Our Benevolent Feudalism. Ghent William James
Carlo, yet more wonderful accounts are given of his lavish expenditure. The betting at the Saratoga race-tracks last August is reported to have averaged $2,000,000 a day. “The money does not come,” said that eminent maker of books, Mr. Joe Ullman, “from any great plunger or group of plungers, but from the great assemblage of rich men who are willing to bet from $100 to $1,000 on their choices in a race.” On the transatlantic steamers, in London and in Paris, the same prodigality is seen. A king’s ransom – or what is more to the point, the ransom of a hundred families from a year’s suffering – is lost or won in an hour’s play or lightly expended for some momentary satisfaction.
IV
There remain for brief mention the benefactions of the magnates. Most of these come under the head of “conspicuous giving.” Gifts for educational, religious, and other public purposes last year reached the total of $107,360,000. In separate amounts they ran all the way from the $5,000 gift of a soap or lumber magnate to the $13,000,000 that had their origin in steel. It is an interesting list for study in that it reveals more significantly than some of the instances given the standards and temper of the seigniorial mind. An anonymous writer, evidently of Jacobinical tendencies, some time ago suggested in the columns of a well-known periodical a list of measures for the support of which rich men might honorably and wisely devote a part of their fortunes: —
“He [the rich man] could begin by requiring the assessors to hand him a true bill of his own obligations to the public. He could continue the good work by persuading the collector to accept a check for the whole amount. This would make but a small draft upon his total accumulations. A further considerable sum he could wisely devote to paying the salaries of honorable lobbyists, who should labor with legislative bodies to secure the enactment of just laws, which would relieve hard-working farmers, struggling shopkeepers, mechanics trying to pay for mortgaged houses, and widows who have received a few thousand dollars of life insurance money, from their present obligation to support the courts, the militia, and other organs of government that protect the rich man’s property and enable him to collect his bills receivable. Finally, if these two expenditures did not sufficiently diminish his surplus, he could purchase newspapers and pay editors to educate the public in sound principles of social justice, as applied to taxation and to various other matters.”
Perhaps it is not singular that no part of the gifts of the great magnates is ever devoted to any of these purposes. Doubtless they see no flaw, or at least no remediable defect, in the present industrial régime. It is the régime under which they have risen to fortune and power, and it is therefore justified by its fruits. Their benefactions are thus always directed to a more or less obvious easement of the conditions of those on whom the social fabric most heavily rests. Hospitals, asylums, and libraries are the objects, though recently a bathing beach for poor children has been added to the list. The propriety of securing learned justification of the existing régime causes also a considerable giving to schools, colleges, and churches. But nowhere can there be found a seigniorial gift which, directly or indirectly, makes for modification of the prevailing economic system.
CHAPTER IV
Our Farmers and Wage-earners
The increasing dependence of middleman and petty manufacturer has already been considered. The same pressure which bears upon these bears also upon farmer and wage-earner. The editorials and the oratory of election years, it is true, supply us with recurring pæans over the independence, the self-reliance and the prosperity of these classes, and such graphic tropes as “the full dinner pail” and “the overflowing barn,” become the party shibboleths of political campaigns. Plain facts, however, accord but ill with this exultant strain.
I
In most ages the working farmer has been the dupe and prey of the rest of mankind. Now by force and now by cajolery, as social customs and political institutions change, he has been made to produce the food by which the race lives, and the share of his product which he has been permitted to keep for himself has always been pitifully small. Whether Roman slave, Frankish serf, or English villein; whether the so-called “independent” farmer of a free democracy or the ryot of a Hindu prince, the general rule holds good. Occasionally, by one means or another, he gains some transitory betterment of condition; the Plague of 1349 and the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381 won for his class advantages which were retained during three generations. But in the long run he is the race’s martyr. Under a military autocracy his exploitation was inevitable. There is no reason for it now, for the lives and well-being of the rest of mankind are in his hands: were the working farmers organized as the manufacturers and the skilled artisans are organized, and could they lay by for themselves a year’s necessities, they could starve the race into submission to their demands. But the thing is not to be; nor, indeed, is any marked change to their advantage likely to happen, for, so far as current tendencies point, the future is to repeat the past.
In our day and in our land both force and cajolery conspire to keep the peasant farmer securely in his traces. He cannot break through the cordon which the trusts and the railroads put about him; and even if he could he would not, since the influences showered upon him are specifically directed to the end of keeping him passive and contented. Our statisticians assure him of his prosperity; our politicians and our moulders of opinion warn him of the pernicious influence of unions like the Farmers’ Alliance, and further preach to him the comforting doctrine that by “raising more corn and less politics” he will ultimately work out a blissful salvation. Sometimes he must burn his corn for fuel; often he cannot sell his grain for the cost of production, even though many thousands of persons in the great cities may be hungering for it; frequently he cannot afford to send his children to school, and in a steadily increasing number of cases he is forced to abandon his farm and become a tenant or a wanderer. He is puzzled, no doubt, by these things; but they are all carefully and neatly explained to him from the writings and preachments of profound scholars, as “natural” and “inevitable” phenomena. His ethical sense may be somewhat disturbed by the explanations, but he learns that it is useless to protest, and he thereupon acquiesces.
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