FHE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN ALBERT SHAW Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L I HQ 166 S53 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below je^N 18 192? RETO BOOK BWJ Form L-9-15m-8,'24 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN •The THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN BY ALBERT SHAW AUTHOR OF "political PROBLEMS OP AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT," ETC. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1907 All righU reserved 3315 (o COPYBIGHT, 1907, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1907. Norfaooli iPreaa J. S. Gushing Co. — Herwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. He lO(o ^53 PREFACE The five chapters of this volume consist of material originally made use of in public ad- dresses to young men. The first was delivered to the students of the University of Chicago as a Convocation address. The second and third, respectively, were prepared as commencement addresses for Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Trinity College, Durham, North Carolina. The fourth was the opening discourse upon the Weinstock Foundation in the University of California, and the fifth was presented at the University of Virginia, on occasion of the re- establishment of " Founder's Day," this being observed on Thomas Jefferson's birthday. The addresses were written with some refer- ence to their subsequent publication in the present form, and they bear a certain relation to one another, though each is complete in itself. They have to do rather with the relation of the indi- vidual to present social, economic, and political Vi PREFACE conditions in the United States than to those conditions themselves. The reader will not fail to discover certain repetitions ; but it has seemed better not to omit views and statements that belong properly in their particular places in a given chapter, merely because similar views or statements are to be found in another chapter. ALBERT SHAW. New York, November, 1907. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOK I. The Average Man under Changing Economic Conditions ... 1 II. Present Economic Problems . . 47 III. Our Legacy from a Century of Pioneers . . . . . .93 IV. The Business Career and the Com- munity ...... 135 V. Jefferson's Doctrines under New Tests ...... 185 VII THE AVERAGE MAN UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS THE OUTLOOK FOE THE AVERAGE MAN CHAPTER I THE AVERAGE MAN UNDER CHANG- ING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS What of the position and prospects of the Economic average young man in the face of vast current ^ ""^^^ "" and impending changes in economic and industrial individual society? Certainly, I shall not hope to exhaust a question of such varied aspect and such profound importance. I shall be satisfied if I may make some suggestions and observations that may prove in the least degree useful to some young men in their tliinking upon general problems, or in their dealing with more personal or individual phases of the economic and social question — for it is obvious that there are prevalent just now two kinds of interest and anxiety in view of the enormous transitions that are taking place about us. B 1 2 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. 1. On the part of many young men who feel A period of that they have their own way to make in the changing u i i . landmarks ^o^ld, the natural optimism of youth is tempered by a considerable anxiety by reason of the disap- pearance of traditional landmarks. They find that new meanings must be written into such terms as " success " and " getting on in the world." A more acute anxiety, reheved by far less of personal hope or general optimism, is that of older men of fixed habits and diminished adaptability, who find themselves the victims of displacement as new methods of work and of organization ruthlessly supersede old methods. The larger 2. Quite a different sort of anxiety is that Question which has a somewhat disinterested or philosophi- cal basis, and concerns itself not so much with the question, "How shall these things affect me, my fortunes, my future.'" as with the questions, "How is the community to be affected.'" and "Are these new tendencies making in the general sense for human emancipation and equality on an ever higher plane, or are they making for a new and unpleasant kind of social and economic imperialism, in which the few shall be pluto- cratic masters and the many industrial sub- jects?" UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 3 I shall not try to take these questions ponder- chap. i. ously or elaborately, and I shall be inclined, quite against my usual habit of mind, to give somewhat more attention to individual and personal aspects, The and rather less to economic generalization. The P^'"*^" *^ problem clean-cut theory, the scientific formula, the beau- tiful presentation of the law of averages — all these bring only cold comfort to the individual young man who is seeking specific solutions for his own problems. If there were grounds for trepidation twenty or twenty-five years ago as men peered over the college wall, there were not so many notes of alarm sounded to affright the student as he is likely to hear in these days. The paragrapher's jokes about the college graduate, of course, have always been with us; but we did not hear so much twenty years ago about the overcrowding of the professions and the narrowed range of independent opportunity in the business world. Let me say at once, to relieve suspense, and not No shrink- to carry any needless air of gloom, that I for one °^^ "^ ^ opportunity do not believe in the least that there is any real shrinkage of opportunity in hfe for the worthy young man, or that the new conditions really threaten the prospects of the individual. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. Trained capacity the best asset Training, with or without college There are, however, certain principles that have new force in these altered times and that cannot be stated with too much emphasis. One of these principles is that the best possible investment any young man can make is in himself ; that is to say, in his own training and development for useful and effective work in the world. The thing in general to be attained is power. The thing in particular is the special training of some kind that enables a man to make expert application of his developed force and ability. If trained capacity has been a valuable asset in the past, it becomes the one in- dispensable asset under the new conditions. I shall not here broach directly the question whether or not it is worth while for the average young man to go to college. My observation has taught me not to draw too sharp a line in busi- ness or commercial life between men who have had a preliminary college training and those who have not. It is useless to lay down rules. Op- portunities nowadays are so numerous and varied that the young man of health and determination may reasonably hope to make his way in the world without regard to any beaten path. But in one way or another he must become educated and trained for efficiency. UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 5 I have in mind an illustration of this principle chap. i. that the modern young man should count invest- ment in himself, the acquisition of trained capac- A concrete ity, as his one safeguard, his indispensable asset. ^^^^'P'-^ Two brothers were left orphans at seventeen or eighteen years of age, each with a small patrimony of perhaps ten thousand dollars. One brother was regarded as possessing a high sense of pru- dence. He was determined under no circum- stances to impair the principal of his patrimony, and gradually he subordinated himself to the conserving of his petty inheritance. He was afraid to embark in active business because he had read that ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent of all business men and business ventures meet with failure. If he had placed his capital at the service of his business energies, it is quite true that he might soon have impaired it or lost it altogether; but in that process he would have gained his experience. And for any young busi- Experience ness man who has perseverance and force of ^«^"«^^« , . at anrj character, experience is a good investment at any -pecuniary pecuniary sacrifice — for, sooner or later, the ^°^^ business experience must be had, it being a neces- sary endowment for ultimate success in affairs; and if the experience can be had young, Hke 6 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. measles or other maladies of immaturity, it does not come so hard. But the young man to whom I refer could not bring himself to risk his capital on the perilous billows of trade or commerce, and much less could he bring himself to the point of doing the next The old- best thing, which would have been to use it up in , . mere expense or even in self-indulgence. He still rule of ^ ° parsimony exists, no longer so young. He has become a model of economy, and he has been adding some- thing to his capital by saving a part of the interest ; but he is disturbed and distressed by the fact that interest rates tend to decline and by the general insecurity of so-called "safe investments." As I have watched this man I have satisfied myself that he is just on the eve of doing one or the other of two things. With his now fifteen thousand dollars he will either buy United States Its government two per cent bonds at a premium, present-day j^ ^j^-^j^ ^^^^ j^^ ^j| ^^^^j^ ^^^^ ^^^ j^f^ ^.^j^ ^^ results income of less than three hundred dollars a year, or else he will violently react, throw prudence to the winds, and — in the parlance of the day — buy a " gold brick." If he were much past middle age, we should be sorry for him if he did not buy the government bonds. But since he is still com- UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 7 paratively young, the gold brick would be really chap. i. his only means of salvation; for, having lost his money, he would have to take some stock in him- self and learn somehow to make a practical use of his own energies. The other young man had a different instinct altogether. It was not, perhaps, that he had fully reasoned it out, but he had by nature a higher 1 r. • 1 • 1 • 11 1 • ii ^^^ man spirit, a httle more faith m this world and m the ^^^^ ^.^_ universe at large, and altogether a better percep- vested in „ , . <• i-p TT • 1 . 1 himself tion of the meaning ot hie. He aspired to do things, but even more, he longed to know and to be. The sole use of his little patrimony seemed to him to be the launching of a man. He believed in education and he was willing to invest in him- self. This particular young man had at once a strong taste for the natural sciences and a sym- pathetic and humanitarian turn of mind. He went to college, threw himself with enthusiasm into his work, determined toward the end of his His college course to study medicine, and also resolved prepara- to use what remained of his money without stint tion for work in fitting himself by study and research at home and abroad for the higher walks of his profes- sion. I need not dwell upon his early struggles or THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. difficulties in getting himself established in prac- tice. I merely wish to note the fact that he had gained the lifelong friendships and associations of college life. He had made liis own those priceless mental resources that are acquired by Incidental study, travel, and foreign residence, where a high object is ever in control of conduct and the use and gains The financial aspects of time. And he had established the habitual currents of thought that are engendered by enthu- siastic devotion to work in fields of science where new treasures may always be found by diligent and well-directed search. In the very process of training for his Hfe work he had found unexpected safeguards and compensations. The financial side of the matter is of less importance, though I may add that our professional brother, who did not make money his chief aim and object, was never- theless in due time earning twice as much money every week as the prudent one could get in a whole year by clipping the coupons from his government bonds. This fragment of biography — or this parable, if you please — leads on to several other con- siderations that I should like to present. One of these is that, generally speaking, it is fortunate for a man if he can choose a pursuit in life in UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 9 which the pecuniary returns come as an indirect chap. i. rather than a direct result of his eflPorts. It was p^^^^. my pleasure some time ago to publish an article where written for me by Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth, en- ^°^^l '' ' JOT its titled " The Old Age of New England Authors." own sake Mr. Butterworth pointed out the remarkably long period through which New England writers have on the average been enabled to continue their useful and valuable labors, and he attributed this largely to the fact that cheerfulness and serenity promote long life and the retention of the mental powers and faculties in old age. And all this is undoubtedly true. But it was also true in a very important sense Money that this class of workers owed much of that °* '^^ cheerfulness of spirit to the fact that the day's ob/ert '^ work did not take them into the competitive struggle and clash of the market-place, nor compel them to give much anxious thought for the morrow. It is not that one should aspire to mere quiet or aloofness, in order to cultivate serenity and live to be ninety years old. My point simply is that there are great compensations in any kind of active life, however intense and severe its labors may be, if only the work itself absorb the mind, and the pay come as a secondary consideration. 10 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. Benefits of the profes- sional spirit Callings that are now profes- sionalized ]My friend, a physician, striving to save the Hfe of a httle child, lost much sleep, and labored incessantly; but I do not suppose that he gave the smallest fraction of one minute to a thought about the amount of his fee. Now an equal amount of effort, strain, and loss of sleep expended upon a money-making transaction, with nothing in mind except the dollars to be gained, would have a wholly different result, both immediate and permanent. It would break a man down, and that ingloriously. Clergymen, professors, lawyers of the better class, physicians, engineers, architects, and even journalists and newspaper men who do work of a professional grade — all persons, moreover, engaged worthily and usefully in any sphere of education, philanthropy, or public service, — and in the term " public service " I include not only the non-official classes, but also the better class of civil servants and also the army and navy, — the people who choose to spend their lives in these and kindred callings may be said to form the advance guards of the social order that is yet to be. Taking them on the average, they have neither wealth nor poverty, and they give their best efforts to kinds of work which are satisfactory in UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 11 themselves. Such kinds of work to a very large chap. i. extent have attached to them fixed or customary y^g livelihoods that come of themselves where intelli- tendency ,».,,., . . , , , towards gent and taitlitul service is rendered to the com- non-com- munity. I am confident that the tendency in petitive many other fields of endeavor will be toward some such non-competitive and permanent stand- ards of income, with comparative fixity of tenure, and opportunity to render devotion to the work for its own sake. Certainly I hope that the young men in our colleges will be Utopian enough to believe in a fu- ture state of economic society in which each man will be more free than now to render service to the community according to his special abilities, while in return the supply to all useful workers of A hopeful their ordinary needs will become more and more °/^ . , , desirable a matter of easy assurance, and therefore much prospect more in the background than now. But even with our present organization of economic society, the young man will find many compensations and many advantages — other things being equal — in the choice of a pursuit in life which interests and satisfies in itself while yielding its pecuniary rewards indirectly. Let me refer again to the question of the rela- 12 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. The warnings agairist massed capital Is the poor man without chance f tive value in this transitional period of the well- equipped, highly -trained man ; for we have been so gravely and so incessantly warned about the crushing out of opportunities for young men through the growth of capitalistic combinations, that many of us find it hard to believe that we are not in some danger of being folded, stifled, and crushed within the tentacles of the octopus. We have been told that the whole present tend- ency is one that endangers not only the position of the workingman, — that is to say, the man who labors with his hands, whether skilled or unskilled, — but also interposes obstacles to the independ- ence and prosperity of merit, education, and high training. For the young man who is not lucky enough to inherit a fortune, or to have influence and favor that gild his prospects, it is said that the world offers a poor and ever-diminishing op- portunity for earning a livelihood and achieving success ; in short, that the situation grows rapidly worse, and that the clouds on the horizon are much darker than those overhead. Now it is true that we are moving fast in the most acutely transitional period of the world's economic history. A powerful financier remarked to me the other day that we had lived a thousand UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 13 years since the Sherman anti-trust law was en- chap. i. acted in 1890. The production of wealth is on a j^eaith prodigious scale, and its private accumulation, «"«? ^ •' massed run uphill, but we can often do something to fix economic its channel and direct its course, and divert what 36 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I, Three possible methods ■ (1) con- centration in a few hands (2) control by the state (3) by dif- fusion of ownership might have been the harmfulness of the flood to useful and fructifying ends. We may be sure, then, that in our new economic society this ques- tion of control will be of vital importance, and that it will be settled in the light of experience, on the basis of efficiency and of the greatest good to the greatest number. Three methods of future control are readily conceivable. One method is that of control by individuals or by syndicates composed of com- paratively few men, whose fortunes may be told in hundreds or in thousands of millions. The second method is that of the radical enlargement of the functions of the political community, so that the people themselves, organized as the city, the state, the nation, may assume control, one after another, of the great common services of supply, and the great businesses and industries. The third method is that of the gradual distribu- tion of the shares of stock of industrial corpora- tions among the workers themselves and the people at large, until in one service or industry after another there shall have come into being something like a cooperative system, managed on representative principles, analogous in some meas- ure to the carrying on of our political institutions. UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 37 I have the impression that we may see some- chap. i. thing in this country of all three of these methods j^j^^g ^j^j.^^ operating side by side. Doubtless in some large methods VI ay industries we shall for a good while witness control operate concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, together They will hold this control, however, subject to the inevitable laws of diminishing returns on capital and of an ever-improving status for the intelligent employee. I may be wrong in my observations and impressions, but there has seemed to me to be a marked tendency toward the gradual elimination from industrial control of the capitalist as such, and the substitution for The ad- him of the skillful administrator. But the ad- , supersed- ministrator — whether of the great railway sys- ing the tems, hke M. de Witte, formerly head of the '^ Russian system, or Mr. J. J. Hill, or of a great manufacturing enterprise — is produced in the business itself, and comes to the front through force of merit and ability. Recognizing this fact, the great capitalists Corpora- who wish their sons to maintain any actual hold ^, *' the mercy upon the conduct of business see the necessity of the of having them taught in a practical way, often ^" beginning at the very bottom of the ladder. The larger the transportation and industrial corpora- 38 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. Efficient men brought to the front Better relations of labor and capital tions become, the more they are at the mercy of the pubhc — of the state, on the one hand, and of their employees on the other. The influence of the state will be to make for publicity and for methods that tend to steadiness, and through taxation as one method, and direct or indirect regulation of rates and prices as another method, the community will check the accumulation of undue or monopoly profits. On the other side, the employees will insist upon gradual ameliora- tion of their own status. Such conditions will of necessity bring efficient men to the front in the organization of labor, and not less so, certainly, in the administration of the business from the standpoint of capital. And with improved intelligence on both sides there will come better and closer understandings, with the prospect that periodic agreements upon wage scales and conditions aff'ecting labor will come into common use, and that not only will mutual respect and confidence be greatly en- hanced, but the opportunity of the individual workman to advance through efficiency and to pass from the inferior to the superior side of the situation will be made easier. In France, where the habit of saving is very UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 39 highly developed, and where capitalistic control chap. i. is not quite so firmly centered in the hands of Diffusion particular individuals as in England and the of owner- United States, the tendency is toward the wide fiance distribution of the share capital of railways and of other enterprises among the people who belong to the great working class, particularly to the class of skilled and intelligent workers. In Ger- Public many, on the other hand, the tendency is rather . strongly in the direction of the increase of the Germany direct industrial functions of the municipality or the higher government — the employees of railways, telephones, and the like assuming the status of civil servants and public employees like our letter-carriers. Within the sphere of the municipality itself this Same tendency toward increase of function, and there- ^^ ^'^y h fore toward the absorption of an increasing pro- cities portion of the community into direct public serv- ice, is particularly strong in the cities of England and Scotland, in nearly all of which there is on foot at the present time a movement for the direct ownership and operation of local transit lines. This movement follows upon longer experience in operating gas and electric lighting, as well as water supphes; and upon the experiment of 40 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. With efficient govern- ment either policy would work Present functions must find better perform- ance direct employment as opposed to the contract system in the making of streets and sewers, and various other kinds of pubhc work. I do not know at all what lines of public policy in these matters we shall have preferred to adopt in the course of the average period of active life and work of young men now concerned. But of one thing I am entirely certain, and that is that there has never been such a hopeful outlook for the sane and wise dominance of the best average intelligence. I would have a government so efficient, whether of the city or the state, that it should become a matter of comparative indiffer- ence whether the government carried on a serv- ice directly for the people as a cooperative com- munity, or whether it secured the interests of the citizens through the proper regulation and control of a private corporation whose shares of stock should themselves be widely distributed. In any case we shall need very strong, capable governments, because the increasing intelligence and refinement of the community will demand that those things now undertaken by the govern- ment shall be managed with a far higher degree of skill and success than heretofore. The prepa- ration for this high average improvement in the UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 41 tone and quality of government, whether local chap. i. or general, must simply come about, as one readily sees on reflection, with the improvement in the intelligence and moral sense of our citizen- ship at large — along with the growth of a more acute sense of the practical value of the commu- nity's efforts to the individual citizen. More, rather than less, shall we rely henceforth We must on the principle of democracy ; and more, rather -^ . than less, shall we be obliged to adopt the policy ciple of .,,. ., .«., li? democracy of leveling up the many, even it it were only tor the benefit of the few. Henceforth the rich man and the talented man, quite as much as the poor man and the man of ordinary parts, are to find their security and their prosperity in a community so ordered as to make for the general comfort and the general welfare. The community as a whole will become the Growing repository of such priceless and varied wealth, ^y^^^^ the administrator of such vast resources, the pro- community itself vider of so many things desirable and useful — that its services will call for and receive the best talent ; and no one will be so sufficient unto him- self that he can afford to be indifferent to the suc- cess of the public administration. It is a very great thing to have attained to some 42 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. sort of clear conception of the possibilities of the yi^g ideal city of the future. Already that ideal city is emergence emerging. Its elements to a large extent already of the ideal . • ^\ u e ^^^ exist, some in one place, some in another, all ot them capable of transplantation and entirely compatible with one another. Thus the city with an ideal water supply is not debarred from possessing ideal schools and public libraries. The city that has perfectly paved and well- cleaned streets may have everything else that makes for health, attractiveness, safety, and pleasure in the public appointments. No private schools can possibly be as good as the free public schools of the United States are destined to become in the due course of time. No private museums or galleries of art, no collections of scientific What it objects, no libraries, no monumental art or vide for all architecture could possibly, in private hands, attain such importance as that which will belong freely to all the people in common. No private grounds could equal our public parks as they are destined to develop. No individual could conceivably so surround himself with safeguards for the health of himself or his family as the com- munity will supply to him and to its humblest citizen alike. UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 43 Thus the evolution of the new order of things chap. i. is to give us some approximation toward the ideal of the modern city with its low death rate, its admirable facilities for education, recreation, and physical culture; its improved industrial conditions; its well-guarded housing arrange- ments ; its clean streets — free from dust and largely free from noise ; its pure atmosphere — with smoke abolished ; its playgrounds ; its public baths, and its varied opportunities for the use of leisure. While the present tendency in the re-grouping An equal- of population, under which the large towns are \ly^^il\. growing, is doubtless to continue for some time and city f*f)Ttd'ht,'t077iS to come, the contrast between city and country life will become less marked ; for with the readier access of the children of the towns to the out-of- door and open life of the country, there will also come about a great movement for supplying the country itself with some of the advantages of the town through the cooperative agencies to which I have alluded. The populous community of the future, even more than of the past, must stand firmly by the principle of democracy. One of the chief objects must be to equalize conditions, to lift men up in the scale of being, and to fit the 44 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. The reality of social progress What has already been achieved oncoming generation in the best possible way for responsible citizenship. When one compares the conditions of life in the great towns as they commonly were twenty-five years ago and as they are at their worst to-day, with those conditions that we now see can be feasibly supplied to all, we get a new sense of the reality of social progress. For it is nowadays regarded, not as a wild dream, but as a fairly sober and reasonable proposition, to demand that the poor man may at least live in a model tenement, on an asphalted street, with pure air to breathe and with pure water to drink; that he may be surrounded by marvelous safeguards in the way of health protection and police and fire protection; that he may send his children to the very best of schools; that in the evening he may read the best of books from the free public libraries, by gas or electric light cheaply furnished ; that he may hear the best lectures without price ; may attend excellent free concerts, visit beautiful parks, public museums, and galleries of art, look upon noble architecture and monumental statues with a feeling of pride and a sense of common possession ; that he may ride swiftly and luxuri- ously in public vehicles at small price, and that UNDER CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 45 he may be safeguarded against the worst dangers chap. i. of illness or old age through one form or another of benefit funds or social insurance. The community which professes to do all this The poor for its members is at once minimizing the dis- ^°'^ ^ T^^ *^ acquisi- advantages of the laboring man and lessening tions the peculiar advantages of wealth. For the poor man, too, under the eight-hour system, is to have his leisure, his books, his music, his pictures, his parks, his opportunities of quick travel, his swimming bath, his gymnasium, his golf course, and a hundred advantages that were wholly out of reach even of the well-to-do man living in towns forty or fifty years ago. And if it is reasonable to hope for so much The for the intelligent workingman — as the new social ^'^'P^f^l outlook order develops and the ideals toward which for the society is working come into fuller realization — ^^f^^^°^ surely the man of higher education, more complete training, or more perfect moral, mental, and physical self-control is also to find things better rather than worse for himself. Least of all should he fear lest there be somehow a diminished oppor- tunity for him to play some fitting part in the world's activity, and to reap some fitting reward. The margin of individual risk is destined to man 46 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. I. The general trend of progress diminish. I think it true, also, that the margin of opportunity for obtaining very exceptional advan- tage over one's fellows in some particular direc- tions is also to be diminished. But there will be corresponding increase in the opportunity to earn honorable renown by the full devotion of one's talents to the social good in any chosen field. I hold that the general trend of progress at the present time lies before us with exceptional clear- ness; that life offers rewards and opportunities, as never before, by virtue of the new social and industrial organization; and that the outlook is bright with hope, through the transformed en- vironment that the community is providing for the individual, and through the widening field of opportunity, in consequence, that the individual finds for activity and service among his fellows. PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS CHAPTER II PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS Disguise the fact at times as we may, the eco- " Busi- nomic Ufe has been the absorbing and dominating , _ interest with the American people for many years ing interest past, and it bids fair to hold the central place for a generation yet to come. There are two ways to deal with this fact, according to our con- ception of its meaning. On the one hand, we may apologize for it, deprecate it, condemn it, and endeavor to combat it. On the other hand, we may accept it, fall heartily into line with it, find its rational and philosophical basis, and endeavor to make it harmonize with a social progress not altogether gross, or material, or worldly. There are to-day radically opposed theories as Theories to the proper and desirable trend of our economic "^ life. For example, there is the sociahstic theory ; and this is advocated from two wholly different standpoints. Thus we have the standpoint of those who beheve our present system of private ownership and direction of capitahstic wealth to be a failure beyond remedy. Then, there is the B 49 50 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The wor- shipers of private property The cheer- ful oppor- tunists One great point of agreement standpoint of those who take the more cheerful view that an evolutionary process is bringing us, along a more or less stormy but not very danger- ous path, to a gradual socialistic extension of the economic functions of government. Over against those who belong to one or the other of these socialistic schools of thought are those who view all such tendencies with alarm, and beheve that the private ownership and ex- ploitation of wealth lies at the very corner stone of our social well-being, and must so remain. Yet again, there are those who are opportunists, or experimentalists, and who are willing to see adjustments and compromises from time to time. They do not think it necessary to subscribe com- pletely to the doctrines of the socialist, nor yet to those of the individualist. But the thing I wish to emphasize is the point that, however much these exponents of theory — these advocates of one policy or another — may differ in their views as to the control and direction of wealth, they all agree about one main proposi- tion ; namely, that the production and distribution of wealth constitute the most absorbing interest and the most dominant problem of our American Ufe in this generation. PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 51 Now, I also am of the opinion that this is quite chap. ii. true, — although I should not hke to be deprived ^ygalth of the right to explain why I so beheve it. It is «« a means .to other not for its own sake that I should regard wealth g^^g as the all-important thing, or the economic life as the dominating interest. I think of wealth as a means rather than as an end. And I regard the intense pressure of the economic motive, in the activities of our people, as an evidence of the coexistence of other motives, and as a token of the growth of those wants and desires that belong to a higher civilization and a better life. Young men upon the threshold of active careers As to will find many phases of American economic life . ,. ■^ ^ prejudices assuming the form of public and social problems about which they must have opinions, and with reference to which they must join their fellows in taking action. We ought at the outset, there- fore, to be wholly free from certain prejudices and misapprehensions about the nature and desira- bility of wealth. Such states of mind have become rather widespread in this country, for reasons natural enough and easy to understand. In the early part of the last century, disaffected trades-unionists sometimes destroyed machinery and burned factories. In the effort to get a fair 52 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The hostility towards capital Due to confused thinking Wealth production not to be neglected distribution of results from the combined use of capital and labor, there has often come about a hostility toward capital itself, which, of course, as you know, is based upon a fallacy. In like manner, the control of great masses of wealth (capitalized in the form of railways, or industrial agencies) by a few individuals, or by great cor- porations centered in a few hands, has often been unwisely or unfairly exercised. And in the popu- lar mind there has been some natural confusion, so that indignation against the abuse of economic power has been directed against economic forces in themselves, as if capital were an evil. I will not for a moment suppose that any of you are in serious danger of entertaining a fallacy of this sort. Yet we are all more or less influenced by popular prejudice; and in our righteous zeal for the correction of economic evils, and the more perfect distribution of wealth among the people whose efforts go to produce it, we may be in some danger of losing sight of the fact that wealth must exist before it can be distributed, and that the productive processes, as well as the distributive, are not to be neglected. The real task, of course, that presents itself to each generation in turn, is the bettering of its PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 53 social life, so that it may transmit to the genera- chap. ii. tion that is to follow all the heritage of good it has y^^^g itself received, with some enrichment and addi- process of tTdTis/ytis— tion thereto. And on this platform, in this uni- versity atmosphere, at the end of an academic year, I should indeed seem both obtuse and ungra- cious if I should ignore the fact that this trans- sion 'O' mission of our heritage of civihzation might best be expressed in educational terms. For we have received treasures of knowledge, and many up- lifting ideals, which it is one of the chief duties of the academic world to preserve and to pass on in endless succession. But in the earlier generations, it was the privi- Poverty lege only of a very few to enter the temple where ^"' ^^ the sacred fire of mental and spiritual enlighten- ment was kept aUve. And this, let me remind you, was for the very simple and sordid reason that the world was poor. Those were the days of favored classes, when a few were rich, powerful, and dominant, a few were learned and refined, and the great mass of men were in slavish subjection because of igno- rance and of poverty. The past century has revolutionized everything. And the chief agency of human emancipation has been the creation of 54 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. Capital the chief agency of progress The growth of recent wealth wealth or capital in the modern sense, due to a series of innovations following one another rapidly, and best characterized in a word by reference to the utilization of steam power, the develop- ment of the factory system, and the building of railroads. It has been so often said that it has become a commonplace, — yet at this point it may well be said again, — that nowadays in every decade we are probably creating more real wealth in the world than had come into existence, in countries having our kind of civilization, through all the ages, up to nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. New England in the early days and Virginia — and later our westward valleys — were able, out of the first freshness and richness of the virgin soil, to give a sort of economic inde- pendence and rude comfort to a limited popula- tion at a time when land was free to all comers. But the great, complex structure of American civihzation has been built up through the addition to our primitive agriculture of further costly and elaborate economic processes. There Avas virtue, intelligence, and a certain charm about the primitive American life. But all observation and experience go to show that it PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 55 could not long have held its own. The pioneer chap. ii. stage is temporary and transitional. It must y^^g evolve into something more complex, or it must primitive inevitably decay. The log-cabin life, in the first ^^.g generation of determined people who face the wilderness conditions in order to plant the begin- nings of civilization for posterity, is compatible with a certain dignity of manners, and with a fair degree of intellectual culture. But when in any given region the log-cabin Stagnation period takes the form of an arrested social develop- ^^^j-^ g^^gg ment, and hngers on into the second, the third, or the fourth generation, — then the physical, the moral, and the mental prowess of the fore- fathers has a tendency almost wholly to disappear. Marks of degeneracy become apparent ; and it is plain that the only salvation of such a region, which has failed for itself to grow into more advanced and complex economic and social con- ditions, must be the sheer injection, from Tvathout, of the transforming hand of modern capitahstic enterprise. The destruction of the poor is indeed his Economic poverty. And the emancipation of povertv- ^^^'^^'^i- "in certain stricken regions must come about through an regions economic new birth. Let us look for a moment 56 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The Southern mountain districts concretely at processes now going on very rapidly in certain parts of our Southern states, in order to illustrate the slower process of evolution that has been at work for a century in England, France, Massachusetts, and some other parts of our own country. Undoubtedly there could be named considerable districts, perhaps whole counties, in the upland or mountainous parts of several Southern states, where as recently as twenty years ago there was scarcely a house really fitted for human habitation, scarcely a district school better than a cabin or a shanty, and scarcely a teacher fit for the simplest tasks of the teaching profession. In those regions there was perhaps scarcely a mile of road that could be traversed at all times of the year by a carriage, and scarcely any evidence whatever of private thrift or progress, or of public asso- ciated life. What had gone wrong with those regions ? They had been settled in the beginning by a brave and hardy stock. But the conditions of progress had been lacking, and as the freshness and spirit of the first and second generations passed away, there had followed the unavoidable decline that goes with poverty and stagnation of life. PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 57 Yet in many neighborhoods that fifteen or chap. ii. twenty years ago answered to some such descrip- j^^^ tion as this, there has come about a most marvel- arrival ous transformation. Some capitaHst or business capitalist corporation has developed a water power, built a factory or a mill, opened a mine, started a town, given steady work to the men and women who had been half occupied with the scanty operations of their hillside farms and their log-cabin homes. And the change that has come about has been like the brightness and hope of day, following the darkness and dread of night. Hundreds of families that had lived in unwhole- some cabins now occupy houses of several rooms. Social with modern comforts. Steady work, regular transfor- mations hours, money with which to buy proper food, of the suitable clothing, decent abodes, and the modern fo-'^^ory life appointments of a decorous home life, have within two decades brought these backward communities into line with the life and progress of the outside world. The good schoolhouse, with proper ap- pointments, and the well-trained and inspiring teacher have made their appearance, and the children are living in contact with the modern world of ideas. From such quickened and revived neighbor- 58 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. How wealth brings civilization Popular culture requires diffused prosperity hoods it is not difficult for the ambitious boy or girl to make his way to the nearest college or university about which his teacher gives him hopeful advice. It is the introduction of wealth in the form of industrial capital, providing re- munerative work, and creating and distributing new wealth, that has thus completely changed the aspect of life in these once hopeless neighbor- hoods. There had been no schools worth the name for two reasons : first, because intelligence had so declined that the demand for good schools did not exist; and second (and chiefly), because there was not enough social or neighborhood wealth that could be drawn upon to build a good schoolhouse or to pay a good teacher. In short, all the conditions of American life demand an educated, efficient democracy. It will not answer, as in former generations, to give culture and training to the few. Yet there cannot be culture among the masses of the people with- out such a diffusion of wealth as will support culture. There must be taxable wealth in the state, in the county, in the neighborhood, if there are to be good schools, good roads, and those facilities and appointments that are recognized as making up the irreducible minimum of advan- PRESExNT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 59 tages to which in common decency every self- chap. ii. respecting American community now has a g^ ^^^^^ right to aspire. Your temples of knowledge "*^'s< be and culture must be multiplied and opened to y^galth everybody, and this can only come about with the large growth of capital and the diffusion of wealth. We are indeed face to face with some "public and social problems that have to do with the wiser and better control of masses of accumu- lated wealth used in production. And it is my pur- pose, after a few moments more, to say something about these aspects of our economic life. But let me dwell for a moment longer upon the point that I believe to have been too much neglected in our recent economic discussion. It became the fashion to say, some twenty-five years ago, that from the days of Adam Smith's great work on "The Wealth of Nations," down to the days of Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," the Dicta chief trend of economic thought, as well as the , ,. ° production chief function of practical economic forces, had and dis- to do with the production of wealth. But from that time forth, — so went the dictum, — the foremost question had come to be the distribution, upon a more equitable plan, of the relatively 60 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN The captivating partial truth CHAP. 11. plentiful means of life that the new forces had brought into being. A partial truth is often very captivating. And it is quite true that the great increase of economic means, already realized in civilized countries, ought to find expression in a vast enhancement of the average welfare. In other words, the standard of living ought to have advanced. Workers ought to have secured shorter hours of toil, ought to be better fed and clothed, ought to live in better houses, ought to have far better private and public opportunities for the comfort and welfare of their families than half a century ago. Mr. Henry George and other writers took the ground that modern wealth production had fallen far short of its reasonable promise, as respects these advantages to the people at large. I am not taking issue with Mr. George, or dealing contentiously with any phase of this subject. But whether or not the governmental or legal conditions under which our economic life has developed have to some extent stood in the way of the just and fair apportionment of benefits, there has in the main been freedom of economic opportunity, and there has been a very wide- spread, even though insufficient, apportionment Benefits already accrued PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 61 of the yearly results of economic effort. In other chap, ii, words, the hours of labor are much shorter, the standard of living is much advanced, the refine- ments of life are far more accessible and better distributed now than ever before. The doctrine that seems to me to have been Yet the neglected of late is this ; namely, that while apply- ^^^^Z"^^*^ ing ourselves to the correction of injustice in the production dividing up of the results of productive force, we must not forget that what we chiefly need is the still larger accumulation of productive capital, on the one hand, and the still larger fund for distribution and consumption, on the other hand. What we are really working for is the abolition of poverty, in order that there may be yet more of leisure, and refinement, and culture in the lives of all the people. With the right kind of education, allied as it The object is with the wonderful discoveries of modern '^ *" abolish science, we know that culture and labor can go poverty hand in hand. Shall we then fear the further growth of wealth and prosperity in this country ? Shall we allow ourselves to believe that poverty is wholesome and that wealth is demoralizing.'^ Shall we apologize for making two blades of grass grow where one grew before .'' Shall we 62 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. look askance at the man who is diligent in business, and whose thrift and energy give him control of productive capital, the use of which ameliorates the condition of an entire neighborhood ? An in- We are afraid of these things only when w.e stance of gtate them argumentatively, or in abstract terms. work for enhanced Let US look at some of them concretely, because production j ^^ intending in this talk to young men to deal with the philosophy of things that they are going to find very practical in their future work. I have more than once had occasion to speak of a Western professor of agriculture, who began some three or four years ago to teach to his state the doctrine of scientific selection in the choice of seed corn. He had experimented very carefully on the state agricultural farm. He gave the results through printing press and word of mouth to all the farmers of a great agricultural state. He showed them how they could immediately increase the corn crop, by a good many bushels to the acre, every year. His efforts at once added millions of dollars to the yearly income of the farmers, and at least a hundred million dollars to the permanent value of the farm lands of the state that employed him. PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 63 This, then, is exactly what I mean by preaching chap. ii. the gospel that further wealth production is what j^r^^^j^ we need, and that if we go about it broadly and rightly • • "pvodtcccd intelligently we shall do good and not harm, so ^^^ that the question of distribution will have a ten- demoraliz- dency to take care of itself. Whatever, then, one may say about the demoralization of wealth in the abstract, when it comes to a concrete case, nobody really believes that the wealth of the farmer who has grown rich because he has farmed wisely and intelligently, is half so demoralizing as the poverty of his neighbor, who has remained poor because he has not brought his land up to its reasonable possibilities. I might cite as another instance the great pros- In the perity that has come to certain parts of Louisiana ^ . °\ agriculture and Texas through a new kind of rice farming, introduced by a representative of the Department of Agriculture, who is a man of great learning, practical sense, and desire for the progress and welfare of the country. Or I could take, for further example, the great fight of the cotton growers of the South against the boll weevil, and the enormous enhancement of wealth due to ex- periments and efforts in the field of an improved cotton culture. 64 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. Recently we were reading in the newspapers of An in- ^^' Edison's journeyings through this region in stance in search of deposits of a metaUic substance called the tTti/TlBTCtt ^^l^ cobalt. Far be it from me to tell you anything about cobalt and its uses, but Mr. Edison is reported to have said that its finding in ample commercial quantities would make storage bat- teries so much cheaper, that electric automobiles would banish truck horses from the streets, and come within the means for pleasure purposes of many a family that otherwise could not indulge in that form of modern diversion. A new Surely nobody supposes that Mr. Edison's conimercia (jjgcQygpy ^nd utilization of supplies of cobalt substance "' ^ ^ could be otherwise than commendable and benefi- cent. A great industry has been built up in recent years through the invention of processes that give to the world for many uses at a cheap price the metal called aluminum. Such develop- ments add at once to private wealth and public weal ; and to deny it is to abdicate common sense. No alarm Wlien, therefore, we talk in abstract terms in e real about the growth of wealth and its dangers, we processes ^ of wealth give ourselves a kind of alarm that disappears pro uction ^,]^pjj ^g fa^pg directly most of the real processes by which wealth is created and accumulated. PRESENT ECOiNOMIC PROBLEMS 65 It is Professor Holden teaching the farmers how chap, ii, to raise corn ; it is Dr. Knapp promoting rice culture; it is somebody else fighting the boll weevil ; it is the inventor who gives us aluminum or the electric light, or the cyanide process for the reduction of low-grade gold ore, — it is these men, and many others of whom these are examples, who are producing the enhanced wealth of the country, and they are engaged in a mission of great beneficence. The enlarged corn crop of Iowa will send many a boy and girl to college What it who would not otherwise have gone. It will in- ® practice crease the taxable basis and provide many an improved country school and many a mile of good roadway; and the scientific work of your own university laboratories will have so unlocked hidden treasures of mineral wealth in your own state as to accomplish like results. The more energetically you turn your attention The thing to the further development of the resources of <^«< ^« '» 6e done wealth lying all about you, working in the right spirit and under modern conditions of fair play, the better it will be for everybody in the com- munity. We have scratched the surface of the country from one ocean to the other, and in many parts of it we have exhausted the first richness of 66 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The intensive methods Growth and power of individual fortunes the soil. But in the very nick of time scientific agriculture has come to our aid ; nature study tends to alleviate some of the drudgery of life on the land ; the telephone, free rural delivery, cheap and abundant reading matter, better means of transit, and many other modern facilities, give fresh hope and courage to the people who till the soil. Thus we shall increase and multiply the wealth produced from the land as the years go by, and as our farmers apply scientific knowledge and the intensive methods of culture. In like manner we shall train and develop the inventive genius of the boys, whether of the mountain side or of the city, and add untold wealth to the community through new industrial processes and a higher utilization of human skill and resource. But, some one may fairly object, while it is true that all this great coming development of prosperity through improved knowledge and skill, the better use of the soil, the opening of mines, the utilizing of electric power, and the perfection of industrial processes cannot be harmful and must be of general benefit, what is there to be said about the monopolistic power of individual for- tunes grown so great that they seem beyond all social control ? PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 67 It would be useless to deny that the existence of chap. ii. these colossal fortunes is very generally regarded ^^^ ^f^ by thoughtful men as to be regretted. But it a menace? cannot now be safely said with certainty that such fortunes are destined to constitute a menace in the future. Their vastness has been due to condi- tions that must be frankly studied, and that must in some respects be severely changed. In mediaeval days, the barons built their castles The on the cliffs along the Rhine, armed their retainers, ^° ^^ , harons of and took forcible toll of the merchants and traf- olden fickers, all the way from Switzerland to the Nether- lands, who used the river as their main highway of trade. And thus the barons became rich and powerful. And they seemed, indeed, to consti- tute a serious menace to the general welfare. But as civilization developed, the feudal customs Changes and tyrannies disappeared. The castles fell into ""^ highways ruins. In due time there were railroads on both of trade banks of the Rhine, and a wholly new set of prob- lems confronted those who bought and sold and trafficked in merchandise along the Rhine valley with its rich cities and modern activities. You will already have anticipated what I am How we going to say. We created our railroad system "^ "^f ^ ® -^ *' railroads in this country under conditions of bold private 68 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. ir. The specu- lative era A system of railroad favors — Which gave rise to the new kind of "mag- nates " initiative, crass speculation, and total failure of government on the one hand, and public opinion on the other, to understand the true functions of the railroads as common carriers and public highways. The government gave away imperial zones of land, and lent its credit to syndicates and companies to get the railroads built. Then, in turn, the railroads trafficked in land and town sites, promoted manufacturing enterprises, and competed with one another recklessly and furi- ously for traffic with which to keep from falling too frequently into bankruptcy courts and receiv- erships. The consequence of this system was that every merchant or manufacturer secured from the railroad the best rates he could get ; and the more powerful the shipper, the larger was the secret rebate he was able to obtain, to the disadvantage of other competing shippers in his own line. And thus arose a system of favoritism in the employment of the great highways of commerce that built up the wheat and grain magnates own- ing elevator lines; the beef and packing-house barons ; the iron and steel and coal magnates, the petroleum monopolists, and others in their turn and their degree. It was all in its peculiar PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 69 way almost as simple, when one stops to con- chap. ii. sider it, as the system by which the medieval barons of the Rhine took undue advantage of the trade that had to pass along that historic waterway. Let us not be too full of indignation against Who was those who benefited most from an objectionable , , system. The smaller traders who paid toll on the Rhine would gladly have exchanged places with the men who owned the castles on the shores if they could, or yet more gladly with the larger traders who paid less toll. Our recent period of railway discrimination was one in which every shipper, great and small, was glad to take advan- tage of the best rate he could possibly get. We The later had to live through this peculiar period in our (conception economic history, in order finally to come into roads as the conception of railroads as essentially public P"''"'^ in their nature. Many of the greatest fortunes of the country are simply due to the fact that those who had the best railroad rates could do the most business, and in a country as great and prosperous as ours, to do the most business meant to become Mean- exceedingly rich. If we were somewhat tardy ^'"^^-^"^ ® "^ •' favorites in rescuing the national highways from unfair were rich use in the interest of favored individuals or com- 70 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. panics, we seem at la.st to have become fairly awake to that whole situation. And since this forms one of the essential .strands in the thread of my discourse, 1 may be allowed to say something further, at this point, upon the railroad question as fundamental in its bearing on almost every phase of the problems of wealth pro- duction, control, and distribution in this country. The Naturally, then, the railroads developed some masters of „yqh\ magnates or barons of their own. under transpor- ^ tation the speculative and ill-regulated system that pre- vailed, and it could not have been otherwise. They were not worse men in their relations to the community than smaller business men who envied them. On the contrary, in the main, they were men of large vision and great capacity, whose part in the useful development of the coun- try was even greater than the princely rewards they took to themselves for their efforts. Rhine There were in those olden times to which I have barons and j-eieTTed great Hanseatic merchants who got on merchants well with the barons of the Rhine clifl's, and who regarded the tolls they paid as for protection, safe conduct, and unimpeded navigation. And doubt- less, in the alliance between the richer of the mer- chants and the stronger of the feudal chiefs, the PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 71 merchants got the larger share of the profit from chap. a. the use of the Rhine for purposes of commerce. We need not pursue the analogy any further. How The exchange of local surpluses throughout this ^"-^'-^''^'^ ° have pro- country, made possible by railroads, has been moted the foremost single fac-tor in promoting the stu- "'^°''" pendous enlargement of wealth that has come afiout in our own times. The railroad system has enriched those fortunate enough to control it, and it has aggrandized those who were able to make use of it on more favorable terms than their fellows. And so the great industrial mag- nates, so-called, in close and confidential alliance The with the railway powers, have OTOwn enormously *P^"<^* _ -^ \ . (finances rich ; and this alliance has, in many cases, been the true .secret of their growth. It is this that goes far to explain the my.stery of their rapid overshadowing of competitors. The time has come to see all this clearly, and Only half it should be .stated without hesitation and with ^^^"^^""y utter frankness. But it is only part of the story. It has all belonged to a disappearing age of specu- lative development, in which not only the rail- road sy.stem, but almost every other form of business activity was completely involved, in the three or four decades following the Civil War. 72 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The mitigating conditions The real test of wealth What the great fortunes mean The misuse of the railway system to some extent, — harmful as it was to the victims of a favored and rebated competition, — did not outweigh its general advantages. The undue wealth of the barons of transportation and industry was, and is, small in comparison with the vast dis- tributed accumulations that have gone to the enrichment of thousands of communities and millions of individuals, through the opening up of 200,000 miles of commerce-bearing steel high- ways in the United States. Always keep in mind the two kinds of wealth; namely, that which consists in the control of the means of production, and that which signifies abundance for purposes of use in consumption. The man who owns great New England shoe fac- tories has large capitalistic power; but the final test of wealth is in the ability of the people in general to buy and wear all the shoes they need. In this country, thus far, the great fortunes have not been used very wastef ully. They simply mean a centering of control over capital engaged in producing things. When such capital is man- aged efficiently, the results must, of necessity, in the main, be distributed to the community at large in the form of commodities that enter into PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 73 common use. The shoe manufacturer's wealth chap. ii. — in the form of control over factories and ma- y^g chinery — would speedily disappear but for the capitalist's ,.«. , , , » , , 1 . , dependence dinused wealth oi the people which enables them to buy his output. But the truth is that productive capital is increasing very rapidly, and must continue to do so; and that those now in control of it have an advantage over others in securing control of Control further new increments of capital. We shall o/^^^P^^^^ is too have to go on even more than heretofore with much con- production on the large scale, backed up by accu- c^"^*^°^^" mulated capital. /And the control of that capital^ should not rest so largely in the hands of a few. At some points, the government should, directly or indirectly, share in the control, while at other points there should be a wider subdivision of control among private owners. A perfectly fair use of railroads will have much First, let to do with checkino; the tendency toward the dan- ^ \'^^ ' ° '' roads gerous concentration of capital in a few hands ; abolish and when the tendency is checked, the problem J'^^^^^ loses its immediate urgency. It may then safely be left for those solutions that will come with longer time and more thorough study. Thus, thirty years ago, the problem of land 74 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. How 'problems lose their urgency The way of relief The hope- ful view- point monopoly in Ireland seemed frightfully urgent; but it is now working itself out on just and wise lines with everybody's rights fairly observed, and with new methods of farming, and of coopera- tion in country life, now promising at an early day to transform completely the Irish peasantry. It all began with laws to regulate the rent system, and to mitigate the evils of absentee land- lordism. In like manner we shall in due time work out the problems involved in the overweening control of railway and industrial capital by a few people. And as Ireland's regeneration began with laws to secure a fair land system, so our relief from some of the evils and dangers of mo- nopoly and concentrated wealth power will come with laws — national and state — to secure a reasonable and impartial use of the means of transportation. We are in the very thick of newspaper sensa- tions and industrial and political turmoil just now, because these evils of wealth control and of corporate management have been coming into the light as never before. But it is not the time for a depressed view of American life and affairs. Exposure and criticism had to precede thorough- PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 75 going relief. And it is not when evils are in chap. ii. process of remedy that there is most ground for discouragement, though the process may be highly disturbing and painful while it lasts. When real emergencies come, the people of the The task United States are usually right-minded and effi- cient. The important task before them now indicates nothing else so much as it does a whole- some growth and progress. The body politic has vigor and health. Therefore it throws off what would otherwise bring decay. The use by the federal government of the power to regulate interstate commerce, and by the states of their power over common carriers and chartered corporations, was never so necessary as now, and the railroads will not be the least of those benefited. For the most part, the railroads came into being as a part of the means for opening up a new country; and our conditions created a race of The men with whom individual and private initiative ^^" . ., . ^ great imtta- was stronger than anywhere else at any time in live the world's history. A great part of the railroad mileage of the country was built in advance of actual needs, and the population and wealth of regions traversed by the new lines had to grow up. 76 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. Growing up to the railroads At length, the new conception of a riper period in order to give solid value to the transportation properties. It was customary to look upon railroads not merely as private enterprises, but to regard them as of a highly speculative and extra-hazardous nature, in which investors risked much on the chance of final rewards of a corresponding mag- nitude. Most of the roads, as I have already intimated, went into bankruptcy sooner or later, and some of them passed through more than one period of receivership and reorganization. As the country matured, railroad property became more stable, until finally the great systems were well beyond danger of serious financial reverse. Business interests all along the lines became di- versified, and it was no longer necessary for the railroads to secure traffic by favoring and build- ing up special or particular interests. The time came when there emerged the clear conception of the railroad as a great necessary public servant, with all the obligations of a com- mon carrier, and with no right, therefore, to dis- criminate for or against any of those whose busi- ness required them to make use of the public highway. The whole thing has come about by way of evolution from transient, speculative, im- PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 77 mature conditions to those of a riper period of chap. ii. industrial life and civilization. Yet abuses, even when naturally outgrown, are often hard to destroy. For even as the tree grows great, so also will the entwining parasite some- times have a stronger clutch. And many of the favored industries built up on special transporta- tion favors have been in a position powerful enough Adjust- to make it difficult for particular railroad corpora- ^^^^ ^^^^ tions to relinquish the rebates or the other forms of itself of favoritism. It is probably true, however, that the very growth of business conditions would sooner or later have compelled the railroads to cease discrimination and treat all comers fairly, even if there had been no interstate commerce legislation. However that may be, the government's power Timeliness to regulate interstate commerce is a chief correct- -^ ing agency at the present time; and it is helping reforms the railroads and the shippers to readjust rela- tions on a fair and proper modern basis. The railway reforms, now coming about through government action on the one hand and evolution of business conditions on the other, are especially timely for two reasons. First, they will save us from a premature agitation of the demand for 78 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The alter- natives End of the pioneer epoch the government ownership and operation of railroads; and second, they will encourage thou- sands of energetic men to use their brains, and such capital as they can enlist, in new efforts for wealth production. We had reached the limit under the old system. Railroads had to be emancipated, for the further rapid progress of the country in its varied business life. And if at Washington reform had been successfully obstructed, then the fight for govern- mental administration of the railway network would have come on in dead earnest, with our political conditions very poorly adapted to such a tremendous increase of public functions. It is this that gives the underlying significance to the recent struggles at Washington for new railroad legislation. The disappearing methods grew up with the rude forces of the pioneering epoch that created the new West beyond the Mississippi after the Civil War, that built up the manufactures of the East under the forcing processes of a high tariff, and that deserve credit for some of the achieve- ments of the New South. But the pioneering epoch, as I have occasion to show at length in another chapter is practically complete for the PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 79 United States ; and we have to deal henceforth chap. ii. with the problems of a mature country. By this I do not mean a finished country, but a country ripe for a second period of intensive and complex development. Success is no longer waiting toward the sunset. The There is no West or East, or North or South, f/Jf^^l^^ where the young man can go in order to find appeared prosperity assured, by merely identifying him- self with the growing country. But just as fruit farming succeeded wheat lands in California, where the wheat fields in turn had followed grazing, — so in every part of the country there is great opportunity for those prepared to see how radical are the possibilities of progress in any given neighborhood. Untold resources of wealth — not for the multi- Conserving millionaire alone, but chiefly for the community ' "^ •' resources at large — are awaiting the further progress even of our older states. Before our hard- wood forests of the mountain slopes are all con- verted into articles of utility, we will have learned how to maintain them in perpetuity through the methods of modern forestry. And we will have learned how private business enterprise, scientific instruction in our higher institutions, and the 80 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The forests The soil The new education fostering care of state and national governments, can all work together in harmony to secure the best and most lasting economic advantages from a great natural resource like the forests. So much for an illustration. The earlier epoch slashed the forests away in frantic haste for the sake of immediate private wealth. Scientific forestry belongs to the new period, in which public and private interests alike require that forests be used without being destroyed. Take another example: the old method of farming cropped the soil, regardless of its ex- haustion; the new agriculture will restore worn- out lands, find new crops, and secure results tenfold greater than those of the discarded, primi- tive modes of farming. Education and economic advance will go hand in hand. And the new sort of education will especially qualify the coming generation for new and unanticipated results in the effort to improve material conditions. For every one concedes that men must work, to gain food and shelter and leisure, and the means for a higher life. And with what we know and see about us, it would be absurd to suppose that the coming men are PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 81 not to work under better advantages and with chap. ii. far better results than their predecessors. They will develop your mineral wealth to an What the extent that would now seem fabulous. They ^g^» ^^n will harness your waterfalls, transmute your accomplish coal deposits, and multiply the applications of electricity; they will equalize the advantages of country living and city living and minimize the disadvantages of both, for they will suburbanize or countrify the cities, and give all sorts of social advantages to factory workers, while reducing the isolation and hardship of country life in many ways, some of which are already well begun. With the needful development of private The needs wealth, there can also be vast enhancement of 'Y . ^ ' state the public income. And the state will need ever-increasing revenues in order to maintain the progressive standards of a more exacting civilization. Thus, the state provides schools, but the schools of the future must be very dif- ferent from those of the past and the present. In the state of New York, the best school at A New present for a workingman's son is at Elmira. It g^^^^g is a great boarding school with every kind of facility, and it gives free board, lodging, and in- struction. It affords splendid physical disci- 82 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. Training for convicts Give the honest hoy a like chance pline, gives as good military drill as West Point, provides proper mental and moral training, and teaches every young man a good practical trade to the point of high efficiency. It accommodates perhaps 1200 young men. Unfortunately, the state gives this admirable opportunity for fitness to enter the modern world of work only to young men whose credentials are: the proved commis- sion of a felonious crime. The uneducated son of a workingman who will break a plate-glass window and take a watch, may hope to go to the Elmira State Reformatory Prison, whence, after two or three years, he will emerge, — stigmatized, indeed, as a convict, — but well trained for prac- tical life, with strong physique, just ideas of public and private conduct, and the mastery of a profit- able trade or handicraft. Now, for many years, it has been clear to my mind that what the state of New York does for thousands of youths who have violated the penal code, it must some day do for the honest lad whose father cannot provide such opportunities for him. We have adopted the principle that the state is to instruct and train the young. Let us not shrink from the full application of that principle. What the state does for young crimi- PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 83 nals, for the blind, or for the deaf mutes, and chap, ii, what the national government does for young Indians in its great industrial schools, we should expect to find equaled, at least, in provisions made sooner or later for the sons and daughters of all the people. And this will require a development It xvill of public, and therefore of private, wealth far '"^3"*^^ ^ ^ 'public greater than we have yet attained. But the wealth wealth invested in such training of the young will be returned many times over in the results of their increased efficiency as producers. We do not need to invoke new principles. We The old must simply extend and improve the appfication of .,, , ,, the principles already acknowledged. We must find the true balance between public author- ity and private enterprise. We may find some things that the state can do for all of us better than we can do them for ourselves; but we are not going to industrialize government in our day, and we need not fear to use government to the full, where it has proper place for use. The state will not run our factories, but it will protect society from some of the dangers of unregulated competition among private factory operators. Thus, it may enforce sanitary conditions and have some rules to give as to hours of labor. 84 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. Socialism as a doubtful remedy Govern- ment and its relation to health especially where women and children are con- cerned. The author of a popular novel, based upon a realistic study of conditions in the Chicago stock yards and packing houses, ends his book with an impassioned plea for socialism. His remedy is the control of productive wealth by the govern- ment. He would put us all in the uniform of the state, in order somehow to protect us from evils he discovers in the workings of the present economic system. But the remedy he proposes is untried, while the evils he deplores may not, after all, prove deep-seated, and may yield with wonderful promptness to the remedies already at hand. Thus in due time the ancient Chinese learned (see Charles Lamb) that they did not always have to burn down the house every time they wanted a roast pig ! Let us admit without hesitation that the care of the public health is a necessary function of government under modern conditions of knowl- edge regarding diseases and their spread. Europe is now saving millions of lives of little children by public regulation of milk supply. Public health measures are abolishing epidemics, such PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 85 as prevailed forty years ago, whether of cholera, chap. ii. yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid, or diphtheria. The individual cannot protect himself in these What matters, and health laws and administration are ^o'^^rnmen can do well a necessary application of the police powers of government. The simple question is. Does gov- ernment do these things well ? And I answer. It does them marvelously well, all things con- sidered. When it began to do them, in our crowded cities, the death rate exceeded the birth rate, and human life was cheap and miserable. Already the new methods have greatly reduced the death rate of all cities, and the average lon- gevity has increased remarkably. From time to time new facts and instances will come to light to show that public regulation in the interests of health must occupy itself with some fresh case or in some unexpected direction. Thus governments, local or general, can inspect food supply just as they can institute quarantines and provide epidemic hospitals in case of infec- tious disease. The test of old principles lies in their strength The state when new needs arise. Can state supervision ^^^ '"^^^ einergencies protect the people's deposits in savings banks or life insurance companies, as against private 86 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. fraud or mismanagement ? If so, we need not make haste to add vast new financial functions to our state or national governments. Can aroused public opinion, supporting new laws for government supervision, rid the packing industry of the abuses about which there has been so much sensation ? Then the remedies are at hand, and there is strength enough in our existing social structure to apply them. Food Bill There has been enacted into law at Washing- ^^ "'^ ton an elaborate measure which had been long illustration pending, known as the "Pure Food Bill." This grew out of the conditions under which a great variety of articles that enter into the general supply of food and medicines are now manufactured on a large scale and distributed through the channels of interstate commerce. Our advance in scien- tific knowledge and our more fastidious standards of living require that such food products should be honest from the commercial standpoint and wholesome from that of sanitary tests. It is not that matters are at so bad a pass in this country, but that we ought to expect positive improvement. The pack- In Europe the public abattoirs have done tng-house ^wav with thousands of small slaughterhouses, question and the gain has been almost incalculable. With PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 87 us, the great packing houses, with their refrigera- chap. ii. tor car lines and their cold storage plants every- where, have also abohshed local slaughterhouses by the tens of thousands, — and in spite of all that has ever been brought to light, I assert that Sanitary the packing-house system is incalculably more 'P^^^^^^^ sanitary, in the main, than the old local slaughter- houses, with their supply of uninspected animals and their total ignorance of the first elements of cleanliness or health rules in the methods they employed. The small slaughterhouses, as a vast system, could hardly have been reformed; but the large packing houses can be made models of wholesomeness, with positive profit to all branches of industry concerned in providing the country's food supply. As respects the articles with which the Pure Principles Food Bill is concerned, the commercial is more "-^ ^"'"^ food laws important than the health standpoint. Oleo- margarine is not, as a rule, unhealthy; but it is commercially wrong to sell it as butter. Glucose may be a nutritious food product, but to sell glucose for honey or maple sugar or jam, or any one of a dozen other articles, is not defensible. Pulverized cocoanut shells taken in small quan- tities are not harmful, yet they should not 88 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. 11. Protection of honest trade Still room for private energy constitute four fifths of what the people buy under the name of pepper. The chicory and the cereals which make up the bulk of so much of the coffee that is sold ready for use, do not undermine the human constitution; yet they certainly do tend to undermine the legitimate trade in coffee. The government can do a good deal to stop these dishonest practices, for the benefit of consumers on the one hand and for the protection and pros- perity of the honest producer on the other. Such are some of the points at which govern- ment touches the current economic life. This necessary assertion of the power of government and law only gives the better chance for the proper play of individual energy and initiative in the economic field. To my mind, the old, unre- strained forces of competition in business were wasteful; and the growth of comparatively non- competitive methods had in it place and timeli- ness. At one time the competitive system seemed beyond remedy in its reckless misuse of economic force. Then the trust system arose with its tendency toward abuses of monopoly power. And in turn the appeal of many men is to the government, with a socialistic programme, to give the final cure. PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 89 But we shall manage to keep place for private chap. ii. initiative and a good deal of competitive activity j^^g ^^^^ in the field of wealth production, while keeping ^^"^^ '^S , . -111.- 1 • advance the great corporations, with pubhcity as to their methods and a diffused ownership of their shares of stock. At the same time we shall use govern- mental authority freely to regulate economic forces, and we shall aim to make government so clean and efficient that we might, if necessary in the future, intrust it with enlarged business functions. Some of us can readily remember a time when Municipal .1 ,. p 1 T r u- franchises tiie very conception or a pubnc irancriise as a "^ valuable municipal asset was a strange and un- familiar one to our citizens. Municipal govern- ments would from time to time give away long- term monopoly privileges to gas companies, street railroad companies, electric light companies and so on, without any serious criticism directed against them, and with apparently no appreciation on the part of any citizen that private wealth was being built up at the public cost and disad- vantage. Here, again, we have come to see a new light, and we see it clearly. We do not as yet manage these things perfectly in our cities and towns, but the old days of 90 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. A system to be reformed wanton disregard of the public right and the general welfare are gone forever. It is one thing to protect private initiative in business affairs, and it is quite another thing to permit or foster abuses that enrich one man or set of men at the expense of the community. My point is that the chief fault has belonged, not to the men who have gained great fortunes through the opportunities afforded by our economic system, but to the transitional period through which we have been living. And the thing we have now to deal with is not the great fortunes or the men who hold them, in so far as their pos- session is legally beyond assault, but the system itself, in those parts of it which have been used to the public detriment. The principles are now clear, and what we have to do is to apply them. It is the failure to see these principles, or else the failure to believe that we can apply the remedies that is driving men to the socialistic extreme. The course of recent events would seem to prove the opposite of the socialistic argument and to show that we have ample capacity for economic reform along the line of well-established doctrines. I have not sought to extol wealth or economic force in any materialistic spirit. Back of all effi- PRESENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 91 cient human effort lie character and the behef in chap. ii. things of the mind and spirit. But I have tried to set forth some of the conditions under which the young men of to-day must do their work for the further promotion of our best civiHzation. I would have the business man professionalize The true his calling by understanding how serious are his j^usiness responsibilities in what is preeminently the busi- ness man's age. Work done in the right spirit, with science and knowledge to guide it, and with a sincere desire for the public welfare, can be made of absorbing interest. And it matters, therefore, comparatively little what particular pursuit a young man chooses in life, if only he , makes honest effort, and tries to give the best that is in him to the service of his own day and generation. In our great Southern states, we have many The difficulties and perplexities to face in the onward l^^^^^ty course of our social and political hfe. But we can make no mistake in turning our best energies to the development of our vast latent resources, as a foundation for the great structure of civili- zation we mean to build in that beautiful and highly favored portion of the earth. With their own trained men, and their own capital, they must 92 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. II. The underlying ideals work out amazing transformations along the line of many things already begun. When the capital invested in farms and mines and furnaces and factories begins to yield the returns we may confidently expect, let us not forget that capital invested in education is the most important of all, because it produces the trained minds and scien- tific aptitudes necessary for further progress. Furthermore, there can be no great progress in purely economic directions without high ideals to inspire effort and high motives looking toward the use of economic results. OUR LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS CHAPTER III OUR LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS Certain aspects of our American life and society, that are to be considered in the pages that follow, should remind us of the fact that we are now a mature country. This mav not seem A mature a novel suggestion, yet the bearings of it have scarcely been recognized by any element or group of our leaders in opinion or in statecraft. We have been so long accustomed to regard ourselves as a young country and a pioneering country, that we have not attained unto the recognition, as a matter of national consciousness, of tlie meaning in a synthetic, full way of a great number of facts which we recognize in their separate aspects. Every one knows, for example, that we now Our make far more products of iron and steel each . r 171 certain year than any other nation; that our agricultural things output is more extensive than tliat of other lands ; that the mileage of our railroads far exceeds that 95 96 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Meaning of the transition of any European country ; that our population is larger than that of any other nation of white men excepting Russia; that our educational system is more extensive and widely diffused than that of any other large nation, and that in many material regards, and in some intellectual and moral aspects, ours appears to be the most highly favored of modern countries. These things, indeed, might all be true; and yet such might be our extent of area and of unde- veloped resources, and such might be many other practical conditions, that it could still be said that we were, relatively speaking, in the pioneering stage of our progress and our civilization. And here let me say that I do not for a moment mean to imply that the relative maturity which I affirm is in any manner to be thought of as a stagnant or passive or unchanging condition, — for just the contrary of this is what I think to be true. The stages of development upon which we have now entered in our mature national period are more complex and more profound than those of the pioneering epoch, and they involve a higher degree of activity in every sense of the word. It would be inaccurate, and therefore useless, to fix any exact date as marking the transition from LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 97 one period to another in the history of civilization chap. hi. in any country whatsoever. We may say, if we y^^g nxina choose, that our pioneer period ended with the of our ^ ... . national opanish War, or with the nuieteenth century, periods There are locaHties, assuredly, in which it has not yet come to its end. But I am speaking in broad and general terms. The colonizing period had begun with the first settlements, that of Virginia about three hundred years ago, of Massachusetts a little later, and of North Carolina in a scattered fashion along its tidewater frontage at ' a time almost as early. This colonial period we regard conveniently as having ended with the attainment of independence by the colonies and their federal union. So slight had been the westward movement, The before the Revolutionary War, of the pathfinders , '' ^ epoch and wilderness hunters like Daniel Boone, that the exceptions only mark the main fact that it was not until well after the war that what we may call the pioneering period had fairly set in. Almost the entire population of the United States in the Colonial and Revolutionary period dwelt within easy access to the seaboard or to tidal streams. It was after that period that the movement toward the West took on so great a volume and 98 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. The century of pioneering The westward spread of the American family SO remarkable a character from the standpoint of American history and of the making of our national life. If you would know your own country in its most essential things, you must study the move- ment by which the descendants of our old, origi- nal commonwealths spread themselves across the continent through a period of a hundred years or more, beginning, let us say, about 1785. Ken- tucky was admitted to the Union in 1792, Ten- nessee in 1796, and Ohio in 1803. Northern New England, western New York, western Penn- sylvania, and the western valleys of Virginia and North Carolina were undergoing pioneer develop- ment in this same period. Indiana and Illinois in the North, and Mississippi and Alabama in the South, came into the Union in the period from 1816 to 1819, then Maine followed in 1820, and Missouri in 1821. Louisiana, meanwhile, had been brought into the Union in 1812 under obligations incurred in the purchase from France of the great central tract of the country. These are familiar dates, and I mention them only as incidental to the endeavor to impress upon your minds the marvelous spread of the American fam- ily away from the seaboard to the Appalachian LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 99 valleys and through the mountain gaps to the chap. m. great timber lands of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indi- ana, and to the warm alluvial soils of Alabama and Mississippi. These men and women not only founded new communities beyond their home states, and so brought new states into the Making 71611) Union, but they also developed the interior and , , western parts of the states which formed the original group. While this first great Western movement was mostly made up of Revolutionary soldiers, or the descendants of those who had belonged to the American colonial period, there also came a wel- come and important stream — though not a vast one — of men from the British Isles, includ- ing the Scotch-Irish, who have played so impor- tant a part in the making of the Appalachian region and the states contiguous to it. And the pioneers might be said faii-ly to have laid a domi- nating hand upon the affairs of the whole country, when Andrew Jackson had become President, or The certainly after we had fought the Mexican War, ,,„,„„ and had brought Missouri, Arkansas, and Michi- gan into the Union, with Iowa and Wisconsin following Texas. The admission of most of these states came in a very early stage of their settle- 100 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Up to the Civil War Subduing the wilder- ness — 1790^0 1850 ment, and the pioneer process of felling the for- ests, creating farmsteads, building roads and towns, and establishing institutions, was still very far from complete when the era of railroad build- ing had begun and when there was reached in our history the momentous period of the great Civil War. Let me say a few words about the pioneers who had made the country as it was before 1860, and then something about that amazing outburst of energy — transmuted into material progress — that exhibited itself through the thirty or forty years after the North and South laid down their arms and gave themselves once more to the task of making the country great. In all history we can discover the records of no better or braver people than the men and women who subdued the American wilderness in the period from 1790 to 1850. They prepared it to be the home of millions of people speaking the same language and possessing the same kind of civilization, and they left to America a noble heritage of hope, courage, and faith. Our ances- tors beyond the sea, whether from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, or whatever other European land, may have been of humble LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 101 origin, or they may have been of educated or chap. hi. even of aristocratic Hneage. We are willing indeed to know anything about them that we can find out. But, after all, for Americans it will always The suffice to trace their ancestry back to the earliest ,. '' lineage of their forefathers who crossed the seas and cast in their lot with the makers of this new world. Very many, perhaps a majority, of the English no- bility do not record their pedigree for more than two or three centuries. We, on the other hand, have a great population in this country of men and women who can clearly trace their descent from ancestors who had a part in creating our Eastern colonies two hundred and fifty years ago. Some of these people, of this lineage so credit- The able, and for which they are so justly grateful, ^^P°"*^^" still remain, as here in North Carolina, in the families old seaboard states. But the vast majority of them are scattered all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. This again is in itself a fact familiar to you, yet have you fully reahzed its significance ? What other country can you find that has been made in the same way, by the spread of famihes across a vast unoccupied 102 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Founders territory, in such a manner that they have never lost their sense of kinship, and have carried with them all their ideas and all that is essential in the institutions that grow out of their associated life. Where to-day are the sons of North Carohna ? Of C07777D OT) — — ,., While the movements of migration have been mainly along parallel lines westward, there has also been a fanlike radiation; and the sons of North Carolina, as of Virginia, have helped to make Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas notably, while they have helped also in lesser degree to make many other states. And few of them or their descendants have ever forgotten the family begin- nings in the old home state. Thus, one of my own great-grandfathers, as a young man after the Revolutionary War, sold his land in North Carolina and crossed the moun- tains to Kentucky. Subsequently he made one more advance and passed over the Ohio River to become one of the pioneers in the settlement of the Buckeye state. To illustrate in this personal way the movement of population in that period, another great-grandfather from the line between Maryland and Pennsylvania passed down the Ohio River and also settled in Kentucky, subse- Personal illustra- tions LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 103 quently going in like manner to Ohio. At just chap. hi. that time the men of eastern Massachusetts were moving northward to develop northern New England, westward to northern and west- ern New York, subsequently to northern Ohio, and so on across the northwestern states, where New England influence became so predominant. Of these sturdy people from New England who did so much for the making of the country north North and of the 40th parallel of latitude, the same thing can ^?^ Z*^ be said as of the men of Pennsylvania, Maryland, parallel Virginia, and the Carolinas who developed the country south of the 40th parallel. They spread across the country, recognizing themselves as belonging to one great American family. Thus there are some of us whose own kith and Kinship kin have so scattered and advanced in the pioneer- ^ . , .^ ^ nationality ing process that relatives in some degree are known and recognized in perhaps twenty states of the Union, from the Eastern seaboard all the way to California. And this has had to do, more than almost any other one thing, with the solidarity of the American people. We know how brightly burned the early lights of aspiration and intelli- gence and character in Virginia and the Carolinas, as well as in the Middle States; and we know 104 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Trans- plantation of leaders A com- parison with European nations that Tocqueville spoke justly when he referred to the far shining of the beacon of New England's enlightenment. • Yet the country became great not by the mere radiation of influence from the older centers, but by the actual transplantation of the men and women who embodied the best of our early ideals, and who gave added strength and vigor to what was characteristic of America in the healthful though often dangerous and painful experiences of the subduing of the wilderness and the making of new communities. Mark the difference in this regard between our American population and that of any other country. England is not large in area, and its people are generally regarded as homogeneous in their insularity. But as a matter of fact the populations of the different parts of England are scarcely at all acquainted in any other part. Thus the Yorkshire man would only by the rarest chance have a relative living in Kent or Cornwall. The intimacy between North Carolina and Mis- souri, for example, is incomparably greater than that between one part of England and another part. In like manner the people of the north of France know very little of those of the south of LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 105 France, or even of those living in districts not at chap. hi. all remote. Exactly the same thing is true of Italv and Gernianv, and it is characteristic of almost every other European land. As com- pared with other countries, we in America are Americans i> 11 1 1 i> I 1 literally a literally a band ot brothers, spread to the number ijrotherhood of millions upon millions across a vast continent, and our characteristics have been formed very largely in contact with the problems we have had to solve in this transcontinental march of subjugation. All honor to the strong men and brave women The who floated down the rivers on flatboats and ,,, ,,. of the Mis- crossed the mountain passes with ox teams and sissippi Conestoga wagons. While they were not all equally fortunate, most of them had the wisdom and good judgment to build their cabins and make their abiding places where the soil was rich, the rainfall equable, the climate wholesome, and the geographical situation certain to give permanence and continuity to the work of their hands. When they cleared the valley lands, they knew that the conditions were such as to give long and abiding prosperity to their new neighborhoods and to justify their descendants in remaining and in keeping alive the memories and traditions of the 106 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. pioneers of the early part of the nineteenth cen- tury. Their They were large-minded people, who from the rai s an very first were determined to possess good churches, good schools, and a home life made the more dignified and refined by good houses and sub- stantial improvements. They were people of high ideals and unbounded self-respect. Surely Nature was lavish in her gifts to that beautiful, productive region that lies west of the Alleghanies and south of the Great Lakes. There are, indeed, other fair and rich countries, some of them fairer and richer than this, that lie desolate to-day because they have lacked the right kind of men. They have needed but ha.ve not found men with brawn and brain and heart to wrest wealth from the soil, to utilize the forces and bounties of Nature, and to plant those seeds of social life and of religious and political institu- tions that count for more, after all, than fields of waving corn and golden grain. Life in the So much for the two generations of frontiersmen . . who were creating commonwealths between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River in the first half of the nineteenth century. They had, indeed, their peculiarities and their crudities. Read, if LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 107 you please, with due amusement, Mrs. Trollope's chap. hi. " Domestic Manners of the Americans," Dickens's "American Notes" and his "INIartin Chuzzle- wit," Baldwin's "Flush Times in Alabama"; but these pictures of pioneer times in the West and South tell only a little part of the story. It was surpassingly wonderful, if the full truth were known, how the best ideals of life were cherished, maintained, and transmitted in thousands of log cabins west of the Alleghanies, Then came the decade before the Civil War, The of gathering political clouds, of financial disaster, '^'^^^^3 ^ *= ^ ^ _ of the war and of moral and social reaction. And then the great convulsion and struggle, born of a period when the harsh voices of passion and wrath were too loud for the gentler counsels of brotherhood and forbearance. I have no further word about that period, excepting such as relates to the influ- ence it had upon the later pioneering develop- ment of the country. The war destroyed vast resources and sacrificed Masterful- hundreds of thousands of brave men, but it also , , awakened awakened such masterfulness, such power of by the achievement, in its survivors — and these were ^°^J^^^' the great majority of those who participated — as the world has never seen and may never again 108 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. in. experience. Remember that the war was fought on both sides for the most part by very young men. The colleges in the South were closed because the students all went to the war. I am a graduate of a Northern college that also closed because every student in it went to the front. Develop- When the war was ended there were on both ment of per- ., • i u £ u j? u j , , sides maior-o-enerals who nve years beiore had sonal force jo ^ scarcely entered upon the careers of men. There were in fact hundreds of men on both sides who had commanded brigades or full regiments, yet who were at the end of the five years' struggle still mere striplings in their twenties. But they had seen such stern and terrible reality — they had faced danger, carried responsibility, and exercised power under such circumstances — that they could not by any chance relapse to the mental stature of ordinary, inexperienced men. They must perforce do great things. Just as the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 had built up a generation of masterful men, who settled the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley, so the events of the Civil War awakened in the sons and grandsons of those men, and of their kinsfolk of the eastern seaboard as well, a power which was bound to find expression in some great Our men of power after the war LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 109 history-making processes. If we had been essen- chap. in. tially a mihtary nation, these men might have sought conquest to the northward in view of our claims against England, and to the southward under pretext of the expulsion of French and Austrian invaders and usurpers. But the armies were disbanded, and the million or two of young men who had been tried in the fiery furnace of war set about making careers for themselves in a land where swords were beaten into plowshares. Then followed for two or three decades the How they great movement west of the Mississippi. The ''P''^'^^^^ men who had fought in the war turned their West engineering and organizing and directive talent to the building of a vast network of railways, to the opening of mines, and to the exploitation of forests. They became the leaders in our political life, the captains of our industry, and the Napo- leons of our finance. They brought hundreds and thousands of millions of dollars of capital from Europe to aid in the development of the virgin West. Wlicre the prairie grass was growing and the buffalo herds were flourishing, they planted the wheat and the corn and the cotton. They found a vast export market for American grain and fiber and meat, and they built high, and kept 110 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Their industry and their politics They built the rail- roads They im- ported foreign labor high, the protective-tariff wall in order that they might create diversified manufactures and com- mercial centers in our own country to consume the food products and raw materials of the agri- cultural West and South. They were not always refined in their methods ; their materialism was crude and insatiate; but they did wonderful things and they left us many a perplexing legacy as a result of their eagerness and — sometimes — their lack of scruples. They invented a new way to develop the Western country, pushing their railroads far beyond the frontier line, then bring- ing the population to settle upon the imperial grants of land they had obtained from the gov- ernment. While our American boys were pushing west to occupy the rich, virgin soil and grow up with the country, millions of immigrants were per- suaded to come from Europe, settle on the land, help build the railroads, work in the mines, and provide labor for the factory towns. To hasten the development of the Pacific coast, Chinese la- borers were brought in by the scores of thousands. And so the great movement went on until we discovered, not so long ago, that the so-called Western frontier of Indians and cowboys, and the LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 111 thin edge of pioneer advance, had disappeared. chap. hi. Whether by honest settlement or whether by j<^ trickery and fraud, all of Uncle Sam's good farm abolished the fron- lands had been made over to private owners. ^^^ By the force of economic conditions, farm lands west of the Mississippi River had become more valuable than those of Ohio or western New York, or of Pennsylvania or Maryland. The new West The nexo West had been built up by money borrowed from ^^j^^^^^^ Europe and the Eastern states. We suddenly financial awakened to the fact that this new West had ^^^^^ become rich and had paid off Europe and the Eastern states, and was able not only to capitalize its own further development for itself in the main, but was from time to time sending money, by way of Chicago and St. Louis, to New York to support the general money market and the opera- tions of so-called high finance. When the West was poor and struggling and Agrarian absolutely dependent upon the railroads, there * ^^^^ ^* were long and stubborn political agitations of an agrarian character, directed against the tyranny of the corporations of transport and supply. And there were also formidable political movements having to do with money and the standards of value growing out of the fact that the West was 112 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. How they were mitigated Personal character as result- ing from 'pioneering conditions The typical American boy prevalently a debtor region and would not tolerate an appreciating standard of value. But when the West had paid off its mortgages and had accumulated its own capital, these phases of social and political agitation belonging to the pioneer period had a tendency to disappear. All the conditions of American pioneering were such as to create a wonderful spirit of individuality, independence, and self-direction in the average man. Never in the world has there been anything to equal this development of personality, and this capacity for private and individual initiative. And I must dwell upon this point because it is at the very root of the problems that we have to deal with, — now that we have completed the pioneering stage and entered upon the next stage, — that of a buoyant, progressive maturity. Several conditions were in conjunction to give to Americans during the past forty years immense capacity for self-direction and individual achieve- ment. First, there was the traditional spirit born of early conditions and the Revolutionary contest; second, there was the freedom begotten of contact with Nature on a great scale in the subduing of a continent. The average American boy had grown up with a gun in his hand, and LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 113 he knew the woods and the native animals. He chap. in. had learned to swim his horse across swollen rivers, and to face all sorts of practical emer- gencies. Furthermore, he had developed under Freedom of conditions of entire political and family freedom, and still further, he had grown up in a land naturally bountiful, where there was ample incen- tive to effort, and where there did not exist any laws or conditions which might dishearten the individual man because tending to deprive him of the fruits of his labor. Furthermore, although later we carried on our Continental industry and commerce under conditions of a ^^^^ tariff that somewhat discouraged traffic with the older countries of Europe, it is to be remembered that we maintained absolute free trade among our- selves. Thus, although protectionists as against the rest of the world, we were free traders over a larger contiguous area of developing country, and were in actual practice living under freer conditions for the large development of business, than any other people in the world. Thus it was that the later pioneer period after How the the war, which built the transcontinental railroads, ^^^^^^^^ created the agricultural West, developed the iron arose and steel production and the textile industries. 114 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Some problems left un- solved No longer a west- ward migration afforded such opportunities for the acquisition of wealth as had never before been known. Great fortunes began to emerge, because opportunities were continental rather than parochial. The private career in that materialistic age offered inducements so far beyond any that a public career could hold out to ambitious men, that private initiative and private interest became dominant. Governmental and public activity and interest became relatively weak and neglected. And so the pioneer period having ended, we are left with some profound social and economic problems which may in their solving perplex us, but which need cause us no deep-seated anxi- ety, certainly no pessimistic foreboding. Let us look at some of the conditions we find existing in the country, and some of the tendencies of the new period. First, with respect to conditions of population: The old hives east of the Alleghanies no longer send their sturdy sons westward to identify them- selves with new communities. The tendency has become almost too slight to be discernible. Neither are the sons of the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi moving in any strong stream to make home and fortune in the newer regions LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 115 of the West. "Westward Ho !" is no longer the chap. hi. cry. There is, indeed, a more discernible move- ment northward and southward. From a general North- reffion of which Iowa may be taken as the center, ^'°^ , ° . " southward there is a movement of young men to the new wheat lands of the far Canadian Northwest, and there is a decided movement of older men to the more genial climatic conditions of Louisiana and the Southwest. As for young men who seek business or profes- New York sional careers in cities, New York now calls more ^^ ° ^'^^^ strongly to the ambitious young men of the West and South than Chicago or the other Western centers call to the ambitious young men of the East. In short, the westward pioneering and developing trend of our American population is at an end. Some reaction has set in, and Eastern Revival of land that had been neglected and had become , o farming relatively cheap has a tendency to fall into the hands of Western men. The most marked change in the status of population, however, is that which has built up the cities and industrial centers at the expense of the villages and the country communities. And next to this, the most marked change is the decline of the old native population in New 116 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Population changes in the East New Eng- land's abandoned farms They once produced great men and women England and in other parts of the East. If it were not, indeed, for the influx of a vast European population to supply the demand for labor caused by the falling off of the native population, it would be seen that New England, and some other parts of the country as well, are not merely at a standstill like France in point of population, but are declining to a point threatening extinction. Wealth and industry, indeed, served by foreign- born labor, seem in no danger of declining in New England. But the decadence of once beau- tiful and famous villages, and the relapse to wil- derness conditions of what was once a well-tilled country, are indeed pathetic. Not long ago I was wandering over the rock-ribbed pastures of a New England state. At best, the thin covering of soil seemed only a few inches deep. In lieu of fences, the tiny fields were separated by massive granite stone walls, blasted and hewn out of the solid rock, or else heaped up with giant bowlders by those Yankees of prodigious industry a hun- dred years or more ago. They raised poor crops, tho.se hardy farmers, but they planted churches and schools, and they produced men and women. These are the real tests of the greatness of a com- munity or a state. LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 117 If in the same spirit of devotion and courage chap. hi. those New England pioneers had perchance made ^ picture their farms on richer soil, they would have been of present coTtdxtxofis none the worse for it, and the results in a local sense would have been more enduring. They built up men and women for the glory of the nation and the peopling of prairie states yet un- born. But in thousands of instances their farms, so painfully redeemed from forest and from rock, have now relapsed to a state of wilderness where some gnarled old apple tree, in the very thick of a dense growth of scrub oak, birch, spruce and pine, reminds us that here were once cleared fields and orchards, thrifty homesteads, men who plowed and women who spun, all for the glory of God and the greatness of the American name. Only a hundred years ago — or even seventy- The five years or fifty years ago — these were tidy, "'*^"^'""^ss _ _ again decent farms. To-day they are lost in mile after mile of tangled young forest, where the fox dwells, where the wild deer has come back, and where even the wolves and panthers have reappeared. Of course, within a few miles there are thriving manufacturing towns, and there is progress along The new other lines. But these manufacturing towns are , ,. „ «=» populations made up of a new and strange population of 118 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. The 'problems of the village Decay of the rural hamlet polyglot origin ; and in the lesser of the farming hamlets there remain few, if any, who would care to celebrate the one hundredth or the two hun- dredth anniversary of the neighborhood, or who possess either the knowledge, the reverence, or the personal interest to save the tombs of the stalwart forefathers from neglect. With the growth of the factory towns, the decline of the villages of New England and other parts of the North and East is a most painful thing to consider. The life of a village when it is stagnant and listless, and without the touch of idealism, is about the pettiest and worst of all possible kinds of life. The city, even with its darker aspects of misery and vice, stimulates the mind by its rush and roar, its external activities, and its ever-changing sensations and novelties. But the dull, dead rustic hamlet, where nobody cares for anything or believes in anything beyond the gratification of a few sordid, material wants, is in danger of sinking to a lower moral level than the slums of the great towns. And quite in con- trast with conditions of a half century ago we now find thousands of such depraved neighbor- hoods where fair skies shine on the scenes of natural loveliness, without seeming in the very LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 119 least to lift up the minds and souls of men to chap. hi. noble thoughts and aspirations. Assuredly we seem to be moving in a vicious Is it a circle. For, first, the present conditions of city .^^"^,^* CZTCC& T life are not to be sought as a remedy and a refuge from decay and demoralization in the country districts; and, second, on the other hand, there is no such moral or social health in the villages and farm neighborhoods as would seem to invite a retreat from the urban centers of population. Nor would it seem very encouraging to admit The dis- the fact that our own American stock is increasing ^^'"^'''^d^^d phases scarcely any if at all, while our enhanced economic power as a nation is derived from the working energy brought to us by Italians and Poles, Rus- sians and Hungarians, and strange peoples from many lands, with little or no kinship to us whether of race or ideals. And in addition to these con- ditions there are the further problems of popula- tion in large parts of the country, due to the pres- ence of the negro race. It is not only in the Toivn and Eastern states that the decline of rural population '^^^^ ^^ has been marked and absolute, but the tendency exists even beyond the Mississippi River, where, for example, in Iowa there has been for many years a positive falling off in the population of the 120 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. The problems of city and country life Identical rather than opposed strictly country neighborhoods, with a marked increase in the railroad towns and the larger cen- ters of population. Here, then, are two sets of problems, pressing upon us at the same moment. The first of these are very urgent: having to do with the way in which we must order the life of cities and towns so that we may minimize the evils of population centers, while at the same time we derive a maxi- mum of benefit from the opportunities for social welfare that are afforded where many people live and work in the same immediate vicinity. On the other hand, we have the pressing problem of the rehabilitation of country life, so that the farm may be less distasteful and so that the village community may be sweeter and happier in its life and less disadvantaged in its opportunities as compared with the city. Fortunately, these two sets of problems do not antagonize one another, and it is better to view them as parts of a larger whole than as unrelated. It is not, then, the question of country life as against city life ; but in both country and city it is a question of the larger use of modern oppor- tunity, and the determined effort to do away with bad conditions. In a thousand ways the life LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 121 of the great towns is actually becoming amelio- chap. hi. rated; and there are now standards and methods of scientific and social progress that are bringing about most salutary changes. Our cities were Sanitary once the centers of epidemic disease, and the death rate averaged higher than the birth rate. This is no longer the case, for health administra- tion has practically stamped out epidemics, and the harmful physical tendencies of thirty or forty years ago are rapidly disappearing. The modern transit facilities of our towns and Improved cities are distributing the population over sub- , .,.,. ° ^ '^ jacilihes urban areas, and thus the city has a tendency to become countrified; while parks and libraries, improved schools, and facilities for recreation, make the life of the workingman's family a very much more comfortable thing to-day in a commer- cial center or factory town than it was a half century ago or even twenty years ago. While the tendency has set in this direction, the opportu- Further nities for an improved life in the towns have only f!,^.^]' '■ "^ mimes begun to be realized ; and every educated young man entering upon his life career at this time, it seems to me, is bound to acquaint himself with these matters and, in so far as it falls to his lot, to help bring about the complete regeneration of 122 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Remedies now at hand Improving country schools Necessary to increase the taxable total the conditions of American life in the centers of industry and trade. I do not beheve that any of this work is to be accompHshed by angry or revolutionary methods, and I am of the opinion that the calm, moderate application of remedies now understood by men of knowledge and skill in engineering or sanitary or administrative science can bring about the desired consummations. When it comes to the problems of country life, we find a hopeful process of urbanization going on in the rural districts. Perhaps the greatest demand is for good, modern, up-to-date, central- ized country schools, with well-trained teachers who have a knack for making school work relate itself to the lives of country children. But in order to support such schools the state school fund will not suffice, and there must be ample local taxation. Yet if local taxation is to provide the proper facilities of schools, good roads, and other neighborhood conveniences, there must be something to tax. Farm land must become more valuable. It must produce better and more diversified crops. Water power must be utilized, and manufacturing must be brought into the neigh- borhood, where natural conditions make it possible. LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 123 And here let me say that the greatest triumph chap. m. of the pioneering period in America has been the Capital creation of a great body of capitahzed wealth. ^'"■'^ ^^^ qualities This process must go steadily forward. It is of men true the poet warns us against those hastening ills which are sure to prey upon a country " where wealth accumulates and men decay." But in modern times men have been far more likely to decay under conditions of poverty than under conditions of wealth. The great economic achievement of the past generation has been the Lessening relative abolition of poverty. I take frank and L,^g^^ straightforward issue with those who hold that the accumulation of great fortunes in this country has been simultaneous with the impoverishment of the masses. Those great fortunes are merely in the form Production of tremendous agencies for the production and ^ '^ control distribution at low cost of articles of common use and necessity. The larger these accumulations of capital engaged in production, the greater the output and the wider the diffusion of benefits throughout the whole mass of the people. I do not like to see the control of these agencies of production vested so largely in the hands of a few individuals. I deplore those lax and unregulated 124 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Results of lax conditions Need of further growth of capital conditions of private initiative, during the later pioneering epoch in this country, that placed in the hands of a relatively few men the control of the railroad systems, the coal, the oil, the copper, the iron and steel, and many other important products, processes, and industries, which engage the toil of the people and which produce the necessities and conveniences that are now making most of our people comfortable in their daily lives. But although we might have avoided, if we had been wiser, so high a concentration of private control over the instruments of production, we have done a very great and beneficent thing in this country in creating so vast an amount of wealth in capitalized form. And it is this which is lift- ing our people as a whole from the degradation of poverty. What we have then to do, while seeking for justice and fair play in the distribution of wealth, is to strive with might and main for the further production of wealth in order by the same process to emancipate such other communities as yet re- main in the hard clutches of poverty. There are many such communities in the mountain districts of North Carolina and neighboring states. Let the water power be utilized to turn the wheels of LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 125 factories, and let the capitalist be encouraged to chap. hi. come and give employment to labor. In turn, let the factories be taxed for the support of schools. Encourage in every possible way the scientific Outlook knowledge of agriculture. There are states in ^^^ ^ farming the prairie regions of the Middle West where so intense is the interest in scientific agriculture, and so prosperous is the farming community, that the sons of physicians and lawyers and merchants in the towns are now attending the state agricul- tural colleges and crowding the classes in practical agriculture, with a view to becoming farmers of the new sort with a knowledge of soils and ferti- lizers and varied crop conditions. In one Western state, within three or four years, the work of the agricultural college in showing the farmers how The new to select their seed corn has added perhaps from five to ten dollars an acre to the actual value of all the land of the entire commonwealth. We are just at the beginning of agricultural Pioneer development in this country. Having worked J"-^^] " over and exhausted our soil from one ocean to the results other, we are going back and learning the business of farming all over again, under permanent con- ditions. Across vast expanses of America the log-cabin period still continues. A better kind 126 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP, III. Lessons from abroad The mountain people of the South of country life and a new knowledge of the pos- sibilities of agriculture must be made to change all this. There must now come a mature period of positive rural prosperity, following the lax and shiftless days since the first freshness of the soil was exliausted by the pioneers who made the clearings. We must be willing to take lessons in agricul- ture from the thrifty farmers of France, from the rich tillers of small holdings in Holland and Belgium, from those sturdy men who maintain high intelligence and decent standards of life in the valleys and on the mountain slopes of Switzerland. We must find out how Denmark has rehabilitated its agricultural life, and the remarkable new things the farmers are learning to do in Ireland. There is no reason why several million dwellers in the Appalachian highlands of America should always remain poverty-stricken, anaemic, igno- rant, and of primitive manners and ways of living. They come of a strong and virile stock, they belong all of them to the early pioneering epoch, they are Americans with the traditions of the past. Why should they not be great and dominant Americans of the future .'* With education, their LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 127 sons and daughters show their good quahties chap. m. with an amazing responsiveness. Economic de- velopment is what the Appalachian districts need, ^'hey need and all these modern processes must find their o„»(,r- way into the hills, capital must be encouraged, tunity the factory and the improved school must stand together as missionaries of social redemption. And so this vast hill country must become alive with a new hope and a new prosperity. We live in an economic age, and we must not "Bust- he afraid of it. The business career nowadays is ^f^^ . '' dominates the dominating one. The lawyer either becomes a business man, or becomes the adjunct of some business or corporate organization. The engineer, the architect, the men of various other professions are simply the technical and special servants of a world intent upon business achievement. We could not make this situation otherwise, and we ought to strive to understand it and to bring it under proper control. For the South and West, I firmly believe that Funda- the development of wealth is to be regarded ^^^jff^ ' ^ ^ ^ the South as an urgent, fundamental condition for the meeting of many other problems of importance. I do not for a moment fail to see the pressing need of working for rules of law and of conduct that 128 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Produce first : then divide Democracy requires intelli- gence will bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth. But remember that you have not yet brought one tenth of the possible results out of your soil, your mines, your forests, your water power, your latent human resources of inventive- ness and industry. Do not then be too anxious about the distri- bution of wealth ; or at least remember that we are still in a condition where, for many of our states and communities, the development, rather than the distribution of wealth, is still the fore- most problem. I have never been an apologist for mere plutocracy, and I hope I may never shut my eyes to any injustice in the methods by which an individual or a group of individuals may at times make unfair use of capitalistic or industrial power. But remember that no railroad can grow rich unless it serves a rich and prosperous country. And no industrial trust can create its multi- millionaires, excepting under conditions which also promote the diffusion of an incalculably greater quantity of wealth among millions of people. Ours remains a democracy, and there are no class distinctions of rigidity as yet developed in the United States. We must not lose faith in LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 129 our democracy, and we must remember that it chap. hi. must continue to find its support in the wide diffusion of character and inteUigence. Having made our states in a pioneer fashion, we must now proceed to make them all over again on a new and a better plan, using the instrumentalities which the pioneer period has placed in our hands. We must cultivate the spirit of tolerance and modera- tion. We have no need to deal ruthlessly or by Tolerance revolutionary methods with any of our great ,. . public questions. We must be honest, diligent, faithful, and open-minded. We must not be afraid of the fair discussion of any question what- soever. We cannot see clearly into the distant future. Things but we can see many things that it is right to do f j u in the present, and we can at least stand up and done be counted on the right side. We can fall in with the marvelous new tendency for the improvement of farming and of the conditions of country life in every part of America, and we can at the same time give our sympathy, and so far as possible our aid, to every good movement that brightens the life of workers in factories and dwellers in towns and cities. We shall have to make over again in a new K 130 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Culture and labor Foreigners and their children How to ■preserve American ideals way most of our educational methods, because we are educating the children for conditions of life so different from those that existed half a century ago. We must believe that culture and labor may go hand in hand. We must welcome the idealist, and understand that no progress could be made but for men and women who see visions of better things and strive to give their visions practical reality. We must not be afraid that harm will come from the lifting up of any man or woman or child, however humble. We have a great problem in our Northern cities, caused by the influx of more than a million foreigners every year. To read a book like Upton Sinclair's novel, " The Jungle," makes one shudder with dread and a sense of horror. But when one sees thousands upon thousands of the children of these strange peoples in the public schools of New York and Chicago, knows their eager minds, their quick grasp of American history and their enthusiasm for American ideals, one learns that it is not by blood descent alone that we transmit those things that make up our stock of ideas and traditions, but that there is such a thing as training the children of Italians and Poles and Lithuanians to a worthy American citizenship. In any case we LEGACY FROM A CENTURY OF PIOxNEERS 131 have these people with us, and we must make the chap. hi. best of the problem. The right kind of education is that which fits boys and girls to live well the life which is their appropriate lot under existing conditions. If you have any doubt about the value of educa- What is lion to any human being of any race whatsoever, ' ' , . „ •^ o "^ education? stop with your definition of the word. Most of the boys and girls of our recent immigrants must be plain, sturdy workers. Their education in the schools ought to keep this fact in mind every day, and ought not to alienate them from the hard tasks of ordinary life. Education to-day is the greatest problem that confronts our Ameri- can statesmanship, whether North or South. The pioneering process was a sort of education in itself. The colleges, it is true, did their work fairly well, but a little experience in the district The pioneer schools, plus a large experience in the school of life, produced most of our efficient men and women. In the new period we must consciously make our school systems minister to the solution of our social and industrial problems. As citizens, we must now, more than ever, face our public responsibilities. As I have said, the pioneering century was that of an overweening 132 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. Socialism versus the just balance Certain principles : — (1) The common carrier private initiative. Shall the pendulum now swing to the opposite extreme, shall we become full- fledged socialists, shall government not only regulate and control, but shall it lay hold upon the instruments of production, and shall we all in our respective callings don the uniform of public service ? I do not see why we need to face just now any radical solution. We must simply find a just and true balance between the authority of the government and the power of the law on the one hand, and the freedom and scope of private enterprise on the other. Admitting certain principles, we must not be afraid of their application under new conditions. The function of the common carrier is a public one, and it is a sound principle that carriers should treat all citizens fairly and impartially. The founders of the Republic gave to the government the power to regulate interstate commerce. In so far as private initiative and great business interests have diverted the railroad system of the country from its true function, the govern- ment must find and enforce a remedy. Another principle is well established, and that is the right of government, whether local or general, to protect the health of the individual or the family LEGACY FROxM A CENTURY OF PIONEERS 133 against dangerous conditions over which the in- chap. hi. dividual has no power to act for self-protection. It is right that your local authorities should pro- (2) Public tect you in your home against the spread of infec- (^^^^for tious disease through the carelessness of your neighbors. And it is also right, if on the national and international scale the food supply is dele- terious to health, that there should be some form of public intervention and protection. With the complexity of our more mature social condi- tions, these new problems present themselves one after another. They must be faced as they come up and must be solved honestly and intelli- gently. Government will inevitably become more costly. Increased because there will be more things in the future ^^^^ "^ govern- than in the past to be done collectively for the ment common benefit. And so, while trying to solve the problem how to secure a more equal distribu- tion of private wealth among citizens, we must also learn better ways to supply local and state and national governments with the revenues that they need for the carrying on of their increasing functions. All these are not things for you to worry about, young men, but they are things for you to take 134 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. III. A time for energy, not for anxiety an intense interest in. Do not shrink in fear from the problems before us. Do not lose faith in our people, or our country, or our institutions. But be glad that you may all bear some part in help- ing to do the work of your generation ; so that, as the pioneers before us saw the wilderness sub- dued and peopled, and gloried in the country's swift material progress, you may live to see an intensive progress where the pioneer saw an ex- tensive one, and may feel that you have helped in your day and generation to reestablish on firm foundations those things that have always be- longed to the best ideals of American life. THE BUSINESS CAREER AND THE COMMUNITY CHAPTER IV THE BUSINESS CAREER AND THE COMMUNITY We have heard much in these recent times The .1 J. J. • -J. 1 !.• 1. i J • business concernmo; the state m its relation to trade, in- ^ community dustry, and the economic concerns of individuals and the and groups. Rapidly changing conditions, how- ^ ever, make it fitting that more should be said from the opposite standpoint ; that is to say, re- garding the responsibilities of the business com- munity as such toward the state in particular and toward the whole social organism in general. Some of the thouohts to which I should like The to give expression might perhaps too readily '' / • * fall into abstract or philosophical terms. They might, on the other hand, not less easily clothe themselves in cant phrases and assume the horta- tory tone. I shall try to avoid dialectic or theory on the one hand, and preaching on the other. I take it that what I am to say is addressed chiefly to young men, and that it ought to serve a prac- tical object. 137 138 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Motive in the business world " Commer- cialism" and its critics In the universities the spirit of idealism domi- nates. The academic point of view is not merely an intellectual one, but it is also ethical and altru- istic. In the business world, on the other hand, we are told that no success is possible except that which is based upon the motive of money getting by any means, however ruthless. We are told that the standards of business life are in conflict irreconcilable with true idealistic aims . It is this situation that I wish to analyze and discuss; for it concerns the student in a very direct way. Our moralists point out the dangerous preva- lence of those low standards of personal life and conduct summed up in the term "commercial- ism." We are warned by some of our foremost teachers and ethical leaders against commercial- ism in politics and commercialism in society. So bitterly reprobated indeed is the influence of commercialism that it might be inferred that commerce itself is at best a necessary evil and a thing to be apologized for. But if we are to accept this point of view without careful discrimi- nation, we may well be alarmed ; for we live in a world given over as never before to the whirl of industry and the rush and excitement of the market-place. THE BUSINESS CAREER 139 This, of all ages, is the age of the business chap. iv. man. The heroic times when warfare was the j^j^^ chief concern of nations, have long since passed business man's age by. So, too, the ages of faith — when theology was the mainspring of action, when whole peoples went on long crusades, and when building cathe- drals and burning heretics were typical of men's efforts and convictions — have fallen far into the historic background. Further, we would seem y/jg in the main to have left behind us that period of historic background which the French Revolution is the most con- spicuous landmark, when the gaining of political liberty for the individual seemed the one supreme good, and the object for which nations and com- munities were ready to sacrifice all else. Through these and other periods characterized Idealism ,,,. .,. I'll 1 am! trade by their own especial aims and ideals we have ,.^. •^ ' conditions come to an age when commercialism is the all- absorbing thing; and we are told by pessimists that these dominant conditions are hopelessly in- compatible with academic idealism or with the maintenance of high ethical standards, whether for the guidance of the individual himself or for the acceptance and control of the community. It is precisely this state of affairs, then, that I desire briefly to consider. And I shall keep in 140 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. mind those bearings of it that might seem to have some relation to the views and aims of stu- dents who are soon to go out from the sheltered life of the university, — under the necessity, whether they shrink from it or not, of becoming part and parcel of this organism of business and trade that has invaded almost every sphere of modern activity. The drift I have only recently heard a great and elo- y. ^ quent teacher of morals, himself an exponent of times ^ ^ the highest and finest culture to which we have attained, speak in terms of the utmost doubt and anxiety regarding the drift of the times. To his mind, the evils and dangers accompanying the stupendous developments of our day are such as to set what he called commercialism in direct antagonism to all that in his mind represented the higher good, which he termed idealism. The impression that he left upon his audience was that the forces of our present-day business life are in- herently opposed to the achievement of the best results in statecraft and in the general life of the Ananxious community. He could propose no remedy for moralist ^^^ ^^jjg j^^ deplored except education, and the saving of the old ideals through the remnant of the faithful who had not bowed the knee in THE BUSINESS CAREER 141 the temple of Mammon. But he pointed out no chap. iv. way by which to protect the tender blossoms of academic idealism, when they meet their inevitable exposure in due time to the blighting and withering blasts of the commercialism that to him seemed so little reconcilable with the good, the true, and the beautiful. To all this the practical man can only reply, The that if, indeed, commercialism itself cannot be V^ac ica man s made to furnish a soil and an atmosphere in reply which idealism can grow, bud, blossom, and bear glorious fruit, — then idealism is hopelessly a lost cause. If it be not possible to promote things ideally good through these very forces of com- mercial and industrial life, then the outlook is a gloomy one for the social moralist and the politi- cal purist. It is not a defensive position that I propose to Not a take. I should not think it needful at this time I'^^^j^^^^. even so much as briefly to reflect any of those honesty timorous and painful arguments pro and co7i that one finds at times running through the columns of the press, particularly of the religious weeklies, on such a question as, for example, whether nowadays a man can at the same time be a true Christian and a successful business man; or 142 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. A higher principle at stake The negative moral code whether the observance of the principles of com- mon honesty is at all compatible with a winning effort to make a decent living. I am well aware that the thoughtful and intel- lectual founder of this lectureship, under which I have been invited to speak, takes no such narrow view either of morality on the one hand or of the function of business life on the other. His definition of morality in business would demand something very different from the mere avoidance of certain obvious transgressions of the accepted rules of conduct, particularly of that command- ment which says, "Thou shalt not steal." Nor, on the other hand, would his definition of the functions of business life be in any manner bounded by the notion that business is a pursuit having for its sole object the getting of the largest possible amount of money. Those people who are content to apply nega- tive moral standards to the carrying on of busi- ness life remind one of the little boy's familiar definition of salt : " Salt," said he, " is what makes potatoes taste bad when you don't put any on." According to that sort of definition, morality in business would be defined as that quality which makes the grocer good and respectable when he THE BUSINESS CAREER 143 resists temptation and does not put sand in the chap. iv. sugar. The smug maxim that honesty is the best pohcy, while doubtless true enough as a verdict of human experience under normal conditions, is not fitted to arouse much enthusiasm as a state- ment of ultimate ethical aims and ideals. If it were admitted that the sole or guiding Trade motive in a business career must needs be the '"^^^^^^ °"" the penal accumulation of money, I should certainly not code think it worth while, in the name of trade morals, to urge young men who arc to enter business life that they play the game according to safe and well-recognized rules. I would not take the trouble to advise them to study the penal code and to familiarize themselves with the legal defi- nitions of grand and petit larceny, of embezzle- ment, or fraud, or arson, in order that they might escape certain hazards that beset a too narrow kind of devotion to business success. It is true, doubtless, that a business career affords Some peculiar opportunities, and is therefore subject to its own characteristic temptations, as respects the purely private and personal standards of conduct. The magnitude of our economic movement, the very splendor of the opportunities that the swift development of a vast young country like 144 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Personal honor and the choice of callings ours affords, must inevitably in some cases upset at once the sober business judgment of men, and in some cases the standard of personal honor and good faith, in the temptation to get rich quickly ; so that wrong is done thereby to a man's associates or to those whose interests are in his hands, while still greater wrong is done to his own character. But, even against this dangerous greed for wealth and the unscrupulousness and ruthlessness which it engenders, it is no part of my present object to warn any young man. I take it that the negative standards of private conduct are usually not much affected by a man's choice of a pursuit in life. If any man's honor could be filched from him by a merely pecuniary re- ward, whether greater or less, I should not think it likely that he would be much safer in the long run if he chose the clerical profession, for example, than if he went into business. Sooner or later his character would disclose itself. It is not, then, of the private and negative standards of conduct that I wish to speak, — except by way of such allusions as these. And even these allusions are only for the sake of mak- ing more distinct the positive and active phases THE BUSINESS CAREER 145 of business ethics that I should like to present in chap. iv. such a way as to fasten them upon the attention. Many young men, to whom these views are Recognized addressed, will doubtless choose, or have already ^"°^''** of the -pro- chosen, what is commonly known as a profes- fessional sional career. The ministry, law, and medicine ^^^^^^ are the oldest and best recognized of the so-called liberal or learned professions. Now what are the distinctive marks of professional life ? Are the men who practice these professions not also business men .'' And if so, how are they differ- ent from those business men who are considered laymen, or non-professional ? Obviously the dis- tinctions that are to be drawn, if any, are in the nature of marked tendencies. We shall not expect to find any hard and fast lines. Many Certain lawyers, some doctors, and a few clergymen are ^^""^'^cies clearly enough business men, in the sense that they attach more importance to the economic bearings of the part they play in the social or- ganism than to the higher ethical or intellectual aspects of their work. I have read and heard manv definitions of what really constitutes a professional man. Whatever else, however, may characterize the nature of his calling, it seems to me plain that no man 146 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Service of the community the test can be thought a true or worthy member of a profession who does not admit, both in theory and in the rules and practices of his hfe, that he has a public function to serve, and that he must frequently be at some discomfort or disadvantage because of the calls of professional duty. The laborer is worthy of his hire; and the profes- sional man is entitled to obtain, if he can, a com- petence for himself and his family from the use- ful and productive service he is rendering to his fellow-men. He may even, through genius or through the great confidence his character and skill inspire, gain considerable wealth in the prac- tice of his profession. But if he is a true pro- fessional man, he does not derive his incentive Pecuniary to effort solely or chiefly from the pecuniary gains that his profession brings him. Nor is the amount of his income regarded among the fellow- members of his profession as the true test or measure of his success. Thus the lawyer, in the theory of his profes- sion, bears an important public relation to the dispensing of justice and to the protection of the innocent and the feeble. He is not a private person, but a part of the system for supporting the reign of law and of right in the community. success only incidental THE BUSINESS CAREER 147 Historically, in this country, the lawyer has also chap. iv. borne a great part in the making and administer- The ing of our institutions of government. If, as some ^"■^y^'''^ public of us think, the ethical code of that profession duty needs to be somewhat revised in view of present- day conditions, and needs also to be more sternly applied to some of the members of the profes- sion, it is true, none the less, that there clearly belongs to this great calling a series of duties of a public nature, some of them imposed by the laws of the land, and others inherent in the very nature of the occupation itself. It is true in an even more marked and unde- niable fashion that the profession of medicine, by virtue of its public and social aspects, is dis- tinguished in a marked way from a calling in life in which a man might feel that what he did was Medicine strictly his own business, subject to nobody's °''^^f scrutiny, or inquiry, or interference. The physi- career cian's public obligation is in part prescribed by the laws of the state which regulate medical practice, and in very large part by the profes- sional codes which have been evolved by the profession itself for its own guidance. It is not the amount of his fee that the overworked doctor is thinking about when he risks his own health in 148 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Profes- sional un- selfishness No real self-denial in the pro- fessional attitude response to night calls, or when he devotes him- self to some especially painful or difficult case. Nor is it a mere consideration of his possible earnings that would deter him from seeking com- fort and safety by taking his family to Europe at a time when an epidemic had broken out in his own neighborhood. I need not allude to the unselfish devotion to the good of the community that in so high a de- gree marks the lives of most of the members of the clerical profession, for this is evident to all observant persons. On the other hand, it cannot be too clearly perceived that there is nothing in the disinter- estedness, and in the obligation to render pub- lic service characterizing professional life that amounts to unnatural self-denial or painful renun- ciation, — unless in some extreme and individual cases. On the contrary, professional life at its best offers a great advantage in so far as it permits a man to think first of the work he is doing and the social service he is rendering, rather than of pecu- niary reward. I have myself on more than one occasion pointed out to young men the greater prospect for happiness in life that comes with the choice of a calling in which the work itself pri- THE BUSINESS CAREER 149 marily focuses the attention, and in which the chap, iv, pecuniary reward comes as an incident rather than as the conscious and direct result of a given effort. The greatest pleasure in work is that which What gives comes from the trained and regulated exercise of ^ ^^^Y^ ^" ^ work? the faculty of imagination. In the conduct of every law case this faculty has abundant oppor- tunity, as it also has in the efforts of the physi- cian to aid nature in the restoration of health and vigor in the individual, or in the sanitary pro- tection of the community. I hope I have made clear this point : that pecuniary success, even in large measure, in the work of a professional man, may be entirely compatible with disinterested devotion to a kind of work that makes for the public weal, while it is also worthy of pursuit for its own sake, and brings content and even happiness in the doing. And it is clear enough, The sense in the case of a professional man, that he is false "{,?'" . '■ obligation to his profession and to his plain obligations if he shows himself to be ruled by the anti-social spirit; that is to say, if he considers himself ab- solved from any duties toward the community about him; thinks that the practice of his pro- fession is a private affair for his own profit and 150 CHAP. IV. Increasing range of profession- alized pursuits The teacher above all THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN advantage, and holds that he has done his whole duty when he has escaped liability for malpractice or disbarment. But the three oldest and best-recognized pro- fessions no longer stand alone, in the estimation of our higher educational authorities and of the intelligent public. In a democracy like ours, with a constantly advancing conception of what is involved in education for citizenship and for participation in every individual function of the social and economic life, the work of the teacher comes to be recognized as professional in the highest sense. Teaching, indeed, seems destined in the near future to become the very foremost of all the professions. This recognition will come when the idea takes full possession of the public mind that the chief task of each generation is to train the next one, and to transmit such stores of knowledge and useful experience as it has received from its predecessors or has evolved for itself. It is obvious enough that the work of the teacher gives room for the play of the loftiest ideals, and that its functions are essentially public and disinterested. But there are other callings, such as those of the architect and engineer, which THE BUSINESS CAREER 151 have also come to be spoken of as professional chap. iv. in their nature. Their kinship to the older pro- The fessions has been more readily recognized by the ^^S^-neer and men of conservative university traditions, because architect much of the preparation for these callings can advantageously be of an academic sort. Archi- tecture in its historical aspects is closely asso- ciated with the study of classical periods; while the profession of the engineer relates itself to the immemorial universitv devotion to mathematics. And in like manner the man who for practical Scientific , , . 1 . • • specialists purposes becomes a chemist or an electrician would be easily admitted by President Eliot, for example, to the favored fellowship of the profes- sional classes for the reason, first, of the disci- plinary and liberalizing nature of the studies that underlie his calling, and in the second place, of the public and social aspects of the functions he fulfills in the pursuit of his vocation. The architect, the civil or mechanical or elec- Callings trical engineer, and the chemist, as well as the , professional teacher, the trained librarian, or public the journahst who carries on his work with due sense of its almost unequaled public duties and responsibilities, — all these are now admitted by dicta of our foremost authorities to a place equal 152 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Ethical codes of these callings Meaning of the term " public spirit " with the law, medicine, and the ministry in the Hst of the professions ; that is to say, in the group of calHngs which, under my definition, are dis- tinguished especially by their public character. And in this group, of course, should be included politicians, legislators, and public administrators in so far as they serve the public interests repu- tably and in a professional spirit. Nor should we forget such special classes of public servants as the officers of the army and navy ; while no- body will deny public character and professional rank to men of letters, artists, musicians, and actors. In all these callings it is demanded not merely that men shall be subject to the private rules of conduct, — that they must not cheat, or lie, or steal, or bear false witness, or be bad neighbors or undesirable citizens, — but in addition and in the most important sense that they shall be sub- ject to positive ethical standards that relate to the welfare of the whole community, and that require of them the exercise of a true public spirit. The man of public spirit is he who is able at a given moment, under certain conditions, to set the public welfare before his own. Further- more, he is a man who is trained and habituated THE BUSLXESS CAREER 153 to that point of view, so that he is not aware of chap. iv. any pangs of martyrdom or even of any exercise of self-denial when he is concerning himself about the public good even to his own momentary inconvenience or disadvantage. Pubhc spirit is that state or habit of mind which leads a man to care greatly for the general welfare. It is this ethical quality that to my mind should be the great aim and object of training. On its best side, what we term the profes- The added sional spirit is, then, very closely related to this ^V^J^ commendable quality in men of a right intellec- sional man tual and moral development that we call pub- lic spirit. The chief difference lies in this: that whereas all professional men may be public- spirited in a general sense, each professional man should, in addition, manifest a special and tech- nical sort of public spirit that pertains to the nature of his calling. The lawyer should have a particularly keen regard for the equitable ad- ministration of justice. The doctor should truly care for the physical wholesomeness and well- "Public being of the community. The clergyman should ^P'*"'' be alive to those things that concern the recti- something tude and purity of life. The journalist should '""''^ be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the 154 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Business also must assume profes- sional standards enlightenment of public opinion; and so on. Without either the general or the technical manifestations of public spirit, in short, the so- called professional man is a reproach to his guild and a failure in his neighborhood. Now, what has all this to do with the moral standards that belong to the business career as distinguished from the professional life .'' My answer must be very clear and very direct if I am to justify so long an analysis of the ethical characteristics of the professions themselves. I have merely used the time-honored method of trying to lead you by way of familiar, admitted points of view to certain points of view that, if not wholly new, are at least less familiar and less widely recognized. The whole thesis that I wish to develop is simply this: that however it may have been in business life in times past and gone, there has been such a tremendous change in the organization and methods of the business world and also in the relative importance of the func- tions of the business man in the community, that the distinctions which have hitherto set apart the professional classes have become obsolete for all practical purposes in many branches and depart- ments of the business world. THE BUSINESS CAREER 155 At least, the work of the responsible leaders chap. iv. is no longer to be regarded as essentially a thing j^^^ of private concern and free from public responsi- obligations bility. If the business world is not character- i,i^siness ized, first, by public spirit and a sense of public leadership duty in general, and second, by the special and technical sense of public obligation that pertains to particular kinds or departments of business activity, then it is falling short of its best oppor- tunities and evading its providential tasks. It is for the modern business world to recognize the conditions that have in the fulness of time given it so great a power and so dominant a position; and it must not shirk the responsibilities that be- long to it as fully and truly as they belong to any of the professions. I hold, then, that the young man of education The right and opportunity who proposes to go into a busi- ness career enters it not merely with a low and un- success worthy standard if his sole motive and object be to acquire wealth, but he also enters it in disregard of the ideas that fill the minds of the best modern business leaders. He shows a pitiable lack of appreciation of the elements that are to constitute real business success in the period within which his own career must fall. 156 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Evolution of modern business How old conditions have been bettered The days when poverty prevailed Let us consider, briefly, the evolution of our present-day economic or business life, and then take note of the necessary place that particular classes of business men must hold in the structure of our society. I, for my part, look upon this last century of economic progress, — under the sway of what is often called " capitalism " as a term of reproach, — as an immeasurable boon to man- kind. It began with the practical utilization of several great inventions, notably that of steam power, which broke up the old household and village industries, gave us the modern factory system, and along with the development of rail- roads gave us the modern industrial city. This new and revolutionizing system of industry and business forced its way into a world of poverty, of disease, of depraved public life, of low morals in the main pervading the community, — a world for the most part of class distinctions in which the lot even of the privileged few was not a very noble or enviable one, while the state of the vast majority was little better than that of serfs. Many writers have sought to throw a charm and a glamour over that old condition of eco- nomic life and society that followed the break-up of feudalism and that preceded the creation of THE BUSINESS CAREER 157 our new political and industrial institutions. But chap. iv. with some mitigations it was for most people a period, as I have said, of squalor, disease, and degradation. The fundamental trouble could be summed up in the one word, 'poverty. The mis- sion of the new industrial system, for the most part unconscious and unrecognized, was to transform the world by abolishing the reign of poverty. Mission of Doubtless it would be desirable if the improve- ^ system ment of conditions, material and spiritual, could make progress with exactly even pace on some perfectly symmetrical plan. But history shows us that the forward social movement has pro- ceeded first in one aspect, then in another, on lines so tangential, often so zigzag, that it is diflB- cult until one gets distance enough for perspective, to see that any true progress has been made at all. Thus, the modern industrial system, which The hard found the conditions of poverty, disease, and ^ ^' .^J hardship prevalent, seemed for quite a long time, in its rude breaking up of old relations and its ruthless adherence to certain newly proclaimed principles, to have brought matters from bad to worse. The squalor and poverty of the village of hand-loom weavers seemed only intensified in the new industrial towns to which the weavers 158 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Early days of the factory system Necessary phases Production first, social progress afterwards flocked from their deserted hamlets. Manu- facturers were doing business under the fiercest and most unregulated competition. Economists were demonstrating their " law of supply and demand " and their " iron law of wages " as capable in themselves of regulating all the con- ditions and relations of business life. Epidemics raged, and depravity prevailed in the new factory centers. But things were not, in reality, going from bad to worse. The beginnings of a better order had to be based upon two things: first and foremost, the sheer creation of capital; second, the disci- pline and training of workers. In the first phases, the new modern business period had to be a period of production. There had got to be de- veloped the instrumentalities for the creation of wealth. Until the industrial system had raised up its class of efficient workers and had created its great mass of capital for productive purposes, there could be no supply of cheap goods; and without an abundant and cheap output there could be no possible diffusion of economic bene- fits; in other words, no marked amelioration of the prevailing poverty. It required some development of wealth to THE BUSINESS CAREER 159 lift our modern peoples out of a poverty too chap. iv. grinding and too debasing for intellectual or q^^^ ^^^ moral progress. It is true that the factory «^^^ ^"^ i^^ new towns, created as they have all been by modern ^nethods industrial conditions during the past century, brought their distinctive evils. There was over- crowding in ill-built tenement houses; and long hours for women and children in the factories. Yet with these and many other disadvantages, the new industrial system made for discipline and for intelligence, and above all for a new kind of solidar- ity and for a sense of brotherhood among workers^ In due time the worst evils began to be mili- Growth of ... PI natural gated, largely through the application ot those remedies very methods of organization which had char- acterized the new kind of industry itself. Thus for men who had applied steam power to manu- facturinor and had begun to build railroads, it vvas soon perceived to be a matter not only of sanitary and social service, but of pecuniary profit, to provide water supplies, public illumina- tion, and other conveniences to the crowded city dwellers. Moreover, with the progress of in- dustry and the development of railroads and steam navigation, production and trade took on an ever-increasing volume. 160 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. There were no rich men — until very recent times Competi- tion and the part it played Then the world began to be less poor. There had been no rich men in the modern sense, and of course no such thing as capitalized corpora- tions for production. The richest man in the United States at the time of his death, a little more than a hundred years ago, was George Washington, with his land and his slaves; and so in England and France there were no rich men in the modern sense, that is to say, no men who controlled great masses of productive capital. The men of wealth were those who held landed estates. The chief business of all countries was agriculture. The capitalistic sys- tem in industry and trade existed in its rudiments and in limited measure ; but all its great achieve- ments were yet to be wrought. All modern business life, then, is the result of this grovsi;h of productive capital, and its appli- cation and constant reapplication to the pro- duction of wealth. It made its way by virtue of an intense individual initiative and a fierce com- petitive struggle. But unlovely as were these things, many of their phases were necessary at a certain stage. It was this fierce competition that compelled capital to pay the lowest possible wages in order to market cheap goods. But THE BUSINESS CAREER 161 the same situation stimulated the use, one after chap. iv. another, of new labor-saving inventions in order to increase the per capita productivity. This pro- As respects cess was attended by the higher efficiency of the ^ worker and an increase in his earning capacity. As his position began to improve, the worker gained some hope and cheer; and he and his fellows began to organize, with the result that both wages and conditions of labor were steadily improved, and the workman began to attain ap- proximately his share of benefits. All this is a familiar story, although the depth A change of its significance is beyond the compass of any ^^^^ ° *' i ^ compre- living human intelligence. It is easy to say in a hension glib sentence that the amount of wealth pro- duced every few years nowadays is equal to all the accumulated wealth of all the centuries down to the early part of the nineteenth ; but the social meaning of so great a change baffles all attempt at full comprehension. The competitive system, which had been es- The com- sential to the launching of this modern period of P«'^f^^« ° period production, and which had given to it so much sclf-Umit- of its irresistible momentum, at length brought ^"3 the economic organization to a point of develop- ment where, in some fields of production, it 162 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. was no longer a benefit. The accumulation of capital had become so large — and with new inventions the possible output had become so abundant — that it was well-nigh impossible to trust to the blind working of demand and supply to regulate things in a beneficial way. It began to dawn on men's minds that a successful period of competitive economic life might lead to a period largely dominated by non-competitive and cooperative principles. The idea The superior possibilities of this newest regime, oj a e er ^^^^^^ ^j^-j^ j^g many difficulties and perplexities, system '^ '' ^ ^ began to captivate the minds, not merely of theo- retical students and onlookers, but, even more, of great masters of industry and productive capital. It began to be seen that in place of blind and fierce competition as a regulator of prices and as an equalizer of supply and demand, there might come to be gradually substituted some more con- sciously scientific methods of business administra- tion and of the adjustment of production to the needs of the market. Furthermore, with the development of business on the great scale, capital had become relatively abundant and cheap, while, on the other hand, labor was becoming relatively expensive and exact- Capital relatively abundant THE BUSINESS CAREER 163 ing. It was evident that the modern system of ch ai>. v. industry had passed through its carher period to one of comparative maturity; and that the problem of wealth production was no longer so exclusively the pressing one, but that the problems of distribution were demanding more attention. How to organize business life on a basis at Business once stable and efficient; how to see that capital P''^^^^"'^ take on a was assured of a normal even though a declining public percentage of dividends, while labor should be ^^^''"'^'^ rewarded according to its capacity and desert, — were problems which took on public rather than private aspects. And when the business Avorld began to face these problems with the conscious- ness that they were to be met, it had virtually passed over from the lower plane of moral and social responsibility to the higher plane, where what the directing minds do or decide is not measured solely by immediate results in money getting, but also by the test of larger social and public utilities. Although these conditions are not novel ones. Railroads and are therefore not difficult to grasp even when "'^ "" instance stated in general terms, it is still true that the concrete often helps to make the point appear 164 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Public and private aspects The fight against public regulation more pertinent. Take, then, the railroad busi- ness as it is now shaping itself, in comparison with its conditions and methods twenty or thirty years ago. The railroads have always existed by virtue of charters which gave them a quasi- public character, and have always been theo- retically subject to certain old principles of English common law under which the public or common carrier, like the innkeeper, performs a function not wholly private in its nature. Never- theless, in its earlier stages the railroad system of this country was in large part constructed and operated by its projectors with no sense whatever of responsibility for their performance of public functions, but with the idea that they were carrying on their own private business, in which interference on the part of the public was to be avoided and resented. They fought the railroad codes of state legislatures in the federal courts; they made oppressive rates to give value to new issues of watered stock ; they discriminated in favor of one city and against another; by a system of secret rebates they made different terms with every shipper, thus enabling a mer- chant or a manufacturer to destroy his com- petitors ; and they pursued in general a career at THE BUSINESS CAREER 165 least anti-social in its spirit and false and short- chap. iv. sighted in its principles. A profound change — would that it were The already complete ! — is coming about in this great ^ ""?^ field of transportation business. It is perceived coming that many of the evils to which I have alluded were incident to the speculative periods of con- struction and development in a new country. The better leaders in the business of railway administration now see clearly that it is the duty of the railroads to work with and for the public and not against it. The railroads are gradually passing out of the hands of the stockjobbers and speculators, into the control of trained adminis- trators. It is to be remembered that in a coun- try like ours, the largest single branch of organ- ized administration is that of the railroads. We Railroads have reached a point where their relations to all '^^^ largest organized the elaborate interests of the community are such interest that their public character becomes more and more pronounced and evident. It was only the other day that a brilliant railway administrator, Mr. Charles S. Mellen, recently president of the Northern Pacific, and now president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, made some statements in an address to the business should rule now " 166 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. nien of Hartford at a Board of Trade meeting. With much else of the same import, he made the following significant remarks : — " Publicity " If corporations are to continue to do their work as they are best fitted to, those qualities in their representatives that have resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the background. "They must come out into the open and see and be seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what they want and no more, and then be prepared to explain satis- factorily what advantage will accrue to the pub- lic if they are given their desires, for they are permitted to exist not that they may make money solely, but that they may effectively serve those from whom they derive their power. Publicity Public should rule now. Publicity, and not secrecy, ownership ^^j^ ^-^^ hereafter, and laws will be construed the alterna- tive by their intent and not killed hj their letter; otherwise public utilities will be owned and operated by the public which created them, even though the service be less eflScient and the result less satisfactory from a financial standpoint." Mr. Mellen's state of mind is that which ought to prevail among all the managers of cor- THE BUSINESS CAREER 167 porations which enjoy pubhc franchises and per- chap. iv. form functions fundamental to the welfare of the community. There will at times be prejudice and passion on the part of the public, and unfair demands will be made. We shall not see the attainment of ideal conditions in the management or the public relations of any great business cor- porations in our day. But the time has come a. system when any intelligent and capable young man who ^^'^^ '^ ^^^ public chooses to enter the service of a railroad or of welfare some other great corporation may rightly feel that he becomes part of a system whose operation is vital to the public welfare. He may further feel that there is room in such a calling for all his intelligence and for the exercise and growth of all the best sentiments of his moral nature. In the vast mechanism of modern business the The constructive imagination may find its full plav; ^ , . ^ •' 1 - standards and the desire to be of service to one's fellow- of railway men in a spirit reasonably disinterested may find ^ ^. r •/ -J tration opportunity to satisfy itself every day. Under these circumstances there is no reason why rail- way administration should not take on the same ethical standards as belong rightly to govern- mental administration, to educational adminis- tration, or to the best professional life. 168 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. of finance Social ethics of hanking The same thing is clearly true when one con- In the field aiders nowadays the delicate and important func- tions of the world of banking and finance. The old-fashioned money changer and the usurer of earlier periods were regarded as the very antith- eses of men engaged in honorable mercantile life, and especially of those who possess a social spirit and the desire to be useful members of the community. But in these days the banks are not merely private money-making institutions, but have public functions that admittedly affect the whole social organism, from the government itself down to the humblest laborer. They must con- cern themselves about the soundness and the suffi- ciency of the monetary circulation; they must protect the credit and foster the welfare of hon- est merchants and manufacturers; they must cooperate in critical times to help one another, and thus to sustain the public and private credit and avert commercial disaster; they must at all hazards protect the savings of the poor. Thus the banks, like the railroads and many other corporate enterprises, are quasi-public affairs, in the conduct of which the public obligation grows ever clearer and stronger. We are not at heart — in this splendid coun- THE BUSINESS CAREER 169 try of ours — engaged in a mad struggle and race chap. iv. for wealth. We are engaged rather in the great- q^^. ^^^ , est effort ever made in the world for the upbuild- ^^^ /«'" p , . , ...... rrt 1 1 • civilization Hig ot a higher civilization. lo avow that this civilization must rest upon a physical and material basis — that is to say, upon a high development of our productive capacity and upon a constant improvement in our processes of distribution and exchange — is not, on the other hand, to confess that our civilization is materialistic in its nature or in its aims. I was very glad, not long ago, "Convert to read the wholesome and understanding words "'^", » to the of a distinguished clergyman. He declared that service of this nation was founded on an ideal, and that the * ^" ^ most powerful influences in its life to-day are working toward noble ideals. The moral and spiritual tone of the country, he asserted, is higher than ever, in spite of the accidents of wealth and poverty. He declared that the great host of men and women who cherish our ideals will continue to stamp idealism upon the minds and hearts of our youth, and that they in turn "will convert wealth to the service of ideals." Such views are not merely the expressions of a comfortable optimist. They are true to the facts of our current progress. There are vast 170 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Fertilizers and idealism Cotton mills as evangels Poverty as the common foe portions of this country to-day in which the en- terprising business man who can succeed in selHng to the farmers an honest and effective commercial fertiUzer is the best possible mis- sionary of idealism, — is, in fact, a veritable angel for the spread of sweetness and light. There are regions where the capitalist or the company that will build a cotton mill or some other kind of factory is rescuing whole communities from degradation. It is poverty that has kept the South so backward, and it is poverty alone that explains the illiteracy and the lawlessness not merely of the Kentucky mountains, but of great areas in other states as well. Good schools can- not be supported in regions like those, for the palpable reason that the taxable wealth of an entire school district cannot yield enough to pay the salary of a teacher. But when modern business invades those uplands, utilizes the water power now wasted, opens the mines, builds cot- ton factories or foundries, the situation changes almost as if by magic. There will, indeed, ensue a brief period of disturbance due to changed social condition, — to women and children in factories, and other things of incidental or serious disadvantage. But, THE BUSINESS CAREER 171 as against a survival of the sort of life that was chap. iv. widely prevalent a century or two ago, all the Magical phenomena of our modern industrial life make ^^(^"'^M"^' ' ations their appearance, in full development. The one- room cabin gives place to the little house of several rooms. There is rapid diffusion of those minor comforts and agencies which make for self-respect and personal and family advance- ment. The advent of capital, that is to say, of taxable property, is speedily followed by the good schoolhouse and the good teacher. It is instructive to note the transformation that is thus taking place in one county after another of the Carolinas, or Georgia, or others of the Southern states, because the conditions make it Best seen possible to witness within a single decade the ^"' ^ ^^^ triumph of those business forces which, while they have even more truly and completely trans- formed the prosperous parts of America and Europe, have operated more gradually through longer periods, and therefore in a less easily perceived and dramatic fashion. Our modern ideals have required, not the refinement and the culture of the select few, but the uplifting and progress of the multitude. This could only be possible through a general devel- 172 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Cost of uplifting the many The capitalist and the community he serves opment of wealth, so vast in comparison with what had previously existed as to constitute the most highly revolutionary fact in the history of human civilization and progress. The man, therefore, who has a clear perception of those laws of mind and of society under which mod- ern economic forces have been set at work, can- not for a moment think that the end and outcome of this modern business system is a new kind of human bondage, "the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer"; or that it can mean any such thing as the elevation of property at the expense of manhood. Even if it were a part of my subject to dis- cuss the growth of vast individual fortunes as an incident of this modern development of wealth, which it is not, there would be no time for more than a passing allusion. And in making such an allusion, I might be content to call attention to my earlier dictum, that progress is not upon direct lines, but tangential or zigzag. When the factory appears on the Piedmont slopes of the Appalachian country, it may indeed make a fortune for the missionary of civilization who planted it there. But meanwhile it has given the whole neighborhood its first chance to relate THE BUSINESS CAREER 173 itself to the civilized world. I am content for chap. iv. the present to leave that neighborhood in posses- sion of its opportunities, serenely confident that it will in due time work out its own completer destinv. When the capitalist has retired from the scene of his exploitation, will the day arrive when the regenerated neighborhood will own that factory, and others, too, for itself? Very likely. In any case, the neighborhood has been emancipated from its worst disadvantages. In short, I have little doubt but that the further A wider progress of our civilization will give effect to cer- tain economic laws and tendencies, and to certain evitable social rules and principles, that will make for a higher measure of equality in the distribution of realized wealth. Meanwhile, wherever a practical step can be taken to remedy an evil, let us do what we can to promote that step. Let us recog- nize the already great possibilities for useful par- ticipation in the social and public life that belong to an honorable business career. From the standpoint of the intellectual interest of the young man going into business, let it be borne in mind that there are scientific principles underlying every branch of trade or commerce 174 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. The play of fancy in humdrum pursuits Intelli- gence and the genuine product or industry, and that there is almost, if not quite, as much room for the dehghtful play of the faculty of imagination in the successful conduct of a soap business as in writing poetry or in making statuary groups for world's fairs. The cultivation of public spirit in the broad sense, and the determination to be an all-round good and efficient citizen and member of the commu- nity, will often help a man amazingly to discern the opportunities for usefulness that lie in the direct line of his business work. The more thoroughly he studies underlying principles — whether of a technical sort as related to his own trade, or of a general sort having to do with the organization and general methods of commerce — the less likely he will be to take narrow and anti- social views of business life- The high develop- ment of his intelligence in relation to his own work will show him the value in his business — as in all else in life — of the standard thing, the genuine thing, the thing that will bear the test as contrasted with the shoddy, or the inferior, or the spurious. Our technological schools, our colleges of me- chanic arts, our institutes of agriculture and their related experiment stations, — these are all teach- THE BUSINESS CAREER 175 ing us many valuable object-lessons regarding chap. iv. the way in which the wealth of the individual Scientific and that of the community can both, at the same ^ . , •^ material time, be advanced by scientific methods. Thus progress it is coming about that business life is ever more ready to welcome the most highly trained kinds of intelligence, inasmuch as it is perceived that specialized knowledge is henceforth to be the most valuable commodity that a man can possess. I have already said that the delicate problems of distribution must be faced ever more frankly and liberally by the modern business world. Thus, those who control capital, or administer capitalized enterprises, cannot afford any longer to be without a knowledge of the history and significance of the labor movement. I am speak- ing now from the standpoint of the business man. There is much to be said, doubtless, in respect ^q^qj-'s to the shortcomings and the sometimes fatuous history and 1 ••11 1 1 <• 1 1 1 • destiny and even suicidal methods ot the labor organiza- tions. But for the modern business man who cares to take his place influentially in commerce, in social life, and as a man among men in his city or his commonwealth, it is no longer justifi- able to be unfamiliar with the labor question in its economics and its history. 176 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN The higher schools can train in principles CHAP. IV. Herein lies one great service that the univer- sity can perform (and our best colleges and uni- versities are to-day performing it with marked intelligence and ability), the service, namely, of providing very liberal courses for young men who expect to go into business, in the general science of economics, in the history of modern economic progress, in the development of the wage system, in the history and methods of organized labor, and in very much else that helps to place the life of a practical man of business affairs upon a broad and liberal basis. In the early days of our history it was the especial function of the college to train young men for the ministry. In a somewhat later period it was notably true of institutions like Yale and Princeton that their training seemed to fit many men for the law and for statecraft. We had, you see, passed from that theocratic phase of colonial New England life to the political constructive period of our young republic. rpfig But we have been passing on until we have university Q^Q^ged in a great and transcendent period of and , modern commercial expansion and scientific discovery ^^•^^ and application. It is a hopeful sign, therefore, that our universities are finding out and admitting THE BUSINESS CAREER 177 the demand that present-day conditions impose, chap. iv. and are training many men in the pursuit of modern science, while they are training many others in the understanding of the appHcation of social and economic principles to modern life. All this they are doing and can well do without iornorinir the value of the older forms of scholar- ship and culture. But I have a few remarks to make also upon the ethical relations of the business world of to- day toward the political world; that is to say, toward organized government, whether in its sovereign or in its subordinate forms. We can- not take too high a ground in proclaiming the value, for the present, at least, of the political organization of society. I should like to dwell The State upon this point, but I must merely state it. If '^"^ / * ^"^ the State, — i.e. the political form of social or- ganization — is valuable, it stands to reason that it must be respected and maintained at its best. It '\s also obvious that it will have a higher or a lower character and efficiency, according to the attitude toward it taken by one or another of the dominant factors that make up the complex body politic. Thus, for example, it is the feeling of men in N 178 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Need of loyalty to govern- ment Business forces must be patriotic Public interests too often in weak hands control of the political organization in Franct; to-day that the Church, as a great factor in th i social structure of the nation, is essentially hostih to the spirit and purposes of a liberal republic. Hence a great disturbance of various relation- ships. I do not cite that instance to express even the shade of an opinion. My point is that if the political organization of society is desirable and to be maintained, it is a fortunate thing when one jBnds the dominant forces of society render- ing loyal and faithful support to the laws and in- stitutions of government and recognizing without reserve the sovereignty of the State. Yet in our own country there is a widespread feeling that many of the most potent forces and agencies in our business life are not wholly patriotic, in that they are not willing in practice to recognize the necessity of the domination of government and of law. I do not believe that this is permanently and generally true. It would constitute a great danger if it were a fixed or a growing tendency. As matters stand, however, every one must admit that there is an element of danger that lies in the very fact that as a nation we are in a con- dition of peace, content, and prosperity, and do not find our political institutions irksome. The THE BUSINESS CAREER 179 danger consists in this: that under such circum- chap. iv. stances the rewards of business and professional hfe are for the most part so much more certain and satisfactory than those which come from the jM'ecarious pursuit of poUtics, that pubhc interests have a tendency to suffer from being in weak hands, while private interests have a tendency to assert themselves unduly, from being in the hands of men of superior force. Thus it happens that State's it is often difficult for the State to maintain that "'^"'"'■2/ must be dignity, that mastery, that high position, as the maintained impartial arbiter and dispenser of justice, which it is now even more necessary than ever that it should maintain, in order that the whole social organization should keep a true harmony and a safe balance. At present, the State is largely concerned it with the maintenance of conditions under which ^^^'«''['««^s conditions the economic and business life may operate of pros- equally and prosperously. The State in one P^"^y sense is the master of the people. In another sense it is merely their creature and their agent for such purposes as they choose to assign it. Is the State, then, to absorb the industrial func- tions, and are we to develop into a socialistic commonwealth ? Or, shall the political democ- 180 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. Business interests need strong govern- ment Vital to economic progress racy and the cooperative organization of business life go on side by side, related at many points, but in the main distinct from each other ? What- ever the relation of the State to industry may be destined to become in the distant future, we may be sure that there will be no rash upheavals, no harmful socialistic experiments, if the potent business world clearly sees how necessary to its own salvation it is that the State shall be main- tained upon a high plane of dignity and honor, and that the official dispensation of justice, as well as the official administration of the laws, shall be prompt, just, and impartial. There is no higher duty, therefore, incumbent upon the business man of to-day than to bear his part in promoting and maintaining the purity of political life. The modern business man should regard good government as one of the vital conditions of the best economic progress. Yet scores of instances are at hand that show to what a painful extent certain business interests again and again, for purposes of immediate ad- vantage, — to secure a franchise, to escape a tax, or to procure some improper favor or advantage at the hands of those in political authority, — have employed corrupt methods and thus stained THE BUSINESS CAREER 181 the fair escutcheon of American business honor, chap. iv. while breaking down the one most indispensable condition of general business progress ; namely, honest and efficient free government. I will not dwell upon these things. It is Better enough to say that they are things the modern b J J o govern- business man must have upon his conscience, ment For, if such offenses come by way of the business world, their remedies must also come, and in- deed can only come, by that same path. In our municipal life, for example, it is the aroused interest and zeal of the best business community for better government and better conditions that can alone produce important results. Happily, all over the country we find chambers of com- merce, boards of trade, merchants' associations, The civic and other bodies of men of practical business " ^ ^•' ^ business affairs, taking their stand for the transaction of men public business upon high standards of character and efficiency. I have no doubt or fears as to what the result will be. All of our large cities are themselves purely the creations of modern in- dustrial, commercial, and transportation condi- tions. And I hold that these very forces of in- dustrial and commercial life that have created the problems by bringing together great masses of 182 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. What can be done for the towns A field especially for men of affairs people in crowded communities, must and can in turn solve the problems by the application to municipal government of the scientific and in- telligent principles which belong to the best phases of business life. All of this relates to my subject; but I must pass it by with a mere statement or two. It be- longs to the developed constructive imagination and to the trained ethical sense of the modern business man to perfect the transit systems, to improve the housing conditions, to assure cheap sanitary w^ater supplies, cheap illumination, and, above all, due provision for universal education, parks, museums, and opportunities for recrea- tion, — in short, all possible improvements of en- vironment that can make life in our cities not merely endurable but beneficial for the people. Here, then, is furnished a great field for the definite and conscious aspirations of the success- ful man of business. Here lies a great, many- sided work for social and moral as well as physical and material progress which the busi- ness man, in the quality of good citizen and man of public spirit, is fitted better than any one else to accomplish. The intelligent young man who holds before THE BUSINESS CAREER 183 himself ideals of usefulness that extend to such chap. iv. projects as these, may be sure that the modern The great conditions of life will bring him great opportuni- opportuni- ties before ties, and he may feel that he is thus lifting his young men business career up to the plane of idealism that has, in the past, been reserved for a few exclu- sive professions. Partly through his own endeav- ors — largely through association in commercial or other organizations with his neighbors — he may help to accomplish for the benefit of all his fellow-men of a great community one step after another in the direction of public works that will meet the needs of a high civilization. Some of the most useful men, as well as the The high ti/uc of most unselfish and devoted, with whom I come j^^y^^^i^an in contact are successful business men of large business affairs. They are modest and unassuming; simple and direct in their methods; wide as the world in their sympathies; lofty as the stars in their aspirations for human progress; saga- cious beyond other classes of men, and respected to the point of veneration by those who know them well, because they are men of deeds rather than of words, who make good their professions from day to day. Business has not so narrowed them, nor has devotion to philanthropic ends or public man 184 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. IV. The ethics of action reforms so distorted their mental visions, that they are not able to enjoy what is good in life, whether books, music, pictures, the companion- ship of friends, or the restful contact with nature in field and forest. The lives of such men are dominated by certain fixed ethical standards. Given such moral landmarks, the remarkable conditions and unequaled opportunities of modern business life will promote the frequent development of men of this kind, with their breadth of view and strength of mind and character. It is the positive and aggressive attitude toward life, the ethics of ac- tion, rather than the ethics of negation, that must control the modern business world, and that may make our modern business man the most potent factor for good in this, his own, industrial period. JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS CHAPTER V JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS In 1904 there was held at St. Louis a great Some exposition whose obiect it was to exempHfy the ^^^^^"^"^ anniversa- amazing progress that Mr. Jefferson foresaw as ries a result of his acquisition of the trans-Mississippi country. In the following year there was a creditable exposition in Oregon to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Jefferson's ex- pedition under command of Lewis and Clark. In 1907 comes the celebration of the noteworthy completion of three hundred years of English- speaking men in the commonwealth of Virginia. In these commemorations of the opening Jefferson decade of our twentieth century, Mr. Jefferson "^ ,.^ •' leading stands forth as in many respects the most con- figure spicuous figure. A multiplicity of speeches, brochures, biographical studies, and historical re- views of the Jeffersonian period has within recent 187 188 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. The vitality of his doc- trines His long career Excep- tional training for Presi- dency years attested the marked revival of interest in the career of this eminent Virginian. I could not hope to add anything, not indeed so much as a single suggestion, concerning Mr. Jefferson's personality or public career to that which has become the common stock of knowledge in Virginia, where the great sons of the common- wealth are kept in memory by accomplished speakers and writers. All that I shall venture to do is to attempt some reflections upon what I may call the carrying power and the vitality of Mr. Jefferson's political opinions and doctrines. It is not necessary to agree with every opinion Mr. Jefferson ever expressed, or to applaud every attitude or act of his public career, in order to be counted among those who admire him sincerely and profoundly, and who find his writings a marvelous repository of political wisdom and knowledge. His was a very long period of active statesmanship and public influence. That period reached its zenith in the first term of his incum- bency of the office of President, about a hundred years ago. He entered the Presidency with a thoroughness of training and a ripeness of ex- perience beyond that of any other man who has ever attained this high office. As might have JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 189 been expected, his first inaugural address was chap. v. one of great dignity and elevation of sentiment, — a stately utterance, a model and a classic in form and in breadth and serenity of view. He had been called to guide the affairs of what he described as " a rising nation, spread over a wide A forecast and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the '"^^n- ^ can destt- rich productions of their industry, engaged in nies commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye." It was, indeed, a wide and fruitful land. But Expansion Mr. Jefferson himself was ordained by Providence ^" Jeffer- son's time to make it vastly wider, and in many ways to enhance its fruitfulness. Our population at that time was only a little more than five millions, and our domain was bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, and by the European colonies of Florida and Louisiana on the south. He lived Growth to see our population grow to about twelve mil- ^^^^ ^^ , 'promoted lions, with the Florida Purchase consummated and with every reason to believe that in due time the joint occupation of the Oregon country by the United States and England would terminate in our acknowledged control of the region trav- ersed by Lewis and Clark all the way to the 190 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. His views and his deeds He looked forward His use of political history Our present situation Pacific Ocean. But, as I have said, it is Mr. Jefferson's views rather than his achievements that belong to my theme. Though of a philosophical and reflective habit, and himself a diligent student of the past ex- perience of men grouped in political communities, Mr. Jefferson's own eyes were usually turned forward rather than backward. His was an eminently practical mind ; and he used history chiefly as the touchstone by which to test current opinions and tendencies for the sake of an ever- better future. All political principles and theories, all the history of the past, all the implements and methods of statecraft, were studied by Mr. Jefferson with the one concrete object of enabling him and his colleagues (to quote from that same inaugural address), "to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the con- flicting elements of a troubled world." Now, just as Mr. Jefferson himself examined the doctrines of the English and French phi- losophers, humanitarians, and economists, with a view to the establishment of his own opinions, so I find myself at present disposed to consider not so much the problems that lay before our countrymen a hundred years ago as our own JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 191 problems of to-day, except as those of the former chap. v. period may have some bearing upon the issues that confront us now as we have fairly crossed the threshold of a new century and are casting about us for wise courses, still finding ourselves Do the "amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled ^/J^^^^- ° man prin- world." And I have asked myself. What valid, ciples still trustworthy, and still enduring basis have the "^^ ^ principles of Mr. Jefferson as applied to our own present and immediate future ? Have we outlived his generalizations ? Was The he, to a large extent, superficial and specious? ^"^^J^"' Was he a doctrinaire in a sense that should now cause us to distrust his practical conclusions ? Was he sentimental and visionary.^ Was he hasty in pronouncing radical and sweeping ver- dicts ? Did he allow his love of glittering ex- pressions and abstract dicta to impair his judg- ment ? Did he reason to permanent conclusions from isolated instances or merely transient phe- nomena, and thus violate scientific methods ? Political philosophers come and go. Half The pass- a dozen new ones, who were the vogue ten or ]y, ^•\ ^^" . ° htical phi- twenty, or even five, years ago, are now confessedly losophers obsolete. They do not stand the test of time. Yet there must be some principles of govern- 192 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Outward changes since Jefferson What landmarks can we keep? ment, of national policy, of social and political ethics, approaching nearly enough to essential truth and justice to meet the fluctuations of at least one century, and to hold some rightful claim to popular confidence and allegiance. Men must hold by some opinions; what, then, shall they be? Many things in outward circumstances have changed more profoundly in the past one hundred years than in a thousand years preceding. The production of wealth, for example, has been greater by far since the death of Mr. Jefferson than were the total accumulations of the world through all the ages down to that date. Moreover, there has been most marvelous developmen of population; and every one feels that we are entering upon new and unknown periods of transition at an ever- accelerating pace. What landmarks can we keep in view, or by what charts and compasses shall we be guided as we embark on momentous new voyages ? In these inquiries, I have in mind, not so much the world at large as the people of the United States; and I have particularly in mind two or three lines of questioning. One of these has to do with our national position and policy, as respects other nations and the world JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 193 at large. Another, with some of our internal chap. v. problems of government and poHtics, and per- haps a third, with the economic and social status Public and of the individual citizen — the outlook, so to P'"^y° ^ outlooks speak, for the average man under fast-changing methods of production and distribution. And a fourth might have to do with the relation of the State itself to industry and economic society. Further, in alluding to some of these present- Jefferson day problems, I would like to make test, inci- °* f" . ■^ ' enduring dentally, at least, of the doctrines and opinions prophet of Thomas Jefferson, to see if they hold good, and if Jefferson is still entitled to be looked upon as a prophet and a guide. I shall not try to use any rhetorical art whatsoever to heighten the effect of my own conclusions as respects the essential qualities of the body of political doctrine taught by Mr. Jefferson; and I shall make haste, there- fore, to anticipate some more detailed avowals by declaring in advance, and in general terms, my strong belief in Mr. Jefferson as an enduring prophet. I find myself wondering again and again how An eman- that fine and lucid intelligence of his could, by the "^'^ 5 ^ -' mind time he was thirty years old, in provincial Virginia, a hundred and thirty years ago, have become 194 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Freshness and modernity Across the middle period Some compari- sons More recent than Webster or Calhoun SO perfectly emancipated. When to-day I re- read his utterances, the one thing that impresses me above all else is the freshness, the modernity, of his way of looking at everything. The open- ness and the freedom of his mental processes seem to bring him across the chasm of the middle of the nineteenth century to a place with thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Huxley at their best period. Since Jefferson's time, we have had few public men of large vision. At least these later statesmen, if endowed by nature with capacity to formulate principles, have not enjoyed as favorable opportunities. They have been in- volved in controversies over immediate issues, and have been in the position of men in the thick of the woods, hindered by the trees from seeing the forest. Compared with Jefferson, in practical statesmanship, John Bright seems a limited though a congenial spirit; and Mr. Gladstone, a similarly versatile and capacious mind but with prejudices of class and creed that yielded only painfully and slowly through a half century of experience. Our own Websters and Calhouns and Clays seem merely a part of a past epoch. Jefferson's thinking seems to reach to the things of to-day, while those men of the forties and fifties JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 195 appear almost as remote as the figures of Plutarch's chap. v. time. Lincoln's thought had, doubtless, much Lincoln of the quality that survives, and, among our later °"^ Seward men, I think you will some day give a larger place to Seward than either North or South has yet accorded him. But for flexibility of mind, and for perennial freshness of doctrine and statement, it seems to me JeflFerson must still bear the palm. It must be remembered that the launching of a new and powerful nation has not been a fre- quent occurrence in the history of the world. The erection of a sovereign State to take its place The mak- as a member of the family of nations has almost ^"'9 of a nation mvanably been a matter of sheer force, of bloody violence, of titanic struggle, rather than one of a calm and philosophic shaping of political in- stitutions. Thus, never elsewhere has either the forming of a new State or the political re- making of an old one been accompanied by any such magnificent setting forth of the practical Doctrine and theoretical principles of government, of '"''"'■ formative politics, of jurisprudence, of international law, ■period and of foreign and domestic statesmanship, as that which attended the formative period in the United States. During this memorable period, George Wash- 196 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Washing- ton and Jefferson Hamilton and others Conditions that pro- duced great men ington held the first place as a man of action and of noble and sagacious leadership, while in all deference it may be said that he held second place as a man of reflection and as the exponent of distinctively American opinion. His colleague and friend, Thomas Jefferson, held a place second to Washington only as a leader in actual affairs, and a place unquestionably the very first as a formulator of opinion and an exponent of our American system of popular democratic govern- ment. And all this I say, without abatement of one particle of the admiration I entertain for the powerful statesmanship of Alexander Hamilton, for the learning and persuasive logic of James Madison, for the wisdom and greatness of John Jay, and for the constructive intellect and price- less services of John Marshall. How many others there were in that noble company of Ameri- cans, many of them young men, who were brought to great elevation of view, as evinced in their work in the Continental Congress, then later in the discussions that controlled the framing and adoption of the Constitution, and in the executive, legislative, and judicial acts and decisions, and the diplomacy, of the period that ended, let us say, with the death of Thomas Jefferson and John JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 197 Adams, who passed away on the same Fourth of chap. v. July, in the year 1826. Of some of these men — as of Washington, The force and perhaps Hamilton — it must be said that ^•' ^'^^^"^"' * ^ stances they were "born great." Most of them had "greatness thrust upon them" by the sheer force of circumstances that developed their best capaci- ties. These men were compelled to study the position of their young republic, both as regards its domestic structure, and also as related to the world at large, in a period when the struggles and convulsions of Europe were stirring men's minds and causing them to see things in new lights, with renunciation of old prejudices. Thus they were lifted above the commonplace. It was im- possible to go on in ruts. JeflFerson and Benja- Jefferson min Franklin must, I think, in any case, have ^ Franklin achieved greatness without the stimulus of ex- ceptional circumstances, through the inherent power of minds of rare energy and of still more rare versatility — to which, in both cases, was added the gift of abstract and philosophical rea- soning, and, finally, a touch of that something we call genius and do not try to explain. In the very nature of things a new English- speaking commonwealth, emerging in that par- 198 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. The earlier time and its doc- trines This later time in compari- son Need of some guid- ing prin- ciples ticular period, must have formulated for itself some doctrines and general opinions. The cir- cumstances were of a well-balanced sort as re- spects what one may call the relative exigencies of domestic and foreign problems. Thus our statesmen were able to work out schemes, both of doctrine and of practical policy, that in spite of vicissitudes and profound changes of the nine- teenth century have had momentum enough to project themselves, without much serious deflec- tion, across the line of a new century. And now, if I mistake not, the country has reached a junc- ture where once more the relative exigencies of domestic and external problems not only permit us but also compel us to try again to take our bearings as respects underlying principles and national attitudes and policies. To the wholesome and normal mind some principles and creeds are necessary — if for no other reason than to serve as a working hypothesis. And it is eminently true in the conduct of public affairs, that for wise results there must be some admitted principles of government and some fixed landmarks of policy. Otherwise, disastrous mistakes will be made and recognized only too late. The word policy, as applied to a nation's JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 199 affairs, though broad enough to include all gen- chap. v. eral and fixed trends of action, may well be re- PoUcy and stricted to external relationships. In my use of its mean- it I have in mind more particularly the intentions and aspirations, as well as the actual conduct, of a nation, in its dealings with other countries and its plans as to the world at large. For some countries the problems of foreign Foreign policy are so delicate and difficult that they can- . . ^ -> '' ships not very well be discussed openly. Thus at times British, German, and Russian policy must be learned by inference rather than by any frank or responsible avowal. The United States in this respect has occupied a favorable and fortu- nate position, and we have usually found it to be both safe and wise to discuss freely and openly the principles having to do with our relations toward other countries. During the past century The Mon- American policy has had its pivot in what we com- , . monly call the " Monroe Doctrine," and what the European nations refer to as "Monroeism." Those who find it sufficient, in discussing the Monroe Doctrine, to recall the exact wording of a particular utterance formulated by John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State in President Monroe's second administration, fail to appreciate the under- 200 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. lying fact. This precise utterance did not make The under- ^"^ American policy, but was simply a timely lying fact and valuable expression of a policy that had been shaping itself for a quarter of a century previ- ous, that had found a partial — and, in so far, authoritative — expression in Washington's fare- well address. The real If I have studied aright the history of American ^1^ °^ 0/ policy, it was Thomas Jefferson, as Washington's trine first Secretary of State, and as our foremost ex- ponent of national doctrine and principle, who — incomparably more than any one else — thought out, developed, and expressed the ideas that we have in mind when we mention the Monroe Doctrine. It was he whose teachings made this doctrine the one great fixed landmark to guide us in our relations with the world at large. A masterly As the Louisiana Purchase was the foremost achieve- single act of domestic statesmanship in our ment national history during the last century, so the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine was the one great feature of our statesmanship as it dealt with external affairs. It was an achievement of such overshadowing greatness that in com- parison with it everything else falls into the background. JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 201 What, in its fundamental aspect, is the Monroe chap. v. Doctrine ? Jefferson saw the group of European oid-world nations engaged in almost incessant warfare conditions with one another, changing boundaries through conquest, making and breaking alliances, strug- gling painfully for release from the shackles of mediaeval systems, in response to new ideas of popular progress; and through it all he foresaw with wonderful clearness the gradual evolution of a better order of things and the ultimate es- tablishment of a peaceable, modern concert of European nations, working its way by hard ex- perience out of the old military balance of power. He anticipated the breaking up of the Turkish What Empire and the extension of the European system •'^i'^'"^^^ across the Mediterranean into Africa and beyond the Bosphorus and the Caucasus into Western Asia. He had no misgivings at all about the future outworking of the spirit of human liberty and of democratic and industrial progress in those blood-stained regions of the Old World. But, meanwhile, he conceived of a new Amer- ^ „gy, ican world based on principles of equality and American world freedom, and beginning its political career at a point of human emancipation which it might well take Europe two centuries to attain. And 202 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. A states- man's con- ception Ultimate dominance of the United States he believed that this new and beneficent system in the Western Hemisphere should be allowed to work out its destiny without alliances or en- tanglements with the European nations, both for the happiness of our own people and also for the subsequent benefit of the rest of mankind. I do not say that Jefl^erson was alone in entertaining this great conception, yet I have not the slightest doubt that he held it, in all its wide and varied aspects, with far more clearness of vision than any other man — just as I know that he ex- pressed it better than anybody else either before his day or since, down to our own time. While we were still bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, and inclosed on three sides by the territorial possessions of European powers, — with all of Central and South America, and every dot of the West Indies held as crown colonies by European sovereigns, — JeflFerson saw more vividly, and announced with more boldness and definiteness than any public man at Washington has ventured to assert down to our own day, the necessary ultimate dominance of the United States, and the high policy that must be followed in pursuance of a faith in our manifest destiny. He believed that the whole Western Hemisphere must JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 203 be brought out from under European control, chap. v. and that the American RepubHc must assume the leadership in the development of democratic institutions throughout the New World. In 1805 he declared : " I know that the ac- The quisition of Louisiana has been disapproved by ^oxnsiana Purchase some, from a candid apprehension that the en- largement of our territory would endanger its Union. But who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions ; and, in any view, is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should "Settled be settled by our own brethren and children than ^y <'"'" ^^^ by strangers of another family? With which shall we be most likely to live in harmony and friendly intercourse ? " So strongly did he feel the necessity of a period Growth of of isolation in the working out of our own experi- ""^^"*^''*- '■can nation- ment, that he went so far at times as to say frankly ality that he would like to see us as wholly cut off from European influence as China itself then was. This, of course, was for the sake of that distinc- tive growth of an American nationality, and an American system, for which he believed a period of seclusion and of obscurity might be valuable. 204 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. The conti- nental view As to Spanish America Expansion foreseen He never, of course, forgot the ultimate reaction of our example upon the character of the European countries. Thus, a little more than a hundred years ago, he wrote to an American statesman : "A just and solid republican government main- tained here will be a standing monument and ex- ample for the aim and imitation of the people of other countries." In another letter, fifteen years earlier, a year before the framing of the Consti- tution, Mr. Jefferson had shown the breadth of his view by writing: "Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled." He was fearful at that time lest the Spaniards should be too weak to hold South America. His view on that subject is too interesting to be al- lowed to be forgotten. He did not believe that the Spanish colonies were capable of republican self-government, and he thought it best that they should remain quietly under the domination of Spain until our own population should have been sufficiently advanced to gain the territory from the Spaniards " piece by piece," to quote his own phrase. Thus, even as early as 1786, Jefferson foresaw the inevitability of our expansion, until we had acquired the Floridas, the Louisiana JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 205 country, Texas, and the great Spanish domain chap. v. of California and Northern Mexico. With some prescience, seemingly, of the in- The ex- felicitv of our having to wrest such territory away ^^^^ •' ° ./ ./ process from a Spanish-speaking American republic, such as Mexico became, he had hoped that Spain would hold on until we could emancipate the territory piece by piece and develop it into happy, self-governing states in our own confederation. In these days of the railroad, the telegraph, the fast steamship, and the daily newspaper, large con- federacies seem easily enough possible. But we must not underestimate the boldness of Thomas Jefferson in declaring, a hundred and twenty years ago, that it would be feasible not only to bring the whole of North America under our one federal government, but even possible to bring in South America also. In later years, when fj^g i^i^j. problems of practical statesmanship, rather than demands the bold survey of future destiny more habitually occupied his mind, he contented himself with strong declarations in favor of the acquisition of Cuba by the United States, and of the annexation of Canada at the first convenient opportunity. Undoubtedly it was his opinion — indeed, he expressed it often in private letters — that the 206 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Future of Canada America for peace, not war War of 1812 would result in our taking and keep- ing Canada as compensation for our many and substantial grievances against England. This was not due to any unfriendliness toward Great Britain, but to the belief that it would make for stable equilibrium all around, and be better for everybody concerned. He looked forward to a confederated North America, and to a South America at least wholly independent of Europe and developing under our friendly auspices. He wrote to Baron von Humboldt in 1813 as follows : — "The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe, their treaties make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of in- terests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. America has a hemi- sphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them." To another foreign correspondent he wrote several years later : — JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 207 "Nothing is so important as that America shall separate herself from the systems of Europe t^. ,. and establish one of her own. Our circum- from . '. • , , ^• ,' , European stances, our pursuits, our mterests are distmct; ^ system the principles of our policy should be so also. All entanglements with that quarter of the globe should be avoided if we mean that peace and justice shall be the polar stars of American so- cieties." Finally, before the great enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, President Monroe wisely consulted the venerable statesman then in retirement at Monticello, and he received from Mr. Jefferson an ever-memorable letter, from which I may quote the following sentences: — "Our first and fundamental maxim should be Statement never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. ^-^ P^hct/ ^ ^ ^ in 1823 Our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own. She should, therefore, have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe." This, all things considered, is perhaps the best and clearest statement, as it is the boldest, that has ever been made of the doctrine so repeatedly 208 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. An earlier utterance Cuba and Mexico Mr. Sew- ard's policy in Mexico set forth by Jefferson, though nominally attrib- uted, on account of one official utterance, to one of Jefferson's most steadfast disciples. Fifteen years earlier than this, in writing to Governor Claiborne, who was then administering the Louisiana Territory at New Orleans, — as if in prophetic forecast of actual applications of his principles of policy, — Jefferson had said, re- specting Cuba and Mexico: "We consider their interests and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere." Nearly sixty years later we applied this specific principle to the case of Mexico, and expelled a French army and an Austrian dynasty. Mr. Seward, one of the greatest successors of Jefferson, and one of the few of our more recent statesmen who have seemed to comprehend the principles of American policy, had the honor to enforce our views in the case of Mexico. The reasons would have seemed ample, a very few years later, either before or after the Virginius incident, for the enforcement of that principle in the case of Cuba. But the views that then prevailed were rather those of legalists and diplo- matists than those of masters of American policy JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 209 in the large sense. And so it remained for our chap. v. country, in a better period, and in the fullness Our later of time, to enforce the Jeffersonian principles of policy in policy in the case of an island concerning which Jefferson in 1823 had written: "I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states." It must be borne in mind that Mr. Jefferson Predictions was always consciously working out a permanent f^ .^ popu- •^ J & r lation rather than a temporary line of policy, and that he always had in mind the rapid extension and great growth of the nation. Thus, writing to Baron von Humboldt not long after the census of 1810, which had shown our population to be a little more than seven millions, he declared : — " In fifty years more the United States alone To Hum- will contain fifty millions of inhabitants, and fifty years are soon gone over. The peace of 1763 is within that period. I was then twenty years old, and of course remember well all the transactions of the war preceding it, and you will live to see the period equally ahead of us; and the numbers which will then be spread over the other parts of the American hemisphere catching long before that the principles of our Humboldt lived to see 210 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. portion of it, and concurring with us in the mainte- nance of the same system." What Humboldt actually lived to see the population of the United States alone more than thirty millions, and to see the independent South American states living under constitutions mod- eled after ours, and concurring in the main in our views of a distinctive American international policy. To Monroe In his population estimates, Mr. Jefferson had on Canada pp^ijably calculated upon our union with Canada, which would have resulted in the much more rapid development of that region. Writing to James Monroe, in 1801, he declared: — "However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern, continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." Race and What other man, in 1801, foresaw so clearly language^ the great growth of the English-speaking races in America and the widespread establishment of their social and political institutions .? Writing to Mr. Madi- JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 211 son on the Florida question in 1809, Jefferson chap. v. declared : — "We should then have only to include the North [meaning Canada], in our confederacy, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation ; and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government." It is not necessary to pause to inquire how far The still Jefferson's specific forecasts have been verified •{ . ^ ^ horizon in the course of a hundred years; but it is to be remarked that he was dealing consciously with a larger future than a single century. In short, the statesmen of to-day, for large, fresh, and sweeping views toward the still future horizon, should look through the lenses provided by Thomas Jefferson. It remains true, as he pointed out, that the policy of Europe is essentially belligerent and aggressive, while the policy of America is essentially pacific. It remains true, moreover, that it must be a The largest , • J. !• . . J.1 J 1 remaining prmcipal aim ot our policy to promote the develop- ment of the Canadian half of North America in harmony with that of our own half, with a view to ultimate voluntary political union. If Jefferson 212 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. The Isthmian canal The Gulf (md the Caribbean Sea are American were alive, he would still hold this to be the largest unfulfilled aspiration to be noted in the items of a future public policy. In view of the great development of our Pacific seaboard, it would have been in strict keeping with all of Mr. Jefferson's views to advocate the territorial acquisition of the Isthmian strip that connects North and South America with a view to cutting a ship canal on our own soil. Although such a costly project was by no means ripe for action in his day, Mr. Jefferson more than once expressed lively interest in the possibility of an interoceanic canal. And let it be said with the utmost emphasis, nothing would have been further from Mr. Jefferson's views than the placing of this strictly American enterprise under the political auspices of the great powers of Europe, although such a plan was proposed in the Bulwer-Clayton treaty by an American Secretary of State in 1850, and again proposed in 1900. Fortunately, the preponderant senti- ment of the country was aroused to a perception of the vital bearings of the question; and we may rest assured that Americans will henceforth remember Jefferson's idea that the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea are essentially JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 213 American waters, and that an American inter- chap. v. oceanic canal must come under the full control of the American political system. Jefferson advocated ample coast defenses, and Coast de- a navy adequate to our purposes of protection. J^^^^ '^^^ If at one time he seemed not to favor an ambitious naval policy, it was for immediate reasons which he ably explained. The naval predominance of England was so great that we could not then hope to rival England on the sea, and an inferior navy would be likely to be sacrificed in a British war. John Adams, himself the staunch advocate of a vigorous naval policy, declared in his old age that Father he had always regarded Mr. Jefferson as the ^f ^"-^ navy Father of the American Navy. A study of Mr. Jefferson's views, with reference to their application to our existing conditions, would probably lead to the conclusion that he would now favor the steady development of our q^ ^^^ new navy, but would limit the standing army as army closely as possible. As early as 1799 he wrote to Elbridge Gerry : — "I am for relying for internal defense on our militia solely, till actual invasion." But several years later, in correspondence with some one else, he made this very notable utter- 214 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Universal militia Military instruction in schools A citizen soldiery ance: "None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important." And in his last annual message, in 1808, as his second Presidential term was ending, he declared to Congress : — "For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security." You will remember that in 1813, several years after his retirement, in the light of our current experiences in the pending war with Great Britain, he wrote to James Monroe that "We must make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education; we can never be safe until this is done." In short, Jefferson believed in a citizen soldiery, to be composed, if necessary, of prac- tically all the young men in the country, none of whom should have grown up without becoming familiar with the use of weapons or without being sufficiently drilled and trained to admit of ready organization. For the supply of officers he would make sure that young men in academies and collegiate institutions should have some especial training in military tactics and the art of war. After the experience of a hundred years, we JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 215 have arrived at no wiser view than this. While chap. v. England has begun to talk of conscription and ^ ^j •_ great standing armies, after the continental pUned « , . •. I 1 , 11 nation tasnion, it behooves us to see clearly our own path and hold fast to the principle that ours must be an armed and disciplined nation, which for that very reason can dispense with a large stand- ing army. The question must naturally arise, what rela- Our tion our position and policy in the Philippines P^'^^'^VV^^^ bears to the American policy of isolation as set forth by Mr. Jefferson. I shall make no ingenious attempt to reconcile one thing with another. It is not necessary to prize consistency above all else. But in this particular instance, I am unable to find any denial, or even any weakening, of the Monroe Doctrine principle. Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues were dealing with two opposing systems, one the European, the other the Ameri- can. These systems had relation to such parts of the world as were at that time within the sphere of ordinary commercial intercourse, or were related under the principles of international law, y^^ recognizing one another by the exchange of Pacific in ambassadors or other agents. At that time there ,. was little trading in the Pacific Ocean, the most 216 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Our new interests European system A merican system Pacific system important perhaps being the regular moving of the Spanish galleons from Mexico to the Philip- pines, and vice versa. China and Japan, Korea and Siam, had no connection or intercourse with Europe and America. Australia had not been colonized. A wholly new situation has arisen since then. A new commerce has come into existence, and the far East has been aroused from the slumber of centuries. With our great Pacific seaboard, we must needs be vitally interested in the new com- merce and the new affairs of the Pacific Ocean and its bordering countries. The European sys- tem remains, and it must continue to dominate Europe, Africa, and the western part of Asia. The American system also remains, and so long as we are true to the policy laid down by our forefathers it will continue to dominate the Western Hemisphere of North and South America. But there has been rapidly evolving a third sys- tem — that of the far East, or the Pacific — in which China and Japan have a great part to play, and in which we also have interests, as have several of the European powers. These new interests of ours had become important before we had fairly recognized them. A war in asser- JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 217 tion of the Monroe Doctrine brought us tempo- chap. v. rarily to Manila, and we remained at Manila for reasons that had no reference at all to the Monroe Doctrine, but rather to our new Pacific interests and responsibilities. I have no reason to mention this topic except Our by way of these passing suggestions. The Mon- <^<^^^^^<^^ roe Doctrine more than ever is the great cardinal principle of our policy. Our chief territorial expansion is to be in our own hemisphere, where conditions favor the settlement of English-speak- ing men. Our position in the Philippines is exceptional, and is perhaps to be modified in due time to the form of a mere friendly protec- torate. Of one thing we may be assured, and Our that is that our mission there is destined to be ''^'^^^^^'"^ %n the one of beneficence to the inhabitants themselves. Philip- I must confess myself at a loss to understand the P^^^* logic of those who would quote the Declaration of Independence as showing conclusively that our presence in the Philippines is contrary to Jefferson's principles of democracy and self- government. Mr. Jefferson had some sense of historical Theele- processes, and also some clear recognition of the ^^^* ''•' time need of considering the element of time. He 218 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Evolution of our republic Rights of communi- ties Practical causes of American revolution pointed out with frequency that circumstances had brought our people in the American col- onies to a position where, beyond any other people of any period, we were fitted to enter upon the experiment of a democratic republican state. Our colonies had been growing for more than a century and a half, and had been evolving the American citizen and the American self- governing community. Until these two develop- ments had taken place there could have been no successful American republic. Even in 1774 and 1775 Jefferson's views of the inherent rights of men, as respects self-government, had to do not with the higher attributes of national or imperial sovereignty, but with the practical, every-day rights of communities to order their own local affairs and to take part in imposing the taxes that they were themselves to pay. It was the denial of these ordinary rights of local, concrete self- government to the American colonies that led them to the verge of a revolution that otherwise would not have been defensible. In other words, the American revolution was not, either in Jeffer- son's mind, or in that of any other leader, founded upon abstract conceptions of the rights of indi- vidual men, but rather upon practical grievances. JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 219 The established order of the world required chap, v. the exercise by some accountable government of Poi-mcal the responsibilities of sovereignty at Manila. In evolutional that exercise the United States became the legal successor of Spain. It became incumbent upon us, however, in regard to the people themselves, to assert as rapidly as possible our own views of the value of individual citizenship and of self- government in communities, as a foundation for the larger institutions of the province, the state, or the nation. Mr. Jefferson's letters to James Madison, Early Thomas McKeen, Governor Claiborne, and vari- ^^P^nence in Louisi- ous others, about a hundred years ago, relating to ana the gradual evolution of government in the pur- chased Louisiana Territory, disclose a practical statesmanship that makes it clear, even down to the minute details, how Jefferson would have approached the task of initiating and developing a government for the Philippine Archipelago. And I may add that I do not see any appreciable difference of philosophy or principle between the Jeffersonian views and those which Governors Taft and Wright clearly expressed, and which were sup- ported at Washington by Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and by Mr. Root as Secretary of War. 220 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. We do not show our belief in democracy at Rational home by forcing the ballot into the hands of school democracy children, but rather by our definite purpose so to train the school children that in due time they may come into a valuable heritage of citizenship. In like manner we shall fulfill every duty and observe every principle of democracy in the Philippines if we introduce popular and repre- sentative institutions just as rapidly as may be consistent with the maintenance of order and the enforcement of justice between man and man. It is not impossible, furthermore, that our experience in the Philippines and elsewhere may help us to understand better the evolutionary character of some of our problems nearer home. We have at times found the difficulties confront- ing our democratic institutions to be so dishearten- ing that we have allowed the pessimists to raise their insidious doubts as to the fundamental value of democracy and as to the future of our system. Here, again, I do not know any wiser teacher to follow than Mr. Jefferson, nor any better dictum than that the ultimate cure for the ills of democracy is to be found in democracy itself. In Jefferson's time it required great faith and Light on our nearer ■problems JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 221 clear insight to hold in an unqualified manner chap. v. to the novel doctrine of the right-mindedness, 7^^^ ^^^_ capacity, and wisdom of the plain people, and to trine that the 7)€07)lc the view that government should rest on the hie broadest possible basis. Rousseau and other French writers, it is true, had promulgated such ideas. But they argued in the sphere of abstract discussion, and not at all in that of practical politics. Such views in England were of slow and cautious growth, and even to our own day it is the taxpayer — rather than the man — who casts a British ballot, while a single proprietor may vote in as many different places as he owns property. The practical doctrine of democracy, Jefferson that is to say, of the plain people, as the depository ^ ^ ^ , •^ r r I r J expounder of political power, the doctrine so firmly held in a later period by Abraham Lincoln, was, above all, the Jeffersonian doctrine. Of all the men who had lived in the world up to his time, he expounded that idea most influentially. It was his leadership of a school of American politics and statecraft, more than anything else, that gave firm establishment to the broad democratic ex- " Happi- periment in this country. "The only orthodox ^^^^ "^ •^ general object," he declared, "of the institution of gov- mass" ernment, is to secure the greatest degree of 222 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it." In his "Notes on Virginia," written in 1782, his observations on government were in a vein well indicated by the following quotations : — Argument "Every government degenerates when trusted for popular ^^ ^j^^ ^^^^^^ ^^ ^j^^ people alone. The people govern- '^ ^ '^ '^ ment themselves, therefore, are its only safe deposi- tories. To render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." On the same page he declared : — " The influence over government must be shared among all the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates in the ultimate authority, the government will be safe: because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth; and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the people. In this case every man would have to pay his own price. The government of Great Britain has been corrupted because but one man in ten has a right to vote for members of Parliament. The sellers of the government, therefore, get nine tenths of their price clear." For a period of more than fifty years, seem- ingly without a moment's misgiving, Jefferson JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 223 proclaimed this political gospel of popular self- chap. v. government. Many of the half-hearted repub- j^nun- licans of his time favored some vestiges of hered- wavering itary or aristocratic or exclusive institutions. Jefferson never compromised with any of these opinions. Early in his career he wrote to General Washington, "Experience has shown that the hereditary branches of modern government are the patrons of privilege and prerogative." Since he wrote those words, the world has had a further Hereditary experience of such an hereditary institution as the P^^^^ British House of Lords, through an added cen- tury and a quarter; and Mr. Jefferson's views remain so sound and judicious that they might have been written yesterday. "The true founda- tion of republican government," he wrote at a later period, " is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property, and in their manage- ment." It must be remembered that the idea of an The idea unrestricted suffrage was a very novel one at the ^J ^^^^'^^' beginning of the nineteenth century. What Mr. suffrage Jefferson's views had always been he made clear in a letter to a citizen of Virginia which he wrote in 1800. He explained that the new constitution of Virginia had been formed when he was absent 224 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. For the large electorate He recog- nized facts attending a session of Congress; and then he added, "Had I been here (in Virginia), I should probably have proposed a general suffrage because my opinion has always been in favor of it." In notes and proposals for Virginia constitutions at several earlier periods, Mr. Jefferson had not wholly ignored the prevailing sentiment in favor of a property qualification. But he had practically nullified such a limitation by admitting any man who was liable to militia duty. I must not dwell tediously upon this point, although to my mind it has a significance not merely historical or aca- demic, but practical in a concrete and immedi- ate sense. Mr. Jefferson's arguments for a large electorate were many-sided, and they were to my mind as a whole unanswerable. But it would be highly unjust to his doctrine of the suffrage to say that he proclaimed the efficacy of universal suffrage, at all times and under all circumstances, as sure to work out good results. As a general maxim he was ever proclaiming the inherent right, and also the advantage, of self- government. But he was a statesman, and he recognized facts in any given situation. And so his maxims about self-government presupposed a certain degree of preparation and fitness. Thus, JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 225 after he had purchased Louisiana from France, chap. v. he did not for a moment allow his well-known ^^ ^-^ philosophy of the right of self-government to Louisiana obscure his practical judgment as to the immedi- ate work in hand. In December, 1803, he wrote to DeWitt Clinton as follows: "Although it is acknowledged that our new fellow-citizens in Louisiana are as yet as incapable of self-govern- ment as children, yet some in Congress cannot bring themselves to suspend its principles for a single moment. The temporary or territorial government of that country, therefore, will en- counter great difficulty." Two or three years before that, in a letter The rule of to John Breckinridffe, he pointed out a radical . ^''^^1^'"'' difference between our American people and the people of France, in that, while our countrymen are impressed from their cradle with the sacred- ness of the law of majority rule, the people of France, on the other hand, to quote his exact words, "have never been in the habit of self- government, and are not yet in the habit of acknowledging that fundamental law of nature by which alone self-government can be exercised by a society — I mean the lex majoris partis." Mr. Jefferson, of course, had no doubt whatever Q 226 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Need of prelimi- nary pro- cesses The test of intelli- gence An incen- tive to diligence as to the applicability in due time of the prin- ciples of self-government in Louisiana on the one hand and in France on the other. He did not waive his ideal, but merely recognized the neces- sity of preliminary processes. In his later years he came more and more to point out the need of character and intelligence in the individual citizen. Thus, in commenting in a letter to a foreign correspondent in 1814, on a new constitution that had been drawn up for Spain, he wrote: "There is one provision which will im- mortalize its inventors. It is that which after a certain epoch disfranchises every citizen who can- not read and write. This is new, and is the fruit- ful germ of the improvement of everything good, and the correction of everything imperfect in the present constitution. This will give you an en- lightened people and an energetic public opinion." And I might make other citations, showing an acceptance by Mr. Jefferson of the plan of an educational restriction. In this there was noth- ing inconsistent with his previous arguments in favor of a wide extension of the franchise. The system against which he had been fighting was one which tended toward the perpetuation of privileged classes in the community. The educa- JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 227 tional qualification, as he favored it, had no such chap. v. tendency. Its object was not to make permanent exclusion of the masses from an equal part in the work and privilege of government, but rather to provide an added incentive to diligence and effort on the part of every young man to fit himself to meet the tests. There has been a period in our recent history Making during which more honor has been paid to Jef- ^ ^ ^^ ^^* jit ferson's general maxims than to his practical statesmanship. It was precisely because he be- lieved so deeply in the people and in their essential equality of rights and of legal status, that he attached so much importance to the work of mak- ing them fit to be intrusted with the exercise of their natural rights as members of the political community. Thus Jeflferson would have said — if I have any understanding of the principles of his statesmanship — that it was the great business Mistakes of the people of America, in the critical period after "^ the year 1865, not to confer the franchise indis- criminately upon all comers, but rather to seek by every means and by every sacrifice to qualify all comers — and especially their children — for the future exercise of the franchise in an intelligent and responsible manner. 228 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Too easy naturaliza- tion Would Jefferson have re- stricted immigra- tion? I do not think, then, that we have paid the high- est honor to Jeffersonian principles in the North by admitting to the franchise hundreds of thou- sands, if not milHons, of foreigners unable to speak the English language, densely ignorant of our forms of government, and to a large extent unable to read even the Latinic dialects or the Slavonic jargons of the regions from which they have come. It is not strange, under such circumstances, that the government of our great cities has been cor- rupt and inefficient. The conditions of immigra- tion in Jefferson's time were so different that, while he made many observations on the subject that still possess value, there is not much in his writings of direct application to our recent and present experiences on that score. It may be clearly inferred, however, that Mr. Jefferson would have favored some measure to restrict the coming of undesirable immigrants in excessive numbers ; and it is even more fairly to be inferred that he would have extended the franchise to such immigrants only upon evidence in each individual case of the possession of proper knowledge and capacity to take part in the government of Ameri- can communities. With respect to pending franchise questions in JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 229 the Southern states, I have no word of a con- chap. v. troversial nature to utter. An electorate once yr^g broadened to the utmost possible limits is a Southern I TO, Tt cJiXSC difficult thing to contract. The ultimate aim of pj.o6ie?ws statesmanship, doubtless, should be the broaden- ing of the base of popular government. But I do not think there is any gain in a hastening of the process. After all, Mr. Jefferson's greatest contribution Education to the system of democracy as applied in practice "' **"'^*" manship was his doctrine of the relation of the government to education. He believed that the community as a whole should confer upon every child the opportunity to acquire a common education, and such practical knowledge as would best fit it for its place in the industrial and political com- munity. To his mind this was the best way to meet the inequalities of wealth and condition that otherwise would disturb the equilibrium of a democratic state. If he had lived to our day, and To elevate had found large elements of population unquali- ^^^_ citizen- fied to exercise the electoral franchise, he would doubtless have advised such groups or factors that their true interests lay in other directions than politics and government. But with equal em- phasis he would have urged upon the community 230 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN Every ele- ment must he im- proved CHAP. V. at large the still more important fact that there must be extraordinary effort used to elevate every part of the citizenship of the country. All classes, races, and nationalities must in- evitably suffer some harm and loss through the degradation of any single element or factor of the population; and on the other hand, each element of the community must experience some distinct gain as a result of every effort made to improve the intelligence and general condition of any other element or factor. Happily, there are not want- ing the signs that the country is coming to an understanding of this fact. The most eager pu- pils of our public schools in New York, Chicago, and many other Northern cities are the hundreds of thousands of children from the homes of parents who do not speak the English language. The schools The lives of American statesmen and the prin- , ., , , ciples of American government form the themes cmldren of *- ° and topics that more than all others attract and inspire those sons of Italian, Russian-Polish, and Hungarian parents in the tenement quarters of New York and Chicago, as they throng the free circulating libraries for books, and as they meet in their boys' clubs and debating societies. I have no doubt whatever as to the useful future of %mmi- grants JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 231 these boys as American voters, although I have chap, v, had many misgivings as to the propriety of en- franchising their fathers. There was danger, a few years ago, lest these Character schools might give to the children of hard-working °\ ^, ^ ^ ^ schools though ignorant immigrants just enough smatter- themselves ing of book knowledge, and just enough contact with people of better economic and social condi- tion than their parents, to spoil them for the places they ought to fill. Careful investigation twelve or fifteen years ago convinced me that along with the immeasurable good our public schools were accomplishing, they were also doing some serious, though incidental harm. They were detaching the sons of immigrants from manual pursuits, while not helping them to an}i;hing better. But the schools are now adapting them- Meeting selves to the new conditions they have to meet, / ■^ changed and they are everywhere giving emphasis to the conditions idea of the great dignity and value of labor, while more and more they are combining manual train- ing and the teaching of practical arts with mental and moral discipline, and with instruction in language, numbers, and geography, in drawing, and in the elements of science. Mr. Jefferson's broad schemes of education were scientific enough 232 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. The right kind of instruction Educa- tional systems Jefferson's lifelong work for education and flexible enough to admit all such later dif- ferentiations as the kindergarten and the practical trade school, as well as the older grammar school and the university. To Mr. Cabell in 1820 he wrote, "Promote in every order of men the degree of instruction proportioned to their con- dition and to their views in life." Upon nothing was his heart more set than upon the systematic ordering of education, so that its benefits might be thoroughly distributed. Cir- cumstances have made it possible to carry out his views of a state system more perfectly perhaps in such northwestern commonwealths as Michigan and Wisconsin than anywhere else in this country. And where such systems exist at their best, it is wonderful to note their potency in the assimi- lation of the new and seemingly unpromising relays of immigrants that have come in recent years from Eastern and Southern Europe. The South has responded splendidly of late, at great sacrifice, to the demand for schools; and I am confident that there will be no relaxation of efi^ort. Nevertheless there cannot be too frequent a re-reading of the views of Mr. Jefferson upon the importance of education, and upon its funda- mental place in a democracy. JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 233 His views of the relation of education to the chap. v. state were adopted early in his career, and were propounded with his very latest breath. I deem it remarkable that he should have declared in a letter to Madison as early as 1787 that the task and function of giving " information to the people is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of the government." Even in our own day it The first seems a bold and advanced idea to declare, with- /"^^'^"" ^/ govern- out any reserve or qualification, that education is ment the first duty and chief function of government. The whole civilized world is only now beginning cautiously to recast itself upon a glimmering con- ception of the truth of that idea. Mr. Jefferson stated it again in his first inaugural message. In 1810 he wrote to John Tyler: — "I have two great measures at heart, without Jefferson's which no republic can maintain itself in strength. ^^^ ^^ '^ expres- 1. That of general education, to enable every sions man to judge for himself what will secure or en- danger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." In later writings he advocated a special tax for the creation and maintenance of his system of schools graded from the primary classes to the 234 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. university. His vindication of the duty of the community to draw by taxation upon the resources of the rich to pay for the schooHng of the poor was so complete that nobody has ever been able to improve upon it. The train- And this doctrine of his, in its various implica- t'ng oj e tJojis^ ojoes to the heart of the new social and indus- 'people trial conditions we see about us in this twentieth century. The Jeffersonian principle is that the supreme and imperative duty of the state is the training of the people to be good citizens and useful and capable members of society ; and again and again is it set forth in the utterances of Mr. Jefferson that the safety and well-being of the state lie along this path of its duty and its burden. Our indus- We have emerged with startling suddenness upon a period of undreamt-of industrial combina- society ^ ^ tions and prodigious aggregations of productive capital. There are moments when it seems as if the concentrated power of the new industrial society is becoming so great that it must sub- ordinate to its purposes the organs and agencies of the political society. In many particular in- In relation stances, temporarily at least, such subordination meni ^^^ been too visible to be denied. The only remedy lies in the training of the individual citi- JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 235 zen. Industrial combinations will work evil, or chap. v. they will work good, according as the commu- nity itself is prepared to shape them to the common advantage. It is not true that the man is diminishing in Value of importance as compared with the dollar. For- '^^ ^"^ timately, just the opposite is demonstrably the case. The new industrial combinations rest even more necessarily upon the cooperation of talent and skill than upon the dead weight of united capital alone. There never was a time when it so much behooved the young man to invest in himself, and when the relative value of personal training and acquired aptitude was so great in comparison with that of accumulated capital. The ultimate goal in a democracy is not strife Unified and discord, but political harmony and concord; ^-^ hence- and it is similarly true that in the economic life of forth the community the better hopes reach far beyond the wastefulness and strife of the old competitive system, and demand the substitution for it of cooperative methods and scientific organization. We are certainly entering upon a period of unified efi'ort, from which there can be no return to the competitive system as it has existed heretofore. 236 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Methods of control Jefferson on limit- ing for- tunes And respecting this new and close organization of industry, several methods of future control are readily conceivable. One method is that of con- trol by individuals, or by syndicates composed of comparatively few men whose fortunes can be told in hundreds or thousands of millions. A second method is that of the radical enlargement of the functions of the political community, so that the people themselves, organized as the state, may assume control, one after another, of the great businesses and industries of the country. A third method is that of the gradual distribution of the shares of stock of industrial corporations among the workers themselves and the people at large, until in one industry after another there shall have come into being something like a true coop- erative system managed on public representative principles quite analogous to the carrying on of our political institutions. Mr. Jefferson declared himself clearly and strongly against any arbitrary limitation of individual wealth. He was willing to have governmental experiments tried, and was not, as many people suppose, the apostle of the unqualified doctrine that government is a neces- sary evil, that the best government is the one that governs least, and in any case the functions of JEFFERSON'S DOCTRINES UNDER NEW TESTS 237 government should be negative rather tlian posi- chap. v. tive. The tendency of his teaching was, indeed, Qovern- toward as Httle interference in industrial aflFairs "*^"' '^"^ XTtdzistvij on the part of government as circumstances would permit. This, however, was always subject in his teaching to the broad principle that the object of government is to promote the well-being and happiness of the greater number, and that its practical functions may therefore be varied from time to time to meet new conditions. Thus all the new functions of municipal gov- Cities and ernment, in a period when the majority are com- ^ . ^■^^^~ '■ J ^ soman ing to live under urban conditions, are strictly in views harmony with the Jeffersonian teaching. If the common welfare should some time in the future demand the municipal operation of street rail- ways, or even the national ownership and opera- tion of the general railroad system, surely the shade of Mr. Jefferson w^ould not arise to utter any warning whatever. In his own day he observed that strong men as Fortunes a rule make their own fortunes, and that under "J!^ '^^*'' aistribu- our laws of inheritance wealth tends in the third tion or fourth generation toward a distribution that robs it of any particular danger to the less fortu- nate members of the community. There is no 238 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. Safety in numbers Thefuture belongs to the workers reason at this moment to regard Mr. Jefferson's opinion on that subject as out of date. In other words, Jefferson's dictum holds per- fectly good to-day that our governmental safety lies in numbers; and that concentrated wealth, whether in individual or corporate hands, cannot possibly in the long run take away any of the liberties or rights of an enfranchised people in- telligent enough to know what it wants. We must to some extent pass through the phase of industrial control at the hands of individuals holding disproportionate wealth and power; but this can last only a little time. The growth of the general wealth of the country is at a higher rate than the aggregation of riches in the hands of multi-millionaires. There was a time when the man of moderate fortune could afford to be without any training for a place in the professional or business world. But the fixed fortune now yields much less in- come; while the newer demands of life require a larger outgo. Even the skilled laborer has steadily shortening hours and constantly increasing wages. The future belongs clearly to the work- ers, and they in due time will become the asso- ciated capitalists. I believe it will come to be a JEFFERSON'S DOCTRLNES UNDER NEW TESTS 239 matter of comparative indifference whether the chap. v. poHtical society that we call the State gradually absorbs the industrial organization, or whether the two shall run on indefinitely side by side. In either case the principles of democracy must have a higher potency than ever; and more than ever they must rest upon the basis of a universal train- ing for citizenship and for honorable member- ship in the local and the general community. "One good government," Jefferson observed, "is Advance of a blessing to the whole world " — having refer- represent- ative ence to its illuminating example. In 1823, m a go^gj-n- letter to Albert Gallatin, he declared, with a orient wisdom that the flight of years only serves to illustrate: "The advantages of representative government, exhibited in England and America, and recently in other countries, will procure its establishment everywhere in a more or less perfect form ; and this \vi\\ insure the amelioration of the condition of the world. It will cost years of blood and be well worth them." Let me conclude with one more quotation A final from Thomas Jefferson, which I must commend to the doubters and pessimists, and which seems to me to embody as much political, economic, and ethical wisdom, applicable to present condi- 240 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE AVERAGE MAN CHAP. V. tions, as any other single utterance from the pen of any other American statesman. What I am about to quote was written by Mr. Jefferson in 1817 to a friend in France, M. de Marbois : — " I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come, and that, contrary to the principle of Montesquieu, it will be seen that, the larger the extent of country the more firm its republican structure, if founded, not on conquest, but in principles of compact and equality. My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life, going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory, and the belief that men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them." By albert SHAW, LL.D. Editor of " The Review of Reviews " Political Problems of American Development The Columbia University Press Cloth, $1.50 net Nine Lectures delivered as the opening course of the Blumenthal Founda- tion at Columbia University, on these topics : — I. The Nature and Meaning of our Political Life. 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