Our Benevolent Feudalism. Ghent William James
every effort should be made as soon as the existing strike has been called off and the excitement is abated to prevent by appropriate legislation the recurrence of such calamitous conflicts where everybody is injured and no one is benefited.” Criminal codes, it may be said generally, depend largely on the economic conditions of the time and place where they obtain: horse-stealing, in a community girdled by trolley lines, degenerates to petty larceny, while in Wyoming or Arabia it is a capital offence. In the new order, which requires peace and stability for its proper operation, it may readily enough come about that voluntary leaving of work will be severely penalized.
II
The new seigniorial attitude toward government and public policy is also significant. Often it is paternalistic in a princely degree. The offer of a retired magnate to settle a great national problem by paying to the Government the $20,000,000 demanded of Spain, on condition that the Filipinos be “set free,” had in it something of the “grand style” which Matthew Arnold so extols. The rallying to the defence of the Government’s gold reserve by certain financiers, several years ago, need not be instanced, since in certain quarters it is gravely suspected that their interest was not entirely platonic. But certainly the recent offer of a wealthy magnate to pay one-third of the cost of repairing all the roads in the vicinity of Lakewood, N.J., showed the true seigniorial spirit. Not different in kind, though somewhat in degree, was the recent action of a Pittsburg magnate, on the rude refusal of the Department of Public Works to pave his street otherwise than with blocks at a cost of 65 cents the square yard, in doing the thing himself at a cost of $4.50 the square yard.
Usually, however, the seigniorial attitude toward government is somewhat more in the direction of intervention. The seasonal migration to Washington of representatives of all the great commercial interests has become a salient datum in political zoölogy. Curiosity regarding a proposed parcels post or government telegraph alone draws hundreds of these birds of passage there. The rights of private initiative must be maintained at any cost. In the great West one of the prime necessities for a living is the access to water for irrigation purposes. One may have land; but, if he has not water to irrigate it, the soil is worthless. The prevailing sentiment is for public ownership of waterways, since, in many places, monopoly controls the supply. At the electrical convention held at San Francisco recently, the presiding officer, who is also the president of a public-service corporation, after denouncing organized labor and municipal ownership, added: “For us a far more dangerous agitation is that which now proposes State appropriation of all water rights. The scheme advocated makes the appropriation little less than sheer confiscation.” Luckily the seventy-one mile envelope of air that encases the globe yet eludes monopolization.
“Hands off!” is the warning to government; and though occasionally government puts hands on, they are not very closely or tenaciously applied. The report of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1901), for instance, employs a rather pessimistic tone regarding government control of traffic rates. “We simply call attention to the fact,” it recites, “that the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Trans-Missouri case and the Joint Traffic Association case has produced no practical effect upon the railway operations of the country. Such associations, in fact, exist now, as they did before those decisions, and with the same general effect.” “Should the Supreme Court declare the Northern railways consolidation unconstitutional,” one of the interested magnates is reported as saying, “we shall simply do the thing in another way. It is something that must be done.” Cynically frank is Mr. Dodd, in his Syracuse address, regarding the Anti-trust law. “A modern Federal law also exists,” he says, “which, literally interpreted, forbids business of any magnitude; but Federal judges have thus far found it easier to dismiss proceedings under it than to guess at its real meaning.” The president of the Southern Pacific Railroad takes the bull by the horns, and denounces all interference. In an interview given to the press June 2d of the present year, he declares that “the legislation of the future must be pro-railroad instead of anti-railroad… I believe commissions are things of the past. I do not think transportation companies should have to submit to dictation or control by bodies who do not know anything about transportation.”
The Contract-labor law is another measure, to the seigniorial mind, unnecessary and obstructive, and its provisions, therefore, are but lightly observed. Known evasions have been numerous; and, were the full truth revealed, it would probably be found that this law has met with about the same degree of observance as have the Interstate Commerce and Anti-trust laws. As recently as July 16th, comes word from Berlin to the Chicago Daily News that “agents of American railroads are canvassing the Polish and Slavic districts of Europe for laborers, to whom they offer $2.50 a day and board, regardless of the Federal Contract-labor law.”
Not only do the magnates demand immunity from government interference in their business affairs, but they demand also a more real, if not a more obvious, share in the operations of government. The invasion, during the last ten years, of the National Senate by a number of the magnates or their legates is a part of the process; but something more to the point is their insistence on the right to be consulted in grave affairs by the President and Cabinet. A New York daily newspaper, edited by the distinguished scholar who delivers lectures on journalism before Yale University, published last February an account of a remarkable gathering at Washington. It verges closely upon contumacy to mention the names of the attending magnates, such is their eminence, and they will therefore not be given. Their purpose was to protest to the President against a repetition of his action in the Northern Securities case. “The financiers declare,” says this newspaper, “that they should have been notified of the intended Federal action last week, so that they could be prepared to support the stock market, and that their unpreparedness came very near bringing on a panic. Had not the big interests of the street been in possession of the bulk of securities, instead of speculators and small holders, there would have been a panic, the capitalists assert.” It is, when considered, a modest claim – the powers of an extra-constitutional cabinet, intrusted with the conservation of the public peace. There is no proof that the claim has been conceded, though some light is thrown on the problem by the newspaper’s further declaration that the chief magnate, after an interview with the President, “felt very much better.”
Something of the same nature was revealed in the negotiations last March between the Mayor of New York City and the directors of the New York Central Railroad Company. The company requested the Mayor to secure the withdrawal of the Wainwright bill in the State Assembly, compelling the railroad to abandon steam in the Park Avenue tunnel by a fixed date, and promised to do the required thing in its own time and at its own pleasure. The letter of the Mayor to Assemblyman Bedell records the result: “This letter [of the directors] seems to me to lay a good foundation for the waiving a fixed date to be named in the bill;” and the date was accordingly “waived.”
Of the seigniorial attitude toward the police law, the abundant crop of automobile cases alone furnishes signal testimony. Dickens made a highly dramatic, though perhaps rather unhistorical, use in his “A Tale of Two Cities” of the riding down of a child by a marquis, and the long train of tragic consequences that ensued. We do the thing differently in our day: we acquit, or at most fine the marquis, and the matter rests; we are too deferential to carry it further. Fast driving in the new “machines” has become one of the tests of courage, manliness, and skill, – what jousting in full armor was in the fifteenth century, or duelling with pistols in the early part of the nineteenth, – and if the police law interferes, the exploit is the more hazardous and therefore the more emulatory. The scion of a great house who recently, on being arrested for fast driving and then bailed, subsequently sent his valet to the police court to pay the fine, showed the true seigniorial spirit. Possibly, though, had his identity been known before arrest, he would have escaped the irritating interference of the law; for it happened, about the same time, on the arrest for the same offence of a millionnaire attorney, companioned by a Supreme Court judge, that a too vigilant policeman came to learn his severest lesson – that to know whom not to trouble is the better part of valor.
At Newport, the summer home of the seigniorial class, the automobile enforces a right of way. This is not sufficient, however, for the automobilists, who would prefer a sole and exclusive way. In the summer of 1901 the resident magnates fixed upon a certain Friday afternoon for their motor races, and demanded exclusive control of Ocean, Harrison,