The Theory of Social Revolutions. Adams Brooks
decided in the year 1600. Finally, the issue between monopoly and free trade was fought out in the American Revolution, for the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of political economy.
About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company v. Barclay Coal Company,5 which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in 1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic, substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass, obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall Street, and pervades every corner of the Union. No matter what price is in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth, or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the Hudson.
The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition ceases, as when all the capital engaged in a trade belongs to a single owner. Supposing ownership to be enough restricted, combination is easier and more profitable than competition; therefore combination, conscious or unconscious, supplants competition. The inference from the evidence is that, in the United States, capital has reached, or is rapidly reaching, this point of concentration; and if this be true, competition cannot be enforced by legislation. But, assuming that competition could still be enforced by law, the only effect would be to make the mass of capital more homogeneous by eliminating still further such of the weaker capitalists as have survived. Ultimately, unless indeed society is to dissolve and capital migrate elsewhere, all the present phenomena would be intensified. Nor would free trade, probably, have more than a very transitory effect. In no department of trade is competition freer than in the Atlantic passenger service, and yet in no trade is there a stricter monopoly price.
The same acceleration of the social movement which has caused this centralization of capital has caused the centralization of another form of human energy, which is its negative: labor unions organize labor as a monopoly. Labor protests against the irresponsible sovereignty of capital, as men have always protested against irresponsible sovereignty, declaring that the capitalistic social system, as it now exists, is a form of slavery. Very logically, therefore, the abler and bolder labor agitators proclaim that labor levies actual war against society, and that in that war there can be no truce until irresponsible capital has capitulated. Also, in labor's methods of warfare the same phenomena appear as in the autocracy of capital. Labor attacks capitalistic society by methods beyond the purview of the law, and may, at any moment, shatter the social system; while, under our laws and institutions, society is helpless.
Few persons, I should imagine, who reflect on these phenomena, fail to admit to themselves, whatever they may say publicly, that present social conditions are unsatisfactory, and I take the cause of the stress to be that which I have stated. We have extended the range of applied science until we daily use infinite forces, and those forces must, apparently, disrupt our society, unless we can raise the laws and institutions which hold society together to an energy and efficiency commensurate to them. How much vigor and ability would be required to accomplish such a work may be measured by the experience of Washington, who barely prevailed in his relatively simple task, surrounded by a generation of extraordinary men, and with the capitalistic class of America behind him. Without the capitalistic class he must have failed. Therefore one most momentous problem of the future is the attitude which capital can or will assume in this emergency.
That some of the more sagacious of the capitalistic class have preserved that instinct of self-preservation which was so conspicuous among men of the type of Washington, is apparent from the position taken by the management of the United States Steel Company, and by the Republican minority of the Congressional Committee which recently investigated the Steel Company; but whether such men very strongly influence the genus to which they belong is not clear. If they do not, much improvement in existing conditions can hardly be anticipated.
If capital insists upon continuing to exercise sovereign powers, without accepting responsibility as for a trust, the revolt against the existing order must probably continue, and that revolt can only be dealt with, as all servile revolts must be dealt with, by physical force. I doubt, however, if even the most ardent and optimistic of capitalists would care to speculate deeply upon the stability of any government capital might organize, which rested on the fundamental principle that the American people must be ruled by an army. On the other hand any government to be effective must be strong. It is futile to talk of keeping peace in labor disputes by compulsory arbitration, if the government has not the power to command obedience to its arbitrators' decree; but a government able to constrain a couple of hundred thousand discontented railway employees to work against their will, must differ considerably from the one we have. Nor is it possible to imagine that labor will ever yield peaceful obedience to such constraint, unless capital makes equivalent concessions,–unless, perhaps, among other things, capital consents to erect tribunals which shall offer relief to any citizen who can show himself to be oppressed by the monopolistic price. In fine, a government, to promise stability in the future, must apparently be so much more powerful than any private interest, that all men will stand equally before its tribunals; and these tribunals must be flexible enough to reach those categories of activity which now lie beyond legal jurisdiction. If it be objected that the American people are incapable of an effort so prodigious, I readily admit that this may be true, but I also contend that the objection is beside the issue. What the American people can or cannot do is a matter of opinion, but that social changes are imminent appears to be almost certain. Though these changes cannot be prevented, possibly they may, to a degree, be guided, as Washington guided the changes of 1789. To resist them perversely, as they were resisted at the Chicago Convention of 1912, can only make the catastrophe, when it comes, as overwhelming as was the consequent defeat of the Republican party.
Approached thus, that Convention of 1912 has more than a passing importance, since it would seem to indicate the ordinary phenomenon, that a declining favored class is incapable of appreciating an approaching change of environment which must alter its social status. I began with the proposition that, in any society which we now understand, civilization is equivalent to order, and the evidence of the truth of the proposition is, that amidst disorder, capital and credit, which constitute the pith of our civilization, perish first. For more than a century past, capital and credit have been absolute, or nearly so; accordingly it has not been the martial type which has enjoyed sovereignty, but the capitalistic. The warrior has been the capitalists' servant. But now, if it be true that money, in certain crucial directions, is losing its purchasing power, it is evident that capitalists must accept a position of equality before the law under the domination of a type of man who can enforce obedience; their own obedience, as well as the obedience of others. Indeed, it might occur, even to some optimists, that capitalists would be fortunate if they could certainly obtain protection for another fifty years on terms as favorable as these. But at Chicago, capitalists declined even to consider receding to a secondary position. Rather than permit the advent of a power beyond their immediate control, they preferred to shatter the instrument by which they sustained their ascendancy. For it is clear that Roosevelt's offence in the eyes of the capitalistic class was not what he had actually done, for he had done nothing seriously to injure them. The crime they resented was the assertion of the principle of equality before the law, for equality before the law signified the end of privilege to operate beyond the range of law. If this principle which Roosevelt, in theory at least, certainly embodied, came to be rigorously enforced, capitalists perceived that private persons would be precluded from using the functions of sovereignty to enrich themselves. There lay
68 Pa. 173.