instances these men were legislated away from powers and immunities granted to others.
Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us.
Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic. Now they have become nation-wide and world-wide; and until evolution has got so nearits goal of equilibration that the differences between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater, the conflict will be irrepressible.
The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now, and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers and land-owners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the talk of equality, until the proletariat "tasted blood" in the greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This delusion dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at last as far along in a certain sort of "progress" as the older civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines preached all the way from EmmaGoldman up to some of the most "progressive" of the college professors.
But however discouraging the situation among the wage-earners may be, it is perhaps better than one of ox-like content. The average man is beginning to have ideals—not very high ideals; most of them concern merely his back and his belly; but there are a few which find vent in the orchestras and dramatic efforts at the settlements and village halls; and in the bandstands on the village greens, horrible as generally are the noises made in them. But these awakening ideals also appear in the boycotts among the Danbury hatters, in the vandalisms of the I. W. W., in the Los Angeles dynamiting, and in murders among the Chicago teamsters and Pennsylvania miners, as well as in the assassination of McKinley.
Then there is an intermediate showing of them, neither in art nor in physical force, but in the opinions behind the force, in all sorts of schemes toward the material basis of enlarged life. The people seek short cuts across the gulf, and follow like sheep those who promise them what they want. Just as Jack Cade promised them that every pint pot should hold a quart, so Bryan promised them, virtually, that silver should be as good as gold, and Roosevelt virtually promised them that all judges should be afraid to decide against them in industrial conflicts. True, he explains all that away in the Hibbert Journal. But the people he harangues do not read the Hibbert Journal, and he is astute enough to know it.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Irrepressible Conflict is where it is not between two sides wanting the same dollars, but between the real and the ideal. Nearly all the schemes are ideal, eminently desirable, but utterly impossible in any state of human nature that we know or can clearly foresee. Yet they appeal to the sympathies of all, and therefore mislead the judgments of many. We wish we felt as certain as we do of sunrise that in the present stage of American evolution democratic governmentis not one of these ideals; but we cannot. The American people has just passed its first two measures of distinct and unqualified class legislation, and has been running wild after the two greatest demagogues in history. But fortunately as they both promise substantially the same things—"steal each other's clothes," they tend to neutralize each other.
The sources of the most pronounced conflict between facts and ideals are that ordinarily a man cannot have more than he creates and conserves; that the desire to will torture those who create and conserve little, as long as they have to look upon others who create and conserve much; and that, as long as the difference lasts, those who have little will want to get hold of what is held by those who have much. The things that all men want, but few men have. Those who have not, envy and often hate those who have. Of late this disposition has been greatly intensified by the multitude of rapid fortunes from the new control of Nature and from the trusts, and the parvenu ostentation accompanying them. It makes a difference whether princely state surrounds the king's son, or one's own pal of yesterday.
Worst of all, so many of these fortunes have been obtained wrongfully that they intensify the impression thatallfortunes above the average have.
Now the fundamental question in this conflict is: to whom does that money rightfully belong? Among wise people who are not economists, the width and profundity of the ignorance on this point tends to dissipate the current skepticism regarding the miraculous.
The fortunes wrongfully acquired are exceptional and abnormal. Nearly all comfortable fortunes come from legitimate industry. Within a generation the economists have got the question of to whom they rightfully belong, into the qualitative stage of settlement. The quantitative stage is a much nicer and more complicated problem, and varies more with different cases. Possibly the first germ of the solution appeared a generation ago in a sentence in Marshall's "Economics of Industry."
It was: "The earnings of management of a manufacturer represent the value of the addition which his work makes to the total product of capital and industry." The same holds true of a farmer, miner, transporter, merchant or anybody else who directs industry. It is more easily recognized in the case of the inventor. Francis A. Walker took up this theme and gradually demonstrated that so far from the employer's profits being wrung out of the wage-earner, they are generally greatest where wages are highest, and proceed from devices and economies effected by the employer, and would not exist without them. This is being constantly illustrated by some employers succeeding where others have failed, and failing where others have succeeded. In support of the general thesis Walker says: "Discussions in Economics and Statistics," (Vol. I., pp. 367-75):
"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken, as it should be, into account."Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the employers of what may be called the no-profits class."... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and machinery; from boldly incurring the expense—the oftenlarge expense—of improved processes and appliances, while closely scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his accumulations...."If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too often entertained by the wages class, which regards the successful employers of labor—men who realize large fortunes in manufactures or trade—as having in some way injured or robbed them...."In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods, and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them, each employer's profits representing that which he has produced over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and capital."
"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken, as it should be, into account.
"Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the employers of what may be called the no-profits class.
"... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and machinery; from boldly incurring the expense—the oftenlarge expense—of improved processes and appliances, while closely scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his accumulations....
"If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too often entertained by the wages class, which regards the successful employers of labor—men who realize large fortunes in manufactures or trade—as having in some way injured or robbed them....
"In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods, and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them, each employer's profits representing that which he has produced over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and capital."
All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions, but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.
Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery. But that wealth isgenerallythe result of pillage, and not of invention, good management and other good forces, isprobably the worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.
This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes. This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not always, it has been accumulated to their profit.
Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not, thinks that the man who has it, stole it—that it belongs to the man who handled it. And he is going to take it.
But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong. He is going to take it "by due process of law"—by his vote: the law has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot hold on to what he has already got of it.
At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is unquestionably in conflict with the principlesuum cuique. The problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing forces.
Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To the education in the common schools are now being added medical supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who pay most of the money for them.
In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need, or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to stop it?
Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much farther—especially in distributing favors elsewhere—without attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossiblethat there should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the desirability of having every man feel his interest in government, throughsomedegree of the pinch of taxation.
Any considerable increase of the recent legislation, would of course lead to the diminution of capital, both through expenditure and through discouragement of accumulation. It would also diminish the activity of those who are able to handle capital profitably, and the consequent effect on wages would perhaps in time become apparent to even the order of intellect behind the legislation.
How far can it go without drying up the springs of charity? There is already free talk of saving income taxes out of charities.
Such legislation is certainly nursing antagonisms, and whether the spread of general intelligence can be expected to be rapid enough to prevent serious harm, is doubtful. It even sometimes appears a question whether the conflict can be settled without more serious bloodshed. Fortunately neither side has yet as much to complain of as one side had in the revolutions which cost Charles I and Louis XVI their heads; and it is doubtful whether either side has the power or coherence or disposition to drive it to arms—whether the existing sentiment in any civilized nation is longer such as to make such a consummation possible. Times are growing more peaceful. Not only has the biggest army in the world for nearly half a century been the biggest engine of peace; not only has a permanent international courthouse been built among the fortresses, after several temporary ones had already done good service; but when the brotherhood of locomotive engineers gets into conflict with their employers, instead of settling it in the freight yards with torches and brickbats, both sides go to the Waldorf-Astoria and have a judicial proceeding. For a centrifugal explosion, they substitute a centripetal adjustment. And the brawn supplies its share of the brains to do it.
The fundamental question is, of course, whether before serious harm has been done, the differences in men's fortunes which, as said at the outset, largely mean differencesin men's powers, can be sufficiently decreased to leave room for little conflict.
One answer is that the equalization is already taking place at a rate that few people realize. Amid the poor, the impression that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer, is quite general, and of course is fostered by the demagogues who make their living out of the discontent—out of the justifiable discontent less perhaps than out of the unjustifiable. Worse still, perhaps, the educated whose sympathies lead them to instruct the ignorant, are to a shameful degree ignorant of the truth in this regard, and, it must be feared, of the facts of the economic situation generally: somehow the softness of heart which actuates many such well-meaning people seems often to accompany a softness of head which recoils from all hard facts that would narrow the field where they delight to exercise their sympathies.
Nobody will question the progress of the average man from status to contract—from slavery, serfdom, feudal dependence, to wage-earning; but since the time of Marx, the claim of rich richer, and poor poorer has been general—among the ignorant rich as well as the ignorant poor. Nevertheless abundant authorities prove the exact contrary.
In the "poor poorer" part of the assertion, there was undeniably much truth during the early part of the nineteenth century, especially before industry became adjusted to the new machinery, and before the rise of the trades unions and the overthrow of thelaissez-fairepolicy in legislation. But after those changes, there was a rapid advance in wages, shortening of hours, and reduction in the price of commodities. So great was the change that even Marx himself, who had done more than any other man to spread the "increasing misery" theory, abandoned it in an address delivered in 1864. Yet he so little understood the force of admissions that he then made, that he let the elaboratea prioridemonstration of the theory which he had already built up, stand in his "Capital," which he did not publish till 1867.[1]But theadmissions of 1864 did not end in theory. Facts began to accumulate to confirm it. Early in the twentieth century the changed conditions had attracted attention, and there were gathered many data which proved that rapid betterment had taken place in the condition of wage-earners.
We have space for but a few of the facts, and they are not all up to date. Of the results of the Census of 1910 which bear on this subject, very few are yet published. Most of those of the Census of 1900 were not published till 1907, and it is only up to about that time that many data are at the moment available. But we hope before long to present a careful study of the conditions up to the present time. Meanwhile, it is pleasant to note the following:
In the United States wages in manufacturing industries averaged $247 in 1850, $427 in 1899, and $519 in 1909. And of course other industries could not fall very far below manufactures.
The cost of living did not begin to show any such advance. Dun's tables show that the yearly cost of living per capita in 1860, before the civil war, was $16.87morethan in 1905. For the sixteen years 1880 to 1895, inclusive, the average yearly cost was $101.65. For the ten years 1896 to 1905, inclusive, the average was $81.52, $20.13lessthan for the earlier period. There has been a sharp advance since 1905, but taking the whole period from 1850 to the present time, nothing to compare with the advance in wages.
Although the recent class legislation in favor of the labor trusts also included any possible farmer trust, the farmer appears to have progressed with the wage-earner. His products have lately materially advanced in price, and the abstract of the Census of 1910 says (p. 295):
The total value of the land and buildings of the 1,006,511 farms shown for 1910 was $6,330,000,000, and the amount of debt was $1,726,000,000, or 27.3 per cent. of the value. The corresponding proportion in 1890, as shown in the reports, was 35.5 per cent., and to make this figure strictly comparable it would presumably have to be increased slightly. There wasthus during the 20 years a marked diminution in the relative importance of mortgage debt ... but the average owner's equity per farm increased from $2,220 to $4,574, or more than doubled.
The total value of the land and buildings of the 1,006,511 farms shown for 1910 was $6,330,000,000, and the amount of debt was $1,726,000,000, or 27.3 per cent. of the value. The corresponding proportion in 1890, as shown in the reports, was 35.5 per cent., and to make this figure strictly comparable it would presumably have to be increased slightly. There wasthus during the 20 years a marked diminution in the relative importance of mortgage debt ... but the average owner's equity per farm increased from $2,220 to $4,574, or more than doubled.
Wholesale clothing dealers report a great increase in average size and quality of clothes demanded, which shows that the people are better fed and exercised and better off. Over all highly civilized countries the consumption of food has been increasing faster than population. This cannot mean that the rich eat and drink more; for they ate and drank all they wanted before: so it must prove that the proportion of those who can eat and drink freely is increasing.
Moreover, hours of labor have been decreasing without any diminution of production. The United States Labor Bureau reports for 1913 show that the average wage-earner is working shorter hours than ever before, that he is receiving more pay for the short-hour week than he formerly received for the long-hour week, and that the increase in his average wage in most industries has been so great that its purchasing power has risen, notwithstanding the increase in prices of many commodities.
As to the "rich richer" fallacy: in Massachusetts for the period 1829-31 the probated estates under $5,000 were 85.6 per cent. of the whole, in the period 1889-91 they had fallen to 69.5 of the whole. It is nevertheless true that a few of the rich are richer than men have been before, and in the case of an increasing proportion of them, it has been for the good of all of us.
In Great Britain from 1840 to 1890, the number of estates subject to succession tax increased twice as fast as population, while the average amount per estate had not increased at all.
In France from 1853 to 1883 wages advanced some sixty per cent., and in the principal occupations of women (outside of domestic service), they nearly doubled.
Mr. W. H. Mallock, after an elaborate investigation in the British Census reports, the details of which are given in his "Classes and Masses," states the following conclusions: "The poor" (except those who have nothingat all) "are getting richer; the rich, on an average, getting poorer ... and of all classes in the community, the middle class is growing the fastest." Since 1830 the population has increased "in the proportion of 27 to 35; the increase of the section in question [the middle class] was in the proportion of 27 to 84." "The middle class has increased numerically in the proportion of 3 to 10; the rich class has increased only in the proportion of 3 to 8." In 1881, there were seven thousand windowless cabins occupied by families in Scotland; by 1891, these had "almost disappeared; the one-roomed dwellings with windows have decreased 25 per cent.; the two-roomed dwellings haveincreasedby 8 per cent., and the three-roomed and four-roomed dwellings by 17 per cent."
In 1815 there were 100,000 paupers in London. At the rate of increase of population in 1875, there should have been 300,000. There actually were less than 100,000, while from 1871 to 1908 the percentage of population "relieved" fell from 31 to 22.
In Germany, income-tax statistics prove the same thing. In Prussia, from 1876 to 1888, Dr. Soetbeer (quoted by Professor Mayo-Smith) finds that the proportion of income-tax payers with their families, to the whole population, had increased about 22 per cent., that is from 2.3 per cent. of the population to 2.8 per cent., and that the classes which had increased at the most rapid rate were those with incomes of over $500. And although the most rapid increase of all had been in the class with incomes of over $25,000, the average incomes of that class had decreased.
We regret that more recent figures than some we have given cannot be had in time for the present article, but as already said, we hope before long to present the results of a special study backed by the forthcoming census bulletin, and attempting to weigh judicially the confusing factor introduced into the situation by that part of the rise in prices due to the unprecedented increase in the supply of gold. Were it not for that extraneous circumstance, the showing for the wage-earner's advance would be even greater.
The very recent and probably temporary rise in prices is principally attributed to the unprecedented production ofgold, the rush away from the farms to the cities, the rise in wages, and certain wastes in labor. In some trades wages have been forced to a height which, acting on the prices of products, has in many particulars nullified the advance in wages. All raising of wages by limiting labor instead of increasing product, by increasing friction instead of efficiency, by getting more than one's own instead of making one's own larger, must raise prices. So, to put it more in detail, must all such adventitious tricks as limiting apprentices; limiting each laborer's speed to that of the slowest; limiting the kinds of things a man can reasonably do—in short, all limiting of labor below its best efficiency by men or masters, masters remembering of course that to best efficiency reasonable rest, food and other good conditions are essential. So must all making of work by putting onto a job more labor than can accomplish it economically, as by calling a painter, a carpenter and a plumber to do a little job that any one of them could complete alone, and destroying good old product to make a call for new. Under ordinary conditions there will always be work enough for everybody without these efforts to create work artificially, and the extraordinary conditions where there is not enough, are only multiplied and intensified by such efforts.
But despite these influences contributory to the rise of prices in recent years, the improvements in the wage-earner's lot that had been noted for over half a century, have on the whole continued to the present time.
All the forms of industrial conflict are but manifestations of Nature's striving for equilibration—the goal of all evolution; and only with a nearer equilibration of men's fortunes will there be peace. How can it be brought about?
Will a victory of the socialists bring it? Yes, if, by premature action, you make a desert and call it peace, or if you wait until the civic virtues are so far developed that selections at the polls will be as unbiassed and discriminating as those of Nature. But if that time is approaching, it is with leaden feet; and to act as if it had arrived would only delay it. Our steps must be cautious and tentative.That the frightful wastes of both competition and monopoly should be avoided by state management of all industries or even to any great extent by state control, is a far-off ideal—so far-off that men wise enough to be successful are slow to express opinions about it. Beside this ideal, as beside the ideal of the land directly providing the government revenue, stalks, as the extreme fallacy generally stalks beside the truth, the false ideal of the government management or the land tax producing enough revenue to take care of everybody, and doing it, leaving to no one the saving duty of taking care of himself.
The steps already taken toward that ideal, it may perhaps be worth while to glance at. Outside of government's fundamental functions—the maintenance of order and justice—it has also managed the post-office, the coast and geological surveys, the currency, the census, the public schools, the streets, and the care of the sick and incapable. Some highly centralized and highly civilized governments have added the railways, but the privately owned ones, with all their shortcomings, are better; government telegraph service has been cheapened at the expense of the taxpayers, and government telephone service has been abominable. All this has been non-competitive work. There is not yet any sign that government could make a success of competitive industries. All the indications are the other way. Governments have so far been too slow to invent or even adopt improvements, especially where they involve scrapping old plant; and so far, government has generally been an extravagant and wasteful employer.
Unlike many other conflicts, the new Irrepressible Conflict can never be settled by violence: for violence cannot remove that difference in the capacities of men from which the conflict arises. Violence, even violence disguised under votes, may spasmodically lessen the natural differences in property, but they will reappear as long as there are differences in productive capacity, and society secures to the individual a reasonable share of his production. In this and all cases, advantageous exchangeof course is productive of additional value; and there is a less frequent exchange which tends not to mutual increase of fortune, but to increased difference in fortune. Should society ever go so far as to take from the inventor, the capital-saver, the work-finder, the work-manager and the exchanger their share of the products which, without them, would not exist, and which are shared in by all, production would fall off, probably below the starvation point.
If, then, the conflict cannot be fought out, how is peace to be attained, even the limited degree of peace enjoyed before the modern unrest? Simply by reducing to a negligible point the difference in the productive powers of men—in their intelligence, energy and reliability; and this by leveling up, not by leveling down, as some of the trades unions, from noble but mistaken motives, attempt.
"Simply!" The general proposition is simple enough, but there are many perplexities of detail. One inheres in the definition of "productive powers." Probably it will serve to call them thecapacities of furnishing satisfactions; and to include in satisfactions those produced for oneself as well as those exchanged. In this sense the impecunious philosopher has high productive powers—often so high that he would not exchange them for those of the captain of industry, and he does not often feel discontent enough to make him a very active factor in the Irrepressible Conflict. He does sometimes, though, especially when he feels the pinch of his narrow financial income compared with that of the producer of more material satisfactions. As he is usually a man of gentle make-up, the effect of his narrow income is increased by sympathy with the unfortunate, and sometimes these combined influences send out mighty queer doctrine from professorial chairs. Such phenomena, however, do not controvert the general proposition that the satisfactions of the spirit are to be included among those upon whose more equal production depends the disappearance of the conflict that must be till then irrepressible.
There is no way to peace, then, other than increasing the productive power of the less productive man. Sharing with him material goods, except to tide over emergenciesthat his powers cannot meet, won't do the trick at all, as has been abundantly proved, from the English poor laws down, and as is going to be proved again before some of our recent "progressive" legislation has run its course.
This is far from saying, however, that legislation really progressive in this direction is impossible. We for our part, however, do not see as much hope in legislation as in improvement in knowledge and understanding and disposition among people generally. That great improvement in disposition may be near at hand, seems indicated by recent experiences among the most revolutionary and suggestive in human annals. The recent meeting at Gettysburg, not to speak of the minor earlier ones at Lookout Mountain and elsewhere, indicates an advance in human nature so immense that it has not been realized. Not the least significant thing it demonstrated, is the vast decrease in the necessity of wasting thousands of lives and billions of treasure to settle differences of opinion.
As this is now so startlingly indicated regarding the Irrepressible Conflict which culminated at Gettysburg, and whichcouldbe settled by force, is there not even much more reason to hope for a settlement not very remote, by methods of reason, of our new Irrepressible Conflict, whichcannotbe settled by force?
But even if the outcroppings of the conflict are so soon settled, the fundamental conflict will persist as long as the difference in men is so great, and that difference is the most important thing to be dealt with by all lovers of peace and humanity. The only way to cancel it is for the men in front to help those behind, and for those behind to help themselves—to everything that does not belong to somebody else.
But those in front are entitled to have their judgments followed where they are not plainly tainted by self-interest, and it will pay them to keep self-interest out of their judgments so far as self-preservation does not demand it. But how much self-preservation can properly cover, is a difficult question, and space permits little more than the suggestion of it. Shall a man's self rightly bea wearer of but one suit of clothes, an occupant of a hut, an eater of the plainest food, and an entertainer of no guests: or shall his self rightly be clothed beautifully and suitably for all occasions, occupy a house that shall be a pleasure to gaze upon, consume the food essential to both the greatest refinement and the greatest efficiency, dispense a generous hospitality, broaden his mind and develop his taste so that he can enlighten and inspire others, encourage letters and the arts, and have leisure to devote to charities, education and the common good? There are plenty of illustrations that a man may preserve a self as large as this—as large as Goethe's or Marcus Aurelius's—and yet issue no advice unworthy of the respect of smaller men, and be of an advantage to the race beside which the cost of maintaining such a self is nothing.
If most men cannot have the things just enumerated, and if many of those who have them abuse them, is it best that none should have them? That all should have them is, in the present stage of human development, impossible. If all the wealth of the United States were divided equally among us, we would have but a little over $1,300 apiece,[2]and much of it would be wasted at once, and no conceivable laws would prevent what might be left, being in a very short time as unevenly distributed as now. The only glimpse we can see of a time of even fortunes, is of a time of even capacities; and the only rational way we can see to such a time is through helping each other: every other experiment toward it has proved illusive.
The principal roots of the difficulty are generalized as ignorance and incompetence. The ignorance has already been strongly, though very blunderingly, attacked in the public schools, but not much more blunderingly perhaps than in the universities. It is a strange paradox that education, though the special care of the educated, should be among the most backward of the arts, yet so the highest-educated are the first to admit it to be. We are making hopeful progress in it, though, and are rapidly developingit to care for incompetence not only in mind but in body and disposition.
Then in the struggles of wage-earners and wage-payers, the principle of arbitration is certainly making rapid inroads on the practice of violence. The settlement of the recent great railroad controversies was by deliberative assemblies, not by mobs.
The farther lessening of the difference in material possessions by leveling down on one side as well as leveling up on the other, has lately become a very real and active question. While the inventor has seldom realized his share of production, and while the average director of industry has seldom realized more than his, undoubtedly extortionists and monopolists have rolled up fortunes out of all proportion to their deserts; and the regulation of these, though not doing much to fill up the differences, will do more to relieve the spirit of discontent.
It will be interesting to see how much of the share now going to the employer can go to the employee without stopping the employer's functions of finder, organizer and director of profitable work. We cannot intelligently foresee conditions in which these functions on his part will not be absolutely essential to the progress of society. The functions, however, are being more and more performed, even under the trusts, by men rising from the ranks; and even the men remaining in the ranks are probably performing more and more of those same functions, though some of the short-sighted policies of the unions are obstructing them.
And the unions themselves, despite policies not yet outgrown, have unquestionably done much to raise the wage-earners' fortunes, and are probably, with more experience and wider outlook, to do vastly more. But not until they get beyond the policy of holding their own best men back, will they enter on their full career, and then their least effective men will most benefit. Moreover, the wisest and most effective men are those most ready to learn from criticism, and when the unions realize it, they will have another avenue to usefulness. They will be helped to realize it, however, by morepatience, candor and disinterestedness on the part of the critics. So far, everybody is bellicose, as first at Gettysburg. Cannot both sides to the present Irrepressible Conflict better anticipate a conciliatory disposition than did those heroes of fifty years ago?
When we can always carry the Irrepressible Conflict into courts and arbitrations and, as Godkin said, substitute for the shock of battle, the shock of trained intellects, peace will be in sight.
Its first essential is always a clear understanding. There are lies somewhere in every human conflict. Probably the most pitiful and pernicious of all lies is that all men are equal. The only remedy is to make it true.
During the past five years the agitation in favor of so modifying our governmental system as to remove all those barriers which stand between the will of the majority and its immediate execution has attained formidable dimensions. That the defects which American government has exhibited in many directions have been so serious and so persistent as to furnish great justification for this agitation no candid observer can deny. In both of the two ways upon which advocates of the initiative and referendum lay so much stress, our representative institutions have indeed sadly failed of being ideally representative. Venality of individual legislators, or the control of whole bodies of them by corrupt bosses, has resulted in innumerable instances of special legislation for the benefit of powerful private interests and contrary to the interests of the people. And it must be admitted that apart from any question of venality or corruption there has often been a degree of inertia in the enactment of enlightened and progressive legislation which cannot be ascribed to legitimate conservatism, but must be set down either to the unfitness of legislatures for their responsibilities or to obstacles which an extreme interpretation of constitutional restraints has unnecessarily put in its way.
Nor can it be denied that the referendum and the initiative have intrinsic value as remedies adapted to the counteracting of these two evils respectively. Given a legislature owned by special interests, or controlled by a boss, its power to give away valuable franchises or otherwise to squander the people's inheritance can be held in check by the requirement that upon proper demand such action shall be rendered subject to a veto by the people at large. And if, owing to the intricacies of party organization or to other circumstances, a legislature is stubbornly obstructive, the initiation of legislation by means of popular petition undeniably offers an instrument for the overcoming of such inertia. Were it true that the control oflegislatures by private interests is on the increase, or even showing no sign of diminution; were it true that legislation for social betterment is making little or no headway; were it true that our courts show no disposition to realize that a more liberal interpretation of constitutional provisions is demanded by the changed conditions of our time; it would probably be admitted by all except a few irreconcilables that, however serious might be the objections to the remedies proposed, their adoption appears to be almost dictated by that kind of imperious necessity that knows no law.
As a matter of fact the diametrical opposite of these things is what, upon a large survey of the state of the whole country, is unmistakably evident. It is doubtful whether one can point anywhere to a legislature owned as the Pennsylvania legislature used to be owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Maryland legislature by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the New Hampshire legislature by the Boston and Maine Railroad. Child labor laws and workmen's compensation laws are being enacted and strengthened in state after state, very much after the fashion in which the Australian ballot laws were being passed in state after state a quarter of a century ago. And as for our courts, the Supreme Court of the United States, once regarded as the very stronghold of extreme constitutionalism, has been steadily setting an example of liberal construction; while such a decision as that of the New York Court of Appeals in the Ives case is pointed to on all hands as being rather in the nature of a survival of a past attitude of mind than typical of the present temper of the courts of last resort in our leading states.
Nevertheless, enough remains, and more than enough, to constitute a serious grievance. The progress that has been made towards the removal of scandalous practices or exasperating impotence is not sufficient to justify complacency. But it is sufficient to dispose of that plea of desperate necessity to which advocates of the "rule of the people" are so prone to resort as over-riding all other considerations. Indeed, the state of mind of these advocates is in no small measure an illustration of that remarkablepsychological phenomenon to which Herbert Spencer has drawn attention as marking the progress of reform agitations—that their excitement usually becomes most intense when the object to which they are directed has been almost attained. A dozen years ago it might plausibly have been urged that in our existing representative institutions effective control of public service corporations was impossible; but the railroad-rate legislation of the national Congress and the institution of Public Service Commissions in state after state have been accomplished without a jar. A few years ago it was still the fashion to speak of the United States Constitution as virtually incapable of amendment, this belief being based on the fact that, apart from the amendments brought about by the Civil War, none had been adopted since the early days of the republic. The adoption of the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments in rapid succession has disposed of that notion for good and all; and yet it is only now that a proposal to substitute an easy and rapid method of amendment in place of that now provided in the Constitution has been brought forward and urged. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that to-day's impatience with our existing governmental system, to-day's readiness to welcome short-cut remedies, is attributable rather to exasperation with the difficulties and evils of yesterday than to the conditions of to-day or the prospects of to-morrow.
Into the merits and defects of the various proposals for "direct rule of the people" it is not the purpose of this brief paper to enter in detail. Many valid considerations have been urged in their favor, and many sound objections have been advanced against them. Speaking generally, these arguments relate to the question of the honesty, intelligence, and efficiency of legislation as it has been, or is likely to be, affected by the change in question. Advocates of the new order have pointed to the well-known deficiencies of our legislatures as they are. Its opponents have given instances of errors, and of the misleading of voters, under the initiative system. In the main, however, since experience—in spite of Switzerland's long, but sparing, use of the method—has as yet been but of theslightest extent, serious writers on both sides have dwelt chiefly on the inherent tendency of the system. That it cannot cover the whole province of legislation both sides are fully agreed; and objectors lay chief stress on the inevitable tendency of the initiative-and-referendum system to reduce the importance and dignity of legislatures and consequently to end all hope of raising the quality of their membership, while advocates of the system set great store by the educative value of the exercise of direct legislative judgment upon the whole body of the citizenship.
There is, however, one consideration, and that perhaps the most vital of all, which appears to have been strangely neglected. Every-day efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of legislation and government. They are not settled by an instantaneous show of hands. What may take place in England if it shall come to be governed by a single chamber and under a closure system which makes parliamentary obstruction impossible, no man can say; but up to the present time nothing like this kind of unlimited rule by majority vote in a parliamentary body has existed either in that country or in our own. There has always been in both a possibility of resistance, in one form or another, to the immediate desire of a majority of the people's representatives; and this has profoundly affected the course of history upon those matters which are of most vital moment.
The difference between questions of this type and the ordinary subjects of every-day legislation is more than a mere difference of degree. It is not only that they are more momentous; they are different in kind, in that their decision involves a result which, humanly speaking, isirreversible. Nothing is more common than to say that if an act of the people should prove to be a mistake, they will correct that mistake. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected. If the question of union or disunion had been put to the touch of a majority vote, and had been decided in favor of disunion, the result of that one day's voting would, in all human probability, have been a permanent severance of this nation into two mutually alien parts. Since the Civil War there has been one great issue which, though in a wholly different way, quite as distinctly illustrates the irrevocable character which the decision of a public question may have. Itmightbe no calamity for this country to live, either temporarily or permanently, under a silver standard. But the truly vital point in the silver question which occupied the attention of the nation for twenty years was not that of the silver standard as such, but of the repudiation and currency-debasement involved in substituting the silver dollar, at the ratio of sixteen to one, for the gold dollar as the monetary unit. Had this substitution been effected, the repudiation and debasement would have taken place; and a subsequent return to the gold standard would not in the slightest degree have redressed the wrong. Under the existing system of government there was opportunity for obstruction, for compromise, for the effective influence of a few strong minds and a few powerful personalities. Under the "direct rule of the people" the whole matter might have been settled at a stroke; and it is by no means improbable that it would have been so settled, at some stage or other of the struggle, in favor of the silver standard. For it must be remembered that the very existence of this possibility would have stimulated in an incalculable degree the efforts of the silver agitators; and nothing is more probable than that during the years of depression, distress, and discontent that followed upon the panic of 1893, a moment would have been found when the popular cry of "more money" would have swept the country.
That questions not less fundamental, and the decision of which is not less irrevocable, are destined to arise in the future it should be unnecessary to argue. Never, in thiscountry at least, has the atmosphere been so charged with issues affecting the very bases of the economic and social order. These issues are for the most part vague and undefined, but their gravity and sweep is none the less apparent. But if an illustration were needed of a more specific nature, and one which relates to a question partly of the past and partly of the future, such an illustration lies ready to hand. The agitation against the right of private property in land which was started forty years ago by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" has only within the last few years become a serious factor in practical politics. The shape which it assumes in the actual proposals urged for immediate adoption is that of a mere reduction of the tax now levied on buildings and the placing of a corresponding additional tax on land. But the earnest advocates of this step and its earnest opponents alike rest their case on the animating purpose behind it. That purpose flows from the conviction, which its leading advocates often find it politic to keep in the background but which they seldom disavow, that the owners of land have no rights which, in the eye of justice, the rest of the community is bound to respect. The fiery zeal that shines through the pages of "Progress and Poverty" is animated by this conviction on the one hand, and on the other by the unhesitating belief that under the regime of private property in land human wretchedness must continually increase, while its abolition would carry with it the extinction of poverty. Henry George did not balk at the word confiscation. Indeed it is precisely the assertion of the right to confiscate land which, apart from the eloquent and plausible presentation, constituted the distinctive character of George's work. John Stuart Mill had long advocated the interception by the state of the "unearned increment" of the future, but firmly held that expropriation of landowners without compensation is morally indefensible. Henry George, in spite of his profound reverence for Mill, dismissed this judgment of the great liberal economist and philosopher with undisguised contempt. After quoting a certain passage from Mill, George exclaims:
In the name of the Prophet—figs! If the land of any country belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?
In the name of the Prophet—figs! If the land of any country belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?
But while Henry George was convinced that outright confiscation would be perfectly just, he proposed to accomplish the substance of confiscation without introducing its form. "Confiscation," he said, "would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of thought;" and the method he proposed for achieving his end was "to abolish all taxation save that upon land values." But he made no pretence whatever of there being any difference in substance between the two things. It was of the essence of his plan that the single tax should be tantamount to confiscation. The mere placing of the present entire burden of taxation upon the landowners would be far from sufficing for his purpose; and he expressly counted on what he regarded as the inevitable and rapid growth of the land tax, when once his principle was acknowledged, to such dimensions as to swallow up the entire rental value of land. Not the mere expenses of government as we are now familiar with them, but all the outlay for social and individual betterment which the entire revenue now attaching to the ownership of land could supply was to be available for the public good. The idea of his program was epigrammatically, but sufficiently accurately, conveyed in a motto that was prominent in his campaign for mayor of New York: "No taxes at all, and a pension for everybody."
Now it requires no extraordinary effort of the fancy to imagine what would be the natural course of such an agitation as this under a system of government in which the idea of the direct rule of the people had become thoroughly established; and by "thoroughly established" we must understand, in the case of our own country, the dominance of that idea in the nation as well as in the separate States. If in those conditions a doctrine like that of Henry George were put forward, and commanded the devotion of a band of earnest and able men, the form which its propaganda would take would, in the nature of things,be wholly different from that which we have actually witnessed. The goal towards which all effort would be directed would be the obtaining of a popular majority for some single proposal, the adoption of which would insure the fulfilment of the great purpose. The preoccupation of the nation with other issues that divide parties or factions would be no hindrance. In order to bring the question up for immediate decision by popular vote, all that would be necessary would be the satisfaction of some minimum requirement laid down in the initiative system; a minimum requirement which, be it noted, under the principle of "direct rule," has for its onlyraison d'êtrethe practical need of avoiding an intolerable multiplication of election questions. With this minimum satisfied, the champions of the change would advance to the charge year after year, fired with the consciousness that the gaining of a popular majority at the very next election would end once for all the iniquitous institution by which mankind has been robbed of its birthright, and make poverty and wretchedness a thing of the past.
But, it may be objected, is there after all any essential difference between this process and that which goes on under the traditional representative system, when it is truly representative? If the people are really convinced that land ownership is robbery, and that they should resume what they hold to be their own, are they not able, and ought they not to be able, to obtain their wish through the legislative assembly which represents them? The answer is that under the representative system as we know it—and quite as much at its best as at its worst—the influence of the wishes of the electorate upon the representative body is not uniform and mechanical. Representatives are elected not upon one issue, but upon many, and it is always a question how definite the popular "mandate" has been upon any one of them. From this alone it follows that there is a large, though indefinite, region in which a representative may feel free to act according to the dictates of his own individual judgment. In the case of any question involving a fundamental and momentous change, it is necessary that the mandate be extremelyclear before it can be regarded by intelligent and conscientious legislators as binding upon them; and to accomplish this the strength of the feeling among the people in favor of the measure must be shown in ways far more emphatic, far more conclusive of a firm and fixed desire, than the mere existence of a majority vote. The issue must virtually raise itself to a prominence and intensity commensurate with its importance. It must find its way not merely to a position in which, when people are challenged to say yes or no, a few more say yes than say no, but to a position in which it dominates other issues and is seen to represent the deliberate and imperative desire of the people. And when we add to this the constitutional checks that have thus far obtained both in England and in this country, together with the legitimate possibilities of parliamentary obstruction, we see how profound is the difference between the representative system and that of direct rule. It may almost be likened to the difference between a living organism, endowed with the power of discrimination and judgment, and a crude mechanical contrivance. In the one case, a great issue has to go through an ordeal fitted to its nature; in the other, it is put into the hopper along with the veriest trifles of every-day business, and its fate is settled by the same monotonous turn of the wheel.
The difference which I have been endeavoring to bring out is not identical either with the difference between conservatism and progressiveness or the difference between carefulness and looseness in legislation. Much has been said both for and against "direct rule" as related to these qualities; it has been contended that direct legislation is more conservative and less conservative, more prone to error and less prone to error, than legislation by representative assemblies. But what is usually held in view, on both sides, is the course of what I have been referring to as every-day legislation. Important, however, as the question may be in relation to such matters, the transcendent issue involved in the question of direct rule of the people is how it would operate in those supreme trials which the nation is sure to be called upon in the future,as it has been in the past, to undergo. The cardinal objection that I find to it is not that it is radical or that it is careless, but that it is intrinsically incapable of making that vital distinction which should be made between these grand issues and the ordinary questions of legislative routine. And no merely mechanical modification would overcome this difficulty. The influences which, upon great occasions, have been brought into play to stay the flood of immediate popular desire perform a function for which no automatic device can serve as a substitute. These influences are sometimes noble, as in Cleveland's adamantine resistance to currency debasement, or in the act of the seven Republican Senators who, at tragic cost to themselves, voted against the conviction of Andrew Johnson; sometimes ignoble, as in the gigantic campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna in 1896; sometimes not specially to be marked with any moral label, but embodying the weight naturally accorded, in any system except that of the absolute and mechanical rule of the majority, to intellectual ability and personal force as such. Under the system of direct rule of the people, all possibility of such interposition would be swept away. Union or disunion, currency debasement or currency integrity, land confiscation or the observance of the rights of property—issues like these could be brought before the people with the same facility as a measure authorizing the purchase of a toll-road or defining the duties of a sheriff; and their fate would be decided by the same simple yes or no of the majority.