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Cornell University Library 
 arV11565 
 
 Tired radicals and other papers. 
 
 3 1924 031 322 773 
 olin.anx 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924031322773 
 
TIRED RADICALS 
 & OTHER PAPERS 
 
WALTER WETL 
 
 TIRED RADICAL S 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 NEW YORK : B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. 
 MCMXXI 
 
 s 
 
COPYRIGHT, 192 1, BY 
 B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 To the friends of the late Walter Weyl-this book 
 will present more than an intrinsically interesting 
 volume. The validity of the essays at this date, 
 in the light of the happenings since they were 
 written, serves to justify the admiration of those 
 who followed the author's work during his life- 
 time. The quality of the present volume is such 
 as to provoke speculation concerning the poten- 
 tiality of a life so abruptly ended. 
 
 In view of our ambiguous relations with the 
 Far East the brief articles on Japan make one 
 wish that Mr. Weyl had been spared to complete 
 the fuller "study of the problem of which these 
 articles were a part. One of the hitherto un- 
 published chapters, "The Only Truly Revolution- 
 ary Class," taken from an unfinished book, "The 
 Concert of the Classes," suggests the direction of 
 the author's thinking and increases regret at the 
 loss of a more generous development of the ideas 
 here presented. 
 
 For permission to reprint some of the papers 
 in this volume, grateful acknowledgment is made 
 to The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, Asia 
 and the National Post. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Tired Radicals, 7 
 
 The Only Truly Revolutionary Class, 17 
 
 Equality, 3 1 
 
 The Party of the Third Part, 39 
 
 The New Wealth, 59 
 
 Prophet and Politician, 8 1 
 
 In the King's Robing Room, 103 
 
 The Crumbling House of Lords, 125 
 
 The Conquering Chinese, 149 
 
 Japan's Thwarted Emigration, 171 
 
 Japan's Menacing Birth-Rate, 181 
 
 The Clash of the Races, 199 
 
 [6] 
 
TIRED RADICALS 
 
TIRED RADICALS 
 
 I ONCE knew a revolutionist who thought that he 
 loved Humanity but for whom Humanity was 
 merely a club with which to break the shins of 
 the people he hated. He hated all who were 
 comfortable and all who conformed. He hated 
 the people he opposed and he hated those who 
 opposed his opponents in a manner different from 
 his. Zeal for the cause was his excuse for hating, 
 but really he was in love with hate and not with 
 any cause. 
 
 The war came, and this vibrant, humorless 
 man, this neurotic idealist who was almost a 
 genius, found a wider vent for his emotion. His 
 hatred, without changing its character, changed 
 its incidence. He learned to hate Germans, Bol- 
 shevists, and radicals. He completed the full 
 circle and soon was consorting most incongru- 
 ously with those whom he had formerly attacked. 
 Today nothing is left of his radicalism or his 
 always leaky consistency; nothing is left but his 
 hatred. At times he hates himself. He would 
 always hate himself could he find no one else to 
 hate. He is becoming half-reactionary, half-cyni- 
 cal. He will end — But who knows how anyone 
 will end? 
 
 Radicalism loses little in the defection of this 
 
 [9] 
 
unconsciously sadistical agitator, for despite his 
 stormy eloquence he was always less embarrassing 
 to his enemies than his friends. His case, how- 
 ever, suggests an inherent weakness in radical 
 movements, an inevitable mortality among radi- 
 cals, traceable to wars and other calamities, but 
 due chiefly to the manner in which radicals are 
 recruited and the kind of men they are. 
 
 There are two large, but not sharply defined 
 groups of radicals; radicals by environment and 
 radicals by temperament. The first are usually 
 the slower and surer-footed because their course 
 is controlled by the rut in which they live; the 
 latter are quicker, more violent, more uncompro- 
 mising, less realistic, because their radicalism 
 springs from within. They would be rebels in 
 Paradise and reformers in the Garden of Eden. 
 They do not depend on environment for their 
 passion but on their own psychological disequi- 
 librium, their unsatisfied emotions, their agonizing 
 perceptions of the gulf between their ideals and 
 a world that is always out of joint. These men 
 hate all dogmas and conventions that press down 
 on them and they possess the gift of rebellion. 
 But many of them are ill-grounded in their be- 
 liefs, for they have chosen a philosophy to suit 
 their nerves, as one chooses a wall-paper. Give 
 them a war or some other excitement and their 
 emotion is deflected, and their radical ideas "cease 
 upon the midnight without pain." 
 
 There are epochs in history when humanity be- 
 comes tired and emotions age quicker than usual, 
 
 [10] 
 
and radicals disappear. In the last centuries of 
 the Western Roman Empire, discouraged reform- 
 ers retired within themselves. Our own Civil 
 War depleted the store of our emotion and for 
 a generation put an end to American idealism. 
 So, also, the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905, 
 which destroyed Russian radicalism for a decade, 
 or at least drove it underground. In such periods 
 of reaction men who might have been rebels be- 
 come saints or debauches, depending on tempera- 
 ment and circumstances. At times this day of 
 reaction is brief, a flicker of darkness, a thin black 
 line in a brilliant spectrum. In all these periods, 
 long or short, radicalism declines and radicals 
 fall away. 
 
 At worst, however, it is not a unique calamity, 
 for even in good times age deals harshly with 
 radicals. Adolescence is the true day for revolt, 
 the day when obscure forces, as mysterious as 
 growth, push us, trembling, out of our narrow 
 lives into the wide throbbing life beyond self. 
 But one cannot forever remain adolescent and 
 long before a man's arteries begin to harden, he 
 sees things more as his father and grandfather 
 saw them. Once he becomes an ancestor he im- 
 bibes respect for ancestors and for what they 
 thought. As young radicals grow older they 
 marry pleasant wives, beget interesting children, 
 and begin to build homes in the country, and their 
 zeal cools. Life, they now think, is more than 
 reform or revolution. There are the lilies of the 
 field, as sweet to radicals as to conservatives, and 
 
 [iij 
 
as softly beautiful as in the days of Solomon's 
 glory. Life is old and tenaciously conservative, 
 and so is Nature — the stars, the sea, the moun- 
 tains — and so is Society; and what we are trying 
 to do is only what futile generations long dead 
 and rotted also tried to do. What is the use of 
 these endless efforts to budge the immovable 
 Earth? What use even to look ahead? You 
 "wished to know the secrets of the future?" So 
 Sylvestre Bonnard apostrophizes the perverse 
 beauty, Leuconoe, dead these nineteen hundred 
 years. "That future is now the past, and we know 
 it well. Of a truth you were foolish to worry 
 yourself about so small a matter." 
 
 After all, thinks the tire I radical, each of us 
 is bounded by his own tight skin, and his life is 
 wrapped up in his own sensations. If I must have 
 a world revolution to amuse me so much the 
 worse ; he is happier who can dig his garden and 
 be content. Why fret? Let God in His own 
 appointed time reform the world that He has 
 been rash enough to create. 
 
 Such is the course from radical thought and 
 action, from intense preoccupation with the af- 
 fairs of humanity, to self — self-culture, self-indul- 
 gence. Those who return to self after wandering 
 through a wilderness of altruism, acquire anew 
 something of the child's fresh relish for simple 
 experiences. They find all sorts of important 
 little busy-nesses and discover in the small world 
 all the absorbing interests in miniature that they 
 abandoned in the great world. The wearied 
 
 [12 J 
 
Charles the Fifth, abdicating as Holy Roman 
 Emperor, takes up life again in a pleasant little 
 garden in Estremadura. The deposed statesman 
 who is sent to jail recovers his interest in life from 
 a solitary blade of grass forcing its way up be- 
 tween the flagstones of the prison yard. So the 
 tired radical in his smaller way applies his grand 
 passion for Universal Housekeeping to a micro- 
 scopic farm, and he who aspired to overturn Soci- 
 ety (that obese, ponderous and torpid Society 
 that hates to be overturned) ends by fighting in 
 a dull Board of Directors of a village library for 
 the inclusion of certain books. To what little 
 uses do we descend and how gratefully 1 
 
 If I were the United States of America I would 
 give a few acres, an agreeable wife, two or three 
 docile children and a sufficient tale of kine and 
 swine to every discouraged radical, replenishing 
 him suitably like Job after his trials. I would 
 make him sovereign over these acres and leave 
 him there and forget him. I would not let him 
 loose on the path which he had tired of treading. 
 For progress is halted by these tired radicals who 
 do not know that they have ceased to be radicals. 
 They turn into pillars of salt. There they stand, 
 aging every moment as though aging were all they 
 had to do. Unconsciously they become sensible, 
 glacially sensible. They become expert in the 
 science of Impossibles; they know better than 
 any one else why every thing is impossible 
 because have they not failed in every thing? 
 Oh, how preternaturally practical they become I 
 
 [13] 
 
How they grow enamored of the Indifferent 
 because better than the Bad, and of the 
 Bad because better than the Worse! How 
 they decline into feeble, dwarfed enthusiasms, the 
 pale ghosts of their former ambitions I But let 
 their decline be smooth and their transition easy. 
 Let them tranquilly convince themselves that 
 "every nation has the government it deserves," 
 that "progress comes by good will alone," that the 
 world will better itself or that it is past bettering, 
 and let them accept all the other sedative aphor- 
 isms that end gently in a quietistic philosophy. Let 
 them even grow into clever reactionaries, or after 
 shedding all ideals, become absorbed in business, 
 practical politics or pleasure, retaining only an 
 ironical, half-regretful pity for their callow days 
 of radicalism. Let them go peacefully into the 
 great monastery of Effortlessness, where things 
 are left to God or Inevitable Social Evolution, 
 and whence strife and conflict and zeal are ban- 
 ished. 
 
 There is no use crying over those who are 
 graduated out of Radicalism, for the young trees 
 grow where the old trees die. In truth it is the 
 growth of the young that kills the old. The aging, 
 tiring radical, who has unwittingly given hostages 
 to Society and knows what butcher's bills and 
 baker's bills and the wife's dress and the chil- 
 dren's shoes cost and what a steady job means, and 
 who has learned in the course of the years what 
 slow monotonous things revolutions are, is also 
 discouraged by the radical fledgelings who being 
 
 [14 J 
 
younger and more ignorant are also more untram- 
 meled, vehement and appealing than he. After 
 all, radicalism is a young man's job and only a 
 few older guides are needed, men who preserve an 
 even balance between imagination and judgment, 
 between enthusiasm and experience, and who 
 though old are young. Every radical movement 
 is a relay race in which a fresh runner seizes the 
 torch from the hand of him who lags. It is better 
 that the tired radicals who have run their course 
 should drop out of the race. Let us therefore 
 not berate them and let us beware of charging 
 them with inconsistency, for they are consistent 
 with the way of life and the law of growth. Let 
 us rather give thanks to them and wish them 
 Godspeed for the youngest of us in time may go 
 their way. 
 
 [15] 
 
"THE ONLY TRULY REVOLUTIONARY 
 CLASS" 
 
"THE ONLY TRULY REVOLUTIONARY 
 CLASS" 
 
 The rise of the modern wage-earning class is 
 one of the big facts of history. We have always 
 had toilers and have long had wage-earners, but 
 we have never before had a separate class of 
 wage-earners, conscious and even proud of their 
 class, and willing to oppose the interests of that 
 class to those of other classes or of Society itself. 
 
 It is the machine which has created this class 
 spirit. The machine called forth its millions of 
 wage-earners, and these, congregating in cities, 
 toiled and bred and died, and toiled and bred 
 and died. Gradually out of an unnumbered 
 horde of starvelings, there grew up a more intel- 
 ligent, assertive and compact group. The prole- 
 tarian, the worker who toiled for a wage and had 
 nothing, began to think, to act. He struck. He 
 formed unions, co-operative stores and political 
 parties. He dared look at our whole social 
 structure, our factories and kings, our Parlia- 
 ments, churches, schools and courts of law from 
 his own proletarian standpoint. He dared to say 
 that he would change all these. He stepped for- 
 ward as the chosen instrument in a great social 
 revolution. 
 
 It is difficult to grasp the full significance and 
 
 [19] 
 
sweep of this change from the proletarian deject 
 and wretched to the proletarian come to con- 
 sciousness. Formerly he was docile, insensible, 
 unconsidered, useful, a brick in the building, a 
 thing, a part of our belongings. Descended from 
 miserable toilers, he was born to breed offspring 
 in his servile likeness. Civilization had always 
 gone over his head. Now this rude man stands 
 erect and menacing. Thought is writing itself 
 upon his dull face. He is a giant awakening from 
 the sleep of millenniums. Men see him with his 
 hand clenched, and do not know what is in that 
 hand — a crushed olive branch or a stone. 
 
 There is bewilderment and confusion as this 
 son of toil suddenly appears amid a chaffering 
 congregation. 
 
 All over the Western World, there are whis- 
 perings and quakings and soul-questionings. 
 There is doubt, there is fear ; there is the boastful 
 show of confidence covering a cavern of despair. 
 Men talk of adjustment, compromise, war to the 
 knife. The proletarian must be crushed. He 
 must be untaught to read, untaught to think; he 
 must be won by kindness ; he must be mown down 
 by the sword. 
 
 If in Europe the proletarian has appeared sud- 
 denly what shall we say of his coming in America ? 
 Yesterday we were still conquering the wilder- 
 ness, today we are a nation of cities and factories, 
 of trusts and slums. Fifty years from now, when 
 our children will be still alive, our millions of 
 proletarians will be many, many millions; our 
 [20] 
 
proletarian problems, our labor problems, if un- 
 solved, will be of stupendous magnitude and peril. 
 
 Already the struggle is on. Though there are 
 millions of wage-earners who are grumblingly 
 content with their lot and other millions who never 
 think of their lot at all, there still remains a vast 
 army bitterly disappointed and hotly antagonistic 
 to all there is. Everywhere are industrial evils 
 curable but uncured; inequalities resting on no 
 rational basis, greed rewarded, cunning exalted, 
 and honest humble toil be praised and despised. 
 Daily the gulf deepens between the man at the 
 machine and the man in the counting-house ; daily 
 industry becomes more impersonal, more coldly 
 and scientifically objective, more firmly based upon 
 a division of labor, which robs the worker of indi- 
 viduality, and upon an anonymity of capital, which 
 renders the employer irresponsible. Problems in- 
 volving the welfare and dignity of thousands of 
 workers are decided on the basis of mere pecuni- 
 ary considerations by financiers who have no real 
 sense of the human factors involved. Supply and 
 demand, output and profits rule in the stead of 
 a cooperative spirit and a sense of the social and 
 peculiarly human essence of the industrial prob- 
 lems. 
 
 It is unnecessary to translate this purely pecuni- 
 ary spirit into the countless industrial evils which 
 are its manifestations. The waste of child life, 
 the destruction of women, the killing and maim- 
 ing of men through accident, industrial disease, 
 over-work, insecurity and starvation wages; the 
 
 [21] 
 
robbing of the worker's dignity, independence 
 and joy in his work, the thwarting of ambitions, 
 the overhanging sense of an anonymous oppres- 
 sion — all these are old, all have been dinned into 
 our ears until we are deaf to them. And yet to 
 them who suffer or daily witness them these evils 
 are never old. A dark spirit of revolt broods 
 over the labor world, revealing itself in occasional 
 desperate ventures, fierce and pitiable. We read 
 of obdurate strikes, bloody clashes with police 
 and constabulary desperate assaults upon strike- 
 breakers, wanton destruction of property. We 
 catch glimpses of a truculent spirit given brutal 
 expression. Equally truculent and equally brutal 
 is the attitude of opponents. We read of vig- 
 ilance committees, of embittered groups of cit- 
 izens who tar and feather labor leaders and do 
 not stop far short of murder. We read of pow- 
 erful associations organized "to smash unions," 
 to put spies into union meetings, to bribe union 
 leaders, to "beat up" union workmen, to mobilize 
 into a professional strike-breaking army the reck- 
 less dissolute of the slum. Here and there the 
 tide of passion rises until all good will and mutual 
 accommodation are submerged. In the swirling 
 stream of contending hatreds, law, justice, and 
 morality are lost moorings, and brutal instinctive 
 crimes and subtle gentlemanly crimes intensify the 
 rancor which calls them forth. 
 
 Far more significant even than these violent 
 outbreaks is a deep-seated disillusionment of mil- 
 lions of prospering wage-earners. Beneath the 
 
 [22] 
 
surface of our industrial life, a slow fire smolders. 
 It is a covert, sullen discontent, a loose anger 
 untrained and undirected, a dull sense of injustice, 
 an ardent hope of betterment through untried 
 means. Millions of wage-earners, feeling that 
 something — they do not know exactly what — is 
 rotten in our Society, long for a change in what- 
 ever direction. There is the widest range of pro- 
 letarian discontent from that of the locomotive 
 engineer who wants more dollars to that of the 
 isolated fanatic, who would prayerfully set a torch 
 to our whole Society though he perished in the 
 ruins. 
 
 Nor is this discontent likely to disappear of 
 itself. The fuel upon which the fire feeds is 
 heaped up constantly. The army of wage-earners 
 grows at a stupendous rate, and its spirit of unity 
 does not lessen as our industrial concentration 
 proceeds. We are changing rapidly from an agri- 
 cultural to an industrial nation, and though our 
 farmers increase in numbers the city proletariat 
 increases far more rapidly. No longer is there 
 an outlet for the discontented in beckoning public 
 lands, where a wage-earner might always carve 
 out a farm. No longer is land so cheap as for- 
 merly, and yearly the disproportion increases be- 
 tween the price of the acre and the dollars in the 
 pay envelope. Yearly the cleavage widens be- 
 tween workers who must rise from the bottom 
 and educated men who enter industry upon higher 
 levels through college or technical school. The 
 massing of wage-earners in industrial cities and 
 
 [^3] 
 
suburbs increases. Millions of proletarians, grad- 
 uating from public schools into the common school 
 of industry, come to believe that their only chance 
 is within the proletarian ranks, that "their strug- 
 gle for life" must take the form of a struggle for 
 the proletariat. Gradually there emerges the 
 doctrine of a necessary and inevitable class war 
 between wage-earners and the owners of the 
 means of production, a doctrine eloquently 
 preached, held to be justified by history and 
 reason, and imposed upon the proletariat for its 
 own salvation and the salvation of society. 
 
 This is the portent of today, the prophecy 
 which is thundered in our ears, and of the fulfill- 
 ment of which our headlong development is bring- 
 ing us into an attitude of comprehension. The 
 sword of class consciousness is being whetted, and 
 its sharp edge will cut clean through the body 
 social, sundering us into two mutually antagonistic 
 groups. There is much talk of peace and gentle- 
 ness in this conflict, of struggles without hatred 
 and wars without bloodshed. It is not, however, 
 wholly reassuring. We look at the square chins 
 of employers and at the strong, steady hands of 
 workmen, we read accounts of labor struggles in 
 the past and in this morning's paper, and we do 
 not feel confident of a peaceful war. Already 
 there are open appeals to violence; already there 
 are confident predictions that the sword alone will 
 cut the knot. "It is apparent," says one of our 
 sociologists, voicing a sentiment that is wide- 
 spread, "it is evident that the industrial situation 
 
 [24] 
 
in this country has reached a point where men 
 have despaired of relief through the peaceful 
 means of public opinion and the ballot," and be- 
 lieve "that only civil war can readjust the situa- 
 
 tion." 
 
 They who lightly predict a class war without 
 realizing its probable horrors are like ignorantly 
 valorous children playing with lyddite. They do 
 not know what an explosion really is. Though the 
 doctrine does not necessarily and logically imply 
 a clash of arms, still the very conditions of the 
 problem involve the possibility of a sanguinary 
 physical struggle. If there be within Society no 
 final arbiter, no disinterested public opinion, no 
 overriding law, to decide between contestants, if 
 the issue is to be determined solely by the relative 
 strength of the contending parties then a real war, 
 with all the brutalities and bloodshed of a real 
 war, is scarcely evitable. In such a contest, neither 
 side in a moral or a material sense, would enter 
 naked into the arena. Such a conflict would be 
 far more terrible than its dismallest prophets 
 foretell. It would be a war waged on both sides 
 by high ideals, a war without hope of compromise, 
 without possibility of cessation until one principle 
 or the other had conquered, until one group or 
 the other had been disarmed or annihilated. We 
 must revert to international war to parallel the 
 prolific horrors of such a conflict, rooted as has 
 been taught, in the very soil of our economic de- 
 velopment. 
 
 Nor does the material loss and the suffering of 
 
 [25] 
 
such a conflict measure its full devastation. Both 
 sides to such a conflict would be encouraged by 
 a morality and a political principle, but both 
 would lose in the struggle the very idealism which 
 inspired them. For however high and noble are 
 the ideals which lead to war, the conflict usually 
 leaves the contestants with their idealism burned 
 out. War is a fire which consumes, while dis- 
 playing much that is good in men. Intolerance, 
 party spirit, unthinking loyalty, indispensable vir- 
 tues in war, are vices in times of peace. The war 
 spirit is an excusable reaction against evil condi- 
 tions, but it is- not capable of making the delicate 
 adjustments which will change these conditions. 
 
 But is submission better than war, even a cruel 
 and hopeless war? Are we to permit the rapidly 
 forming class consciousness of the workers only to 
 allow it to rust in passivity while present evil con- 
 ditions remain? Are we to expect the wage- 
 earner to renounce the advantage of his growing 
 unity and accept in a humble and grateful spirit 
 the reforms and concessions dealt out to him by 
 other social classes in a spirit of wisdom, caution 
 or humanity? 
 
 Those who believe that this is desirable or even 
 possible misunderstand the entire problem. It 
 is out of the very progress of labor that the prob- 
 lem of labor arises. So long as the worker is en- 
 slaved there is no more a labor problem than 
 there is a horse or an ox problem. There may 
 be technical questions as to the proper amount of 
 rations for the economical exploitation of the 
 [26] 
 
slave, but there is no social problem. Similarly, 
 so long as the worker is depressed below the level 
 of initiative, so long as he is ignorant, disunited, 
 weak and unexigent, the problem is merely one of 
 what shall Society do with an inert mass, a prob- 
 lem like that of pauperism. The labor problem 
 is what it is today simply because of the wage- 
 earner's rise in the scale, economically, politically 
 and intellectually, and because of his growing 
 awareness of his improved position and prospects. 
 To urge acquiescence upon the wage-earner is 
 therefore the height of fatuity. To urge him to 
 be content with his improving lot, to surrender 
 the gain of today on account of the gain of yes- 
 terday is to urge him to act upon principles diamet- 
 rically opposed to those upon which the rest of us 
 act. We are not a little illogical in this attitude. 
 Though we deplore the conditions under which 
 the proletarian lives, his deprivation of opportu- 
 nity and the contraction of his life, still we are 
 estranged by his natural reaction from these con- 
 ditions. Yet what in his case should we do? 
 The American colonists were not patient, long- 
 suffering men. They destroyed property, poured 
 other people's tea into the harbor, resisted the 
 orderly proceses of the Stamp Act, and engineered 
 a boycott which brought Great Britain to her 
 knees. American proletarians, native and for- 
 eign, share in this common revolutionary heritage. 
 True the mass of proletarians like the majority of 
 any large group are slow to anger. But once 
 a strong minority has dug a channel of revolt, 
 
 [27] 
 
the great inert majority sweeps along with over- 
 powering momentum. 
 
 Renunciation moreover is a virtue a trifle out 
 of date. Intended for the social class, it is a 
 dubious virtue indeed. Renunciation is usually a 
 virtue of necessity, passing with the passing of 
 the necessity. Nor can we solace ourselves 
 with the thought that, once the masses are re- 
 claimed by their traditional religion, they will 
 return to their former submission. All that is 
 past. We have lost the idea of a divinely or- 
 dained servile class. We have unchained innumer- 
 able ambitions and opened the door to astounding 
 successes, disappointments, vanities arid hatreds. 
 We have lost Hell, once a scourge of the ambi- 
 tious lowly; we have gone from a philosophy of 
 fear to one of hope. We have planted our feet 
 firmly upon the planet and in the midst of life are 
 sure — almost over-sure — of life. Collectively we 
 count our chances of life by the aid of mortality 
 tables, betting against Death that we shall live so 
 many years. Famines and plagues disappear and 
 we learn to destroy germs as we destroyed the 
 wild beasts of the fields. Fear vanishes and if we 
 wish to taste the ecstasy of dread, we must join 
 some Suicide Club. Our life has become mun- 
 dane ; we have shut the window which looked out 
 upon the dimness of another life. 
 
 The decay of other-worldliness has enormously 
 stimulated the demand for mundane success. It 
 is not that millions of men do not believe in an 
 after-life, but that that after-life has lost its well- 
 defined metes and bounds, and its chief savor. As 
 
 [28] 
 
Heaven becomes vaguer, money, fame, success, 
 luxury stand out more sharply in the foreground 
 of men's hopes. 
 
 All this means a complete revolution in our at- 
 titude towards all our social problems. We still 
 speak of a vale of tears, as though life were a 
 protractive trial, a preparation for death, an indif- 
 ferent preface to life eternal. But this is mere 
 Sunday talk. Actually all of us — the financier 
 floating a corporation, the farmer selling his crops, 
 the grocer laying in his canned goods, the laborer 
 drawing his pay of a Saturday — increasingly want 
 the things of this world, and are willing to take 
 the cash and let the credit go. The laborer, like 
 the rest of us, may think gravely of his ultimate 
 repast with "the politic worms"; but, however 
 devout, most of his thought goes to his own 
 mundane needs, pleasures, interests and compli- 
 cations. The labor problem is not a problem of 
 class renunciation, but of group and individual ex- 
 pression. It is the problem of securing for wage- 
 earners, primarily through their own efforts, the 
 material and moral conditions of life, health, 
 leisure, recreation, independence. It is a problem 
 similar to that of securing the bases of civilization 
 to the whole community. 
 
 This is the seeming dilemma with which the 
 Western World is faced, — what attitude to take 
 towards this strange significant phenomenon, the 
 rise of class consciousness. It is a new weapon 
 in the hands of a great but depressed class. Is it 
 to lead to a class war, which will undermine the 
 bases of our civilization and destroy the very 
 
 [29 J 
 
wealth upon which our Society is growing? Are 
 we to have hatred, war and failure? Or is class 
 consciousness to vanish into thin air and the wage- 
 earner to return to his ancient loyalties, his prob- 
 lems and the problems of civilization unsolved? 
 Or is there a third alternative ? 
 
 No problem could be more vital to our civiliza- 
 tion. We have here a large, not clearly defined 
 group, growing ever more powerful, growing ever 
 larger within our growing Society, attaining self- 
 realization and pressing hard upon all our tradi- 
 tional beliefs and principles and institutions be- 
 cause these press hard upon it. We have a series 
 of conditions and theories and maxims which re- 
 tard the progress and debase the living conditions 
 of millions of our fellow citizens. We have a class 
 consciousness which sunders the classes and ap- 
 pears sharpest in the sharpest crises. The prob- 
 lem is not merely economic but peculiarly human. 
 What is this class consciousness? What is its 
 origin, its strength, its limitations, its germ of 
 evil, its power to cure? 
 
 This is the theme of the present book. We shall 
 study this class consciousness, this rise of a pro- 
 letarian mind, showing its extent and its bounda- 
 ries. We shall discuss the problem whether this 
 class consciousness is likely to be arrayed against 
 all other classes and whether in such case it could 
 be successful. We shall discuss whether and how 
 this class consciousness can be used constructively 
 to build up a new industrial era and to bring co- 
 operation and concert into our troubled economic 
 world. 
 
 [30 J 
 
EQUALITY 
 
EQUALITY 
 
 Last evening I happened by accident upon a 
 strange coming together of the ends of New 
 York. Seated on couches and chairs in the spa- 
 cious, unpretentious drawing-room were unem- 
 ployed men, recruited from the bread-line and the 
 lodging-houses. These unemployed — there were 
 some thirty of them — were the guests of men 
 and women prominent in the city government and 
 in social reform. They had been called in to give 
 their advice to experts, to explain how relief work 
 should be organized, to discuss the infinitely com- 
 plex problem of unemployment. It seems absurd 
 and sentimental, does it not ? And yet it was evi- 
 dent that the expert learned much from these 
 harassed men, who knew how unemployment 
 hurts, and I took pride in city oificials willing to 
 study in such a book. 
 
 As I listened to these unemployed, as I heard 
 these famished wanderers tell of the monotonous 
 horrors of their life, of trudging night after night 
 through cold empty streets, of sleeping amid ver- 
 min on foul lodging-house floors or on chairs in 
 the stench of low saloons, of deprivation, of deg- 
 radation, of despair, I felt infinitely abased. I 
 looked about me at the well-clad solicitous men 
 and women who had come to meet them, and in 
 
 [33 J 
 
their faces read the same shame that I found in 
 my own heart, the same leaden guilt of living in 
 such a world. But for the happy bulwark of cir- 
 cumstance they too might have sunk into the abyss 
 and joined this despised regiment, useless because 
 unused. What could the fed say to the unfed? 
 What hope could they extend? What did their 
 slow plans for social regeneration mean to 
 wretches whose life would be crushed out long 
 before such plans could mature? 
 
 Only the unemployed were without constraint, 
 for they had the tragic dignity of hopelessness. 
 They stood up boldly, spoke not unwisely, and 
 showed no humility, before men who might have 
 housed and fed them for months without noticing 
 the cost. It struck me suddenly that these unem- 
 ployed men, being Americans, possessed more self- 
 assurance than Englishmen or Germans in like 
 cases would have possessed. These wanderers, de- 
 spised even by pickpockets, held the stubborn 
 conviction that after all they were human beings 
 and citizens, equal to the others in all respects 
 except the accident of money. 
 
 Of course they were not equal, if that word 
 means anything. They had not the health, the 
 vigor, the firm intellectual grasp. They could not 
 reason a thing out ; they were too obsessed by the 
 sordid trifles that had become their life. Some 
 were weak because they had grown up in an evil 
 environment; some, no doubt, were handicapped 
 before birth by a fatal heredity. What does 
 equality mean when men are as unequal as these ? 
 
 [34] 
 
What equality could exist between us, who sat 
 apart, secure and fed, and these friendless unem- 
 ployed, soon to be let out again upon the street, 
 soon to be redelivered to the life that skirts the 
 land of beggary and crime? 
 
 We tried desperately to be equal; it was the 
 least we could do. Were we not all men and 
 brothers? We use the title "brother" as men do 
 when in the absence of all social bonds they ap- 
 peal to the last shred, our common humanity. But 
 though our will was excellent, though we were all 
 engaged upon a single problem, it was not possible 
 even for the short space of three hours to keep 
 down the barrier. The two groups instinctively 
 separated. The unemployed were addresed as 
 "you fellows," "friends," "boys," but the title 
 "gentlemen," which is in vogue in almost every 
 section, was not used. Could it have been used 
 without derision? Is a man a gentleman with 
 whom society deals so ungently? To use that 
 term of equality to one whom you can save from 
 slow starvation or permit to starve, whom you can 
 raise by a nod or condemn to misery is to mock 
 him, as though you offered a flask of perfume to a 
 wretch dying of hunger. 
 
 There can be no equality, nor any approach to 
 equality, except among men economically inde- 
 pendent and economically comparable. You may 
 talk of equality or fraternity, of equal civil rights, 
 of equal political rights, of the brotherhood of 
 man and all the rest, but unless your man has a 
 secure economic position, a chance to earn his liv- 
 
 [35 J 
 
ing in dignity and honor, he has no rights what- 
 soever. Political equality is a farce and a peril 
 unless there is at least some measure of economic 
 equality. What does it avail the poor devil 
 trudging the streets without a chance of bed or 
 breakfast, that he is an equal American citizen 
 with a vote? For what or whom shall he vote? 
 What interest has he in all our fine political 
 schemes, in economy and efficiency, in democracy 
 and progress, when he himself after election as 
 before is without a job and hungry? If such a 
 man sell his political influence for whatever he 
 can get, who is there to blame him? 
 
 We shall not advance far in working out our 
 American ideals without striking hard at this in- 
 equality which has grown with the growth of so- 
 ciety and which produces insane fortunes at the 
 top and destitution at the bottom. When we talk 
 of inequality, we mean inequality of possessions, 
 inequality of income, inequality of industrial op- 
 portunity. It is not an easy task to eradicate this 
 inequality, nor is it one which can be solved in a 
 year or a decade, for the evil is rooted in com- 
 plex conditions and in strong human instincts, and 
 some of it is an inevitable result of quite healthy 
 economic processes. Inequality, even in its worst 
 manifestations, will last long, for the very reason 
 that it means political inequality, for the very rea- 
 son that the man of great fortune is the controller 
 of other men's lives and other men's opinions and 
 votes, and that those who have absolutely nothing 
 join with those who have too much. The road 
 
 [36] 
 
to equality is difficult and long. We shall not even 
 approach our goal without a national understand- 
 ing of this problem, nor without radical economic 
 readjustments, which shall prevent excessive pri- 
 vate accumulation at its source, and give to men 
 at the bottom of society the economic as well as 
 the educational bases of independence. 
 
 [37] 
 
THE PARTY OF THE THIRD PART 
 
THE PARTY OF THE THIRD PART 
 
 "The quarrel," opined Sir Lucius O'Trigger, "is 
 a very pretty quarrel as it stands ; we should only 
 spoil it by trying to explain it." 
 
 Something like this was once the attitude of the 
 swaggering youth of Britain and Ireland, who 
 quarreled "genteelly" and fought out their bloody 
 duels "in peace and quietness." Something like 
 this, also, after the jump of a century, was the atti- 
 tude of employers and trade-unions all over the 
 world toward industrial disputes. Words were 
 wasted breath; the time to strike or to lock out 
 your employees was when you were ready and your 
 opponent was not. If you won, so much the bet- 
 ter; if you lost — at any rate, it was your own 
 business. Outsiders were not presumed to inter- 
 fere. "Faith 1" exclaimed Sir Lucius, "that same 
 interruption in affairs of this nature shows very 
 great ill-breeding." 
 
 It was not only in strikes, but in all industrial 
 matters, that we believed it to be an affair of the 
 parties themselves. We had always been taught 
 that the state should keep the ring, but not inter- 
 fere, that the wage relation was a private relation, 
 that the enlightened interest of employer and em- 
 ployee, if given full play, would benefit all. It 
 was no business of the community to meddle with 
 
 [41] 
 
the community's business. "Let the state mind its 
 own business," was an axiom of politics. 
 
 All this is changing. The philosophy of laissez- 
 faire, of let-alone, is gradually eaten away by ex- 
 ceptions. It is not so much controverted as 
 ignored. To-day public opinion becomes the 
 dominant factor in industry. The public is learn- 
 ing its rights and its responsibilities. It helps to 
 determine how, on what conditions, in what cir- 
 cumstances, men shall work. It decides what shall 
 be the hours of toil for women and children. It 
 declares who is right and who is wrong in great 
 strikes which snap the thread of industry. Not 
 only does it make such decisions, but it enforces 
 them with invisible and intangible instruments. 
 
 Everywhere we find signs of this keener interest 
 and this broader authority of the public in matters 
 of industry. We cannot read our morning news- 
 papers, we cannot walk in the streets or ride in 
 the cars, we cannot go to school, church, or the- 
 atre, without seeing evidences of a public inter- 
 vention, legal or extra-legal, obvious or subtle. 
 The factory inspector we have long had with us, 
 but year by year his role becomes more important 
 and more fully recognized. Year by year the in- 
 dustrial codes of the states expand and grow more 
 explicit and minute. Daily appeals are made for 
 public approbation of industrial acts. An impor- 
 tant electric company advertises at great expense 
 that it is saving the Hves of hundreds of its work- 
 ers. Other concerns vaunt their generosity to 
 employees rather than the cheapness of their 
 
 [42] 
 
wares. "We were the first," advertises one auto- 
 mobile concern, "to establish profit-sharing with 
 our employees." Public approval pays; the pub- 
 lic cares. The public intervents increasingly as its 
 interest in industrial matters becomes increasingly 
 manifest. 
 
 In times of strike this interest of the public be- 
 comes especially clear. If half a dozen workmen 
 in a little bake-shop go out on strike, the struggle 
 is not likely to be of importance to the public. 
 Where, however, the number of strikers is large, 
 the duration of the strike long, the service that is 
 interrupted of vital importance and requiring con- 
 tinuity, where the strike or lockout affects large 
 masses of the population — there the public inter- 
 est becomes transparently obvious. Our whole 
 industrial society is interdependent; you cannot 
 remove one wheel without bringing the whole 
 machinery to a stop. 
 
 In many ordinary strikes on street railways, in 
 coal-mines, in big manufacturing industries, this 
 direct interest of the public is made manifest. The 
 public wearies of being a mere innocent bystander 
 while the two parties fight out their feud at the 
 pistol's mouth. It objects to being struck by a 
 brick hurled through a car window. It objects 
 even more strenuously to being deprived of ac- 
 customed means of transportation to which it has 
 accommodated its daily labor and its daily life. 
 
 All this, however, does not measure the full 
 concern of the public. How overwhelming that 
 interest might become would be made clear in the 
 
 [43] 
 
event of a general railroad strike. Suppose that 
 tomorrow all the trainmen in the United States 
 should strike. We do not like to consider such 
 contingencies; as a nation we do not believe in 
 earthquakes except during the shock. Still, the 
 case, though extreme, is not impossible. Railroad 
 employees have a legal right to demand higher 
 wages ; railroad companies have a right to refuse. 
 
 At the very outbreak of such a strike provisions 
 in the inland cities would rise to famine prices. 
 The steady stream of food would be dammed; the 
 milk supply would trickle, then disappear; the 
 death-rate (especially among babies) would 
 amount to terrifying figures. The strike, were it 
 to last a fortnight, would bring havoc and desola- 
 tion. There would be blanched faces and des- 
 perate deeds ; there would be vigilance committees 
 and mobs of unemployed men storming city cen- 
 tres where the food commandeered by municipal 
 authorities would be stored. The machinery of 
 industrial life would break down. A month of 
 even partial isolation might mean a dissolution 
 of social ties and a temporary reversion to bar- 
 barism. The cities, in the grip of a relentless, 
 slowly closing fist, would sicken, hunger, starve. 
 
 What would happen? We cannot foretell ex- 
 actly what form public action would take, but we 
 do know that the nation's paramount rights would 
 be upheld, that the stoppage would cease, that 
 some competent tribunal would decide upon the 
 merits of the controversy. In so desperate a sit- 
 uation the legal right of railroads and of men 
 
 [44] 
 
to make such bargains as they chose would be sub- 
 ordinated to the nation's right of self-defense. 
 When social peace, when the very existence of 
 the community, is at stake, everything — private 
 property, private contract, law, constitutions, pre- 
 cedents — give way. The interest of the public 
 becomes dominant, unique. It is held to justify 
 any necessary action, legal, extra-legal, illegal. 
 
 An ounce of prevention is worth a hundred be- 
 lated investigating committees, and actually the 
 public moves before such devastating strikes occur. 
 A public disapproval, quick and vengeful, casts 
 its shadow before. A sensitive mariner does not 
 wait till the iceberg strikes his vessel; he detects 
 its chill presence miles away. Today astute rail- 
 road managers and equally astute presidents of 
 the great railroad brotherhoods understand that 
 they may go just so far in the way of bargaining. 
 Strikes on individual railroads occur, but a gen- 
 eral railroad strike, one covering the whole coun- 
 try or a wide territory, is fast becoming unthink- 
 able. Where railroad conflicts of such magnitude 
 are in question the two parties may threaten a 
 lock-out or strike; they may creep to the very 
 verge of the conflict, but not beyond. At the very 
 moment when enthusiasts are clamoring for com- 
 pulsory arbitration in railroad disputes, we are 
 already approaching what in practice amounts to 
 such compulsory arbitration, with the public as 
 arbitrator. 
 
 In five years sixty threatened strikes upon the 
 railroads of the country were averted through the 
 
 [45] 
 
interposition of the public. Again and again the 
 special representatives of the government were 
 asked to mediate, and in no instance were their 
 efforts fruitless. Neither side dares refuse arbi- 
 tration; neither side dares violate the award. 
 The fateful issues involved in war make for 
 peace. What is feared is not the injury inflicted 
 by the opponent, but the certainty that the public, 
 suffering grievously, will cause both sides to suffer 
 in turn. For the railroads and the brotherhoods, 
 with their vast resources, could carry on for 
 months a struggle which the public could not en- 
 dure for weeks. Neither side dares face obloquy 
 or sudden punitive action by the public. Public 
 opinion reaches high up. It cannot be shut out of 
 the home of the multimillionaire. It also reaches 
 down. The officers of the trade-union enter into 
 friendly social relations with many elements of 
 the population. Nor are trade.-union members 
 themselves immune. Public opinion is expressed 
 more or less certainly by newspapers which appeal 
 to the very men to whom the union appeals. 
 Where the interest of the public is as obvious as 
 in the case of the railroad, a strike or lockout is 
 not to be entered upon lightly. 
 
 There are many ways, much less obvious, in 
 which public opinion affects strikes by throwing 
 the weight of its sympathy to the one side or the 
 other. It does this often crudely, sizing up a sit- 
 uation in the mass, expressing itself perhaps some- 
 what ignorantly through newspapers, magazines, 
 and protest meetings. The sympathy of the pub- 
 [46 J 
 
lie is quicker than its sober judgment ; it has little 
 interest in dialectics or fine distinctions ; it is likely 
 to introduce extraneous matters into decisions; it 
 is not always free from prejudice. None the less 
 it acts, and acts decisively, in cases where it might 
 seem difficult to exert any influence whatsoever. 
 
 Public opinion is not an automatic, self-regulat- 
 ing device in which you put a just cause into the 
 slot and get out a victory. The side with the ap- 
 proval of the public cannot rest quietly, knowing 
 that right will prevail. Public opinion, like other 
 gods, inclines not infrequently to the side of the 
 big battalions. It helps those who help them- 
 selves. Time and heroic endurance are necessary 
 to enlist it, for it dislikes labor disturbances in 
 general and hesitates to believe that conditions 
 are evil unless workers strike against them. Public 
 opinion being slow to awake, a strike must usually 
 last some little time before it is concentrated and 
 mobilized. Perhaps it is better so. A social 
 group should not rely too largely upon out- 
 siders. Public opinion is a good ally, but a poor 
 guardian. 
 
 That public opinion is daily becoming more 
 potent in labor disputes is clearly shown by the 
 increasing endeavor of both sides to secure its 
 invaluable aid. Skilful statements are issued by 
 each party; the best points of each are elucidated 
 and emphasized; hostile contentions are merci- 
 lessly attacked. When the Eastern railroads were 
 confronted with a demand for higher wages for 
 their trainmen, they posted up in their stations 
 
 [47 J 
 
carefully prepared statements bristling with sta- 
 tistics and arguments. There is often a certain 
 jockeying for position. The employers insert paid 
 advertisements in the newspapers, showing that 
 their cause is just or is the cause of the public, 
 and the strikers reply in interview or signed man- 
 ifesto. Both sides learn to know the best lines 
 of approach to the public mind, for today, as 
 always, we are ruled by phrases. Each group 
 emphasizes its most popular contentions, each 
 group puts its best foot foremost. 
 
 All of which is new — and old. There was never 
 a time when the public was so frequently and skil- 
 fully approached and never a time when each side 
 to a controversy did not to some extent appeal to 
 outsiders. As early as 1721 we find the master 
 tailors of London seeking to direct public opinion 
 against the malicious "Journey-men Taylors," who 
 "have lately entered into a combination to raise 
 their wages, and leave off working an hour sooner 
 than they used to do," refusing to work and 
 "choosing rather to live in idleness," thus becom- 
 ing "not only useless and burdensome, but also 
 very dangerous to the publick." Then, as now, 
 it was urged that the strike was against public 
 interest, since the men struck in busy season 
 "against the King's Birthday . . . which is a 
 great disappointment to gentlemen." 
 
 Doubtless our modern memorialists, like the 
 master tailors of 1721, are prone to exaggerated 
 statement and even to hypocrisy. Now as then 
 both sides protest overmuch. None the less the 
 
 [ 48 J 
 
result, on the whole, is good. The entrance of 
 the third party means a certain moralization of 
 the strike and of the whole industrial relationship. 
 Our tame consciences, so largely the reflection of 
 our neighbor's opinions, awake in anticipation 
 when what we do is to be blazoned forth in the 
 public prints. Public opinion may not always be 
 a just judge, but cases arise where any judge is 
 better than none. 
 
 Where, however, the two parties themselves 
 can come to a just settlement, it is better for the 
 third party not to interfere. Mutual agreement, 
 where possible, is better than arbitration. When 
 the parties in interest, respecting each other and 
 fearing each other, meet in great industrial par- 
 liaments, and there work out trade agreements, 
 solemn, binding treaties — when such arrangements 
 are achieved by the parties themselves — we have 
 a development of industrial democracy more val- 
 uable and real than the award of any arbitrator. 
 Where the contestants are not too unequal in 
 strength nor too disorganized and chaotic, where 
 the public interest is not immediate and over- 
 whelming, let the issue be decided by the parties 
 and reserve public opinion as a final resort. Some 
 knots should be loosened, not cut. 
 
 Sometimes, too, public opinion itself is weak 
 and distraught. Without concurring with Sir 
 Robert Peel, who asserted that "public opinion 
 is a great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, 
 wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and news- 
 paper paragraphs," we may still admit that it is 
 
 [49] 
 
not all-wise nor all-powerful. How could it be 
 when the public consists of us and our neighbors, 
 the people in the street-cars and at the baseball 
 games ? The public is in part careless, in part ig- 
 norant, in part interested. It is too often but a 
 sleeping giant flinging out with heavy fist against 
 friend or foe, hating to be disturbed. Having 
 an interest in peace, it does not always inquire 
 whether the peace is honorable. 
 
 Moreover, public opinion solidifies slowly. It 
 is not a whole thing — not a thing of one piece. 
 Some men instinctively side with the workers; 
 others with the employers. Subsidiary interests 
 are involved. Some will make money if the strike 
 continues or is won, others if the strike is lost. 
 Beyond all these, however, there is a social group 
 cherishing the interests of society as a whole (as 
 we all do at times) , who want a strike settled or 
 averted only under conditions honorable to both 
 sides. 
 
 This basic public opinion is growing in volume 
 and depth. Attracting many people of some leis- 
 ure and education, it extends downward in the 
 economic scale as industrial and educational op- 
 portunities widen, as wages rise, as our high- 
 schools and colleges pour out greater numbers of 
 educated graduates, and as our new national 
 problems give that education an increasingly social 
 turn. Public opinion becomes democratized. To 
 be effective, however, this opinion must not only 
 swell in volume, but be increasingly directed into 
 proper channels. Uninstructed, untrained, acci- 
 [SO] 
 
dental public opinion drifts like a huge derelict, 
 and its impact is perilous. 
 
 Slowly, however, this public opinion is being 
 unified and guided into effective channels. Ap- 
 peals are made not only to immediate interest, but 
 to wide sympathies and a common morality. A 
 distinction is made between strikes which are nec- 
 essary, beneficent, and an education to the work- 
 ers and the community, and those that are waste- 
 ful and disintegrating. The public slowly learns 
 to uphold the right of the weaker. It learns its 
 own right and ability to secure Its own protection, 
 to assure itself that industries be not permanently 
 injured, that the human side of the labor problem 
 be not neglected. 
 
 Though the weapons of this public opinion are 
 impalpable, they are many and powerful. Polit- 
 ical action is one weapon; publicity Is another. 
 Business is subject to law, and reforms, fought for 
 uncertainly by hungry strikers, may often be more 
 surely obtained by well-conceived laws secured at 
 the Instance of the whole community. Publicity 
 is a broom which sweeps out the dark corners and 
 corrects, by exposing, evils which the law cannot 
 reach. Men who will risk a punitive fine dare not 
 stand up to a Congressional committee or a news- 
 paper reporter. Meditation and investigation 
 are feared by those who have no justice in their 
 cause, and are not only a preventive of strikes, but 
 also a guide to the public in its own determina- 
 tions. We live today in a statistical age. Statis- 
 tics help us to discover what Is a living wage and 
 
 [51] 
 
what wages are actually paid in any given indus- 
 try. The public learns to demand certain mini- 
 mum conditions in industry and to judge by these 
 whether a threatened strike is or is not justifiable. 
 
 It is not only in strikes, however, that the public 
 has been an innocent bystander. If workers be- 
 come ill or are maimed in factories, it is to the 
 public hospitals that they go; if they work at too 
 early an age, for too long hours or under evil con- 
 ditions generally, they tend to become public 
 charges. In one way or another the unemployed 
 also are maintained at public expense. 
 
 This direct interest of the public is strongly 
 reinforced by a sympathy and a growing moral 
 sense which result in a powerful assertion of pop- 
 ular control in many industrial relations. The 
 vitality of this public sympathy can no longer be 
 ignored. Though fluctuating and vague, it is 
 effective. No conception of our modern life is so 
 unreal and sentimental as that which excludes such 
 sentiment from the category of social mo- 
 tives. The public, semi-uninformed but learn- 
 ing, stretches across class lines, grows slowly into 
 self-consciousness, and exerts its new power wisely 
 and unwisely — and increasingly. 
 
 This new social consciousness is partly reflected 
 in what is called "welfare work," an industrial 
 house-cleaning in which the employer wields the 
 broom. Much may be justly urged against such 
 welfare work. Being a reform from the top, it is 
 not nearly so valuable as are democratic reforms 
 secured by the workers themselves or by the com- 
 
 [52] 
 
munity. At times it is resorted to merely for the 
 purpose of making more democratic reforms im- 
 possible. What is given with one hand is occa- 
 sionally taken away with the other. 
 
 There still remains, however, a wide margin of 
 possible benefit in such internal reform of industry, 
 made by employers for the benefit of employees. 
 It is natural that the more intelligent and public- 
 spirited employers should so act. Such men grad- 
 ually imbibe a more social view of industry, learn- 
 ing it not only as members of the public, but as 
 parties to conflicts and controversies in which the 
 public has intervened. Even employers who have 
 not yet attained to a democratic conception of in- 
 dustry, and who merely provide cottages and 
 baths and midday lunches in the spirit in which 
 medieval magnates built churches — even such as 
 these become imbued with a vague sense that the 
 public has a just interest and enforceable rights in 
 the whole industrial relation. 
 
 The development of welfare work or "indus- 
 trial betterment" has been rapid and continuous. 
 Humane and far-sighted employers have im^ 
 proved their factories and shops, built "model" 
 homes for their employees, and furnished airy and 
 cheerful dining-rooms in which good meals are 
 provided at cost. Baths, night-schools, kinder- 
 gartens, recreation centres, have been provided 
 for the workers. In some of these schemes a 
 large measure of democratic management is pre- 
 served; in certain others the government, though 
 paternalistic, is at least far-sighted and scientific. 
 
 [53] 
 
A department of health and economics is main- 
 tained by one large employers' association, which 
 not only provides recreation, comfort, and san- 
 itary conditions for its employees, but also care- 
 fully studies the effect of such improvements upon 
 the productiveness of the force. From this point 
 to the establishment of general standards, which 
 will soon be enforced by law and public opinion, 
 is but a step. 
 
 What is most significant about this programme, 
 however, is not the actual reform accomplished, 
 although that is not negligible, but the fact that 
 many benevolent employers advertise their benev- 
 olence. Everywhere we find great manufacturing 
 establishments spending huge sums of money to 
 inform the public that they treat their employees 
 humanely. It pays the employer to let the public 
 know this. It pays because the public cares. Back 
 of the far-sightedness of individual employers 
 lies the sympathetic concern of a wide public. 
 
 In protective legislation for workmen this in- 
 fluence of the public stands out even more clearly. 
 Labor legislation has been slow and difficult in 
 the United States. Gradually, however, public 
 opinion penetrates into the inmost fields of indus- 
 trial life, and year by year laws are passed for 
 the benefit of the worker, protecting life, limb, 
 health, wage, and morality. Night work, Sunday 
 work, the toil of women, of children, and even 
 of men, are regulated or forbidden by statute. 
 Laws are passed to exclude workers from labor 
 for which they are not fitted, to protect them from 
 
 [54J 
 
dangerous machines and insanitary conditions, to 
 compel frequent payment of wages, to prohibit 
 the truck system, to provide for factory inspec- 
 tion by state officials. This legislation, though 
 demanded by the workers themselves, is approved 
 and secured by public opinion. 
 
 The chief beneficiaries of this benevolent inter- 
 position are the weaker and more exploited work- 
 ers — especially the children. Child labor is no 
 new thing in America. In the early thirties the 
 Massachusetts mills were full of young children 
 and the Massachusetts schools half empty. A 
 child of any age might work any number of hours. 
 Public opinion was inert. Today almost every 
 state has a child-labor law, good, bad, or indif- 
 ferent, and yearly the laws improve. The public 
 is slowly convinced that children — every-day, or- 
 dinary children — are a national asset. No longer 
 is a private agreement between the employer and 
 the child's careless parents inviolable. The public 
 insists that there is a third party to the contract, 
 that this third party has interest overriding the in- 
 terests of the two other parties. 
 
 Women also come under the protection of law 
 and public opinion. Women have always been 
 largely employed. In some of our great industries 
 they were more important proportionately three 
 generations ago than they are today. They are 
 now, however, as they have always been, relatively 
 defenseless. Their wages are low, their skill is 
 low, they are easily replaced. For the most part 
 they form a fluctuating group of young persons, 
 
hoping to marry, and as yet incapable of forming 
 trade-unions as powerful and aggressive as are 
 those of the men. For this very reason, because 
 of their weakness, the state intervenes. Public 
 opinion works also outside the law. There grows 
 up a subtle social code which visits with disappro- 
 bation the exploitation of girl workers, and which 
 applauds wholeheartedly the efforts of individual 
 employers to improve conditions. 
 
 How far public opinion is to go in this reshap- 
 ing of our industrial life no one can safely predict. 
 That it will go far, however, is inevitable. The 
 force making for reform is not spent; the ideals, 
 already formed, are not nearly attained. 
 
 As public opinion advances it revolutionizes 
 all our social ideals. Business, it is true, remains 
 business, competitive, aggressive, pushing, not a 
 school of the virtues, not a moral gymnasium. At 
 the same time, without excessive fussiness or ham- 
 pering of individual effort, there remains a widen- 
 ing opportunity to improve and moralize the in- 
 dustrial relation through public opinion. We are 
 shifting the centre of the industrial universe; 
 more and more that world revolves around the 
 man who works rather than about product or 
 profit. Industrial accidents, industrial disease, 
 low wages, excessive toil, industrial autocracy, 
 encounter an ever-stronger public condemnation. 
 
 To accomplish our new industrial purposes we 
 are gradually evolving a complex machinery by 
 which the party of the third part makes manifest 
 and effective its will. Great strikes and lockouts 
 
 [56] 
 
vitally affecting the public welfare are by one 
 device or another prevented from becoming too 
 disastrous. Investigation, mediation, arbitration, 
 legislation, circumscribe and limit such clashes. 
 Public opinion and public law determine more and 
 more definitely what is a fair and reasonable con- 
 duct of industry, what is to be forbidden and 
 what permitted in the public interest. Vast insur- 
 ance and other plans are devised, making for co- 
 operation between the two parties for the main- 
 tenance of peace and a nearer approach to justice. 
 More and more the public sets its approval upon 
 great parliaments of industry, in which unions 
 and associations of employers meet together to 
 form treaties of peace. Stability, continuity, se- 
 curity, and minimum standards of life and labor 
 are gradually approached. 
 
 We are today only in the beginning of this 
 progress. There will be much warfare, and peace 
 will never be absolute; many experiments will 
 break down before success is attained. Progress, 
 however, will continue. The most hopeful sign 
 in our modern industrial relations is the growing 
 interest and the wider and more active participa- 
 tion by a public growing gradually in intelligence 
 and social consciousness. 
 
 [57J 
 
THE NEW WEALTH 
 
THE NEW WEALTH 
 
 It is a far cry from the present day to that long- 
 ago morning in 1732 when there issued from the 
 presses of Benjamin Franklin, printer, the first 
 damp pages of "Poor Richard's Almanac." Poor 
 Richard escaped the common fate of almanacs, 
 which are not presumed to outlive their year. It 
 survived because, more than any other publica- 
 tion, it expressed the practical ethics of the people, 
 their shrewd, hard, humorous sense. It was 
 America's living philosophy at a time when Amer- 
 ica was still poor. It appealed to apprentices, 
 journeymen, tradesmen, husbandmen, fishermen, 
 and whalers; to a whole population of poor, am- 
 bitious men. It preached to these ambitious poor 
 the ethics of ambitious poverty. It preached self- 
 reliance, individual success, sobriety, frugality, in- 
 dustry. 
 
 Let us listen to these teachings. "Time is 
 money," says Poor Richard, "credit is money; 
 money begets money." "He who kills a breeding 
 sow destroys all her offspring, to the thousandth 
 generation." "After industry and frugality," 
 says Poor Richard, "nothing contributes more to 
 the raising of a young man in the world than 
 punctuality and justice in all his dealings." It is 
 all very canny, near-viewed, and common-sensible. 
 It is the early American version of that immortal, 
 [61] 
 
ever-rewritten book, "How to Get On in the 
 World." 
 
 Yet how strangely sounds the worldly wisdom 
 of that day in the ears of the worldly wise of 
 today I Is it still all true ? Is it still true in the 
 same sense as before? In this day we beware of 
 being over-industrious or over-frugal. To work 
 too hard and too long is to work yourself out, and 
 conservation, like sundry other virtues, begins at 
 home. It is not economy to save overmuch on 
 clothes, which are the poor young man's adver- 
 tisement. We must dress up to our jobs, even to 
 the jobs we merely hope to get. Success, more- 
 over, depends not a little on environment, on 
 luck, on the favor of others. Chances, astounding 
 and romantic, come to those who stand and wait 
 as well as those who toil continuously. Our future 
 may depend less on the hours that we work today 
 than on the words or the smile we exchange with 
 some anonymous fellow-passenger in the ofEce- 
 building elevator. America has changed since 
 1732. 
 
 Of that multiform and complex change, no sin- 
 gle factor is more important than the astounding 
 increase in our national wealth. Whoever studies 
 the statistics of that wealth, of our commerce, 
 banking, insurance, manufacturing, mining, agri- 
 culture, understands forthwith why the excellent 
 virtues of Poor Richard seem a trifle old-fash- 
 ioned. Nor are statistics necessary. One need but 
 look out upon the face of the country to see every- 
 where signs of an abounding prosperity. In total 
 [62] 
 
wealth America easily leads the world; in propor- 
 tion to population, we are among the wealth- 
 iest, if not actually the wealthiest, of nations. 
 Even more significant is the rate of our accumula- 
 tion. The statistics which indicate this accumula- 
 tion are from certain points of view unsatisfac- 
 tory, unmeaning, and even misleading, but they 
 at least confirm direct impressions and are worth 
 quoting. From seven billions of dollars in 1850 
 our national wealth increased by 1912 to one hun- 
 dred and eighty-seven billions. America, poor in 
 1732, still relatively poor in 1850, is now growing 
 astoundingly, one might almost say fantastically, 
 rich, despite its ever-remaining fringe of hopeless 
 poverty. 
 
 This wealth does not mean degeneration. 
 There is an old and stubborn belief that poor na- 
 tions are honest, rugged, industrious, and pious, 
 while rich nations are faithless and decadent. 
 "Ill fares the land," proclaims the poet, "to has- 
 tening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and 
 men decay." The sociologist, however, fails to 
 find any necesary connection between poverty and 
 virtue, between wealth and vice. All our statis- 
 tical tests disprove the ancient doctrine that ac- 
 cumulation of wealth means decay of men. Pros- 
 perity has its uses as well as adversity, and each 
 has its customary virtues and vices. 
 
 It is true that prosperity creates new problems. 
 Wealth often produces inequality, changes modes 
 of life, separates rich from poor, and sows the 
 seeds of hatred and distrust. As a poor, undiffer- 
 
 [63] 
 
entiated community acquires wealth, and this 
 wealth comes to men unequally, classes arise, and 
 men dress, live, get money, marry, and fight ac- 
 cording to the traditions and morality of their own 
 class. Luxury enters. Sparta cannot maintain 
 her strict regimen, her iron money, her rigid 
 simplicity and hardness of life, once the Lacedae- 
 monians acquire wealth. When, under Solomon, 
 Judea becomes opulent, classes arise, morality and 
 religion itself become gilt-edged, and eloquent 
 prophets preach in vain against the avarice, cru- 
 elty, and pride of the rich. In Egypt, Babylon, 
 Carthage, great wealth involves subtle and revolu- 
 tionary changes. 
 
 There are men who believe that as Rome grew 
 rich and fell, so America will grow rich and fall. 
 Wealth will beget luxury, and luxury will breed 
 a weak race of soft-handed men. We shall sur- 
 render ourselves to a feverish, unresting search 
 for gold. The rich will despoil the poor and cor- 
 rupt the law. In such a mercenary common- 
 wealth, writes a great American teacher, "the 
 magistrates of the nation will judge for a consid- 
 eration, the priests thereof will teach for hire, 
 the prophets thereof will divine for money, the 
 princes thereof will be companions of thieves; 
 every one loving gifts and following after re- 
 wards." 
 
 The error in these doleful predictions lies in a 
 failure to distinguish between ancient wealth and 
 modern. The analogy with Rome halts on all- 
 fours. Rome suffered not because it was wealthy 
 
 [64] 
 
(it was poor compared to the England, France, 
 Germany, or America of today), but because its 
 wealth was ill-gotten, ill-used, and ill-distributed. 
 Wealth came to Italy through exactions from 
 conquered populations, not from the labors of free 
 Roman citizens, and such spoliation destroys booty 
 in the taking. Nor did the wealth, so obtained, 
 go back into productive enterprises. It was 
 squandered on palaces and arches, on armies, and 
 on hordes of destitute, careless, and oppressed 
 proletarians. It flowed into the leaking coffers 
 of gluttonous senators, instead of spreading wide 
 among an industrious population. 
 
 To learn the influence of American wealth upon 
 American character and conditions we must study 
 our problem, not in Rome or Judea or Carthage, 
 but nearer home. We must clear our minds of the 
 inveterate prejudices that cluster about our con- 
 ceptions of wealth, and must look at the results 
 of our modern accession of wealth as they ob- 
 trude themselves upon our view everywhere. 
 
 The most striking result of these greater pos- 
 sessions of ours is a rapid increase in American 
 luxury. "Easy come easy go" is the maxim of 
 all get-rich-quick civilizations. As wealth grows 
 the multitude of hard-working spenders grows 
 also, and there develops simultaneously a leisure 
 class which escapes our common debt of labor 
 and lives at its ease, though not always easily, 
 upon the annual fruits of vast private accumula- 
 tions. 
 
 At no time, of course, was luxury completely 
 
absent from America. Men spend when the purse 
 is full, even though the purse be small. Not all 
 the sumptuary laws of seventeenth-century Massa- 
 chusetts could prevent sober Puritans from launch- 
 ing into extravagance ; from purchasing apparel — 
 "wollen, silke, or lynnen, with lace on it, silver, 
 golde, silke or threed." Even the pious slid back 
 into embroidered doublets with slashed sleeves, 
 into "gold or silver girdles, hatt-bands, belts, 
 ruffs, beavr hatts," while women of no particular 
 rank appeared in forbidden silk and tiffany hoods. 
 A century later we encounter disapproval of John 
 Hancock's "show and extravagance in living," of 
 his French and English furniture, his dances, din- 
 ners, carriages, wine-cellars, and fine clothes. 
 Washington starved with his soldiers at Valley 
 Forge, but lived like an English gentleman in his 
 home at Mount Vernon. Luxury, pomp, cere- 
 monial were not absent in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, and even ardent democrats, who cheered 
 Citizen Genet and the glorious principles of '89, 
 and who dearly hated all aristocrats, were not 
 beyond the temptation of an occasional venial 
 luxury. 
 
 Fundamentally, however, the prevailing spirit 
 of America, especially in the North, was averse 
 to high living and ostentation. Puritanism was 
 dominant. Its grave, earnest, ascetic conception 
 of life and its strong antagonism to worldly pleas- 
 ures were strongly reinforced by a social poverty 
 which made the immoral luxuries difficult, if not 
 unattainable. It was virtuous to toil and scrimp, 
 166} 
 
because capital was scarce and hard working and 
 hard saving were necessary. Many of our vir- 
 tues are of this color and derivation. They are 
 rooted in the soil of stern necessity. 
 
 Even after the need for saving had departed, 
 luxury was held back by tradition. There was 
 a stalwart prejudice against it, and innumerable 
 Biblical texts of incontestable validity backed up 
 the prejudice. Gradually, however, one "younger 
 generation" after another moved further along 
 the primrose path of spending. Religious sanc- 
 tions dissolved; descendants of Puritans compro- 
 mised; the comfortable children of frugal Friends 
 abjured gray and affected finery long before they 
 forgot their "thee's" or dropped the pious custom 
 of calling Sunday "First Day." Each decade in- 
 troduced new and unseemly luxuries, and genera- 
 tions of moralizing old gentlemen and ladies, who 
 in their youth had themselves been moralized over, 
 now shook their white heads sadly over the calam- 
 itous decay of American simplicity. By 1840, 
 a nervous, high-tensioned, quickly growing Amer- 
 ica of canals and railroads and speculative West- 
 ern farms was spending at a rate which broke all 
 conventions; by the early sixties, sudden new ex- 
 panding fortunes, born of the war, demanded, and 
 obtained, a spectacular expression. 
 
 It is a curious commentary on the way our 
 human minds work, that in the very midst of the 
 desperate carnage of our Civil War, men who 
 were not unpatriotic found the heart to spend mil- 
 lions in strident and vaunting amusements. While 
 
 [67 J 
 
the armies in the field were being clumsily butch- 
 ered, while long trains were bringing up fevered 
 cripples to overcrowded hospitals, the vainglo- 
 rious new-rich of the North, fresh from dubious 
 army contracts, opened wide their bulging pockets. 
 At Saratoga, women in costly creations from Paris 
 flirted and strenuously dawdled, while the men 
 were "liquoring up" and gambling at track and 
 table. Never before were theatres so crowded; 
 never before were negro minstrels so tumultuously 
 acclaimed. Italian and German opera flourished. 
 The curled and crinolined "young persons" and 
 the white-vested and chokered "dandies" invaded 
 Broadway stores, where Brussels carpets, dia- 
 monds, pearls, and camel's-hair shawls rose to 
 unprecedented prices in the depreciated currency. 
 Extravagance became a cult. 
 
 But this luxury, though it confounded our 
 fathers and filled our foreign critics with the 
 sense of an invincible and wicked American levity, 
 was niggard parsimony compared with the spend- 
 ing of to-day. We need not here describe that 
 spending; it is a matter of common knowledge 
 and notorious. We have been adequately de- 
 rided by native and foreign critics for our mal- 
 adroit spending, our wanton extravagance, our 
 vast and ludicrous adventures as art-collectors and 
 castle-buyers. The constricted palaces which 
 crowd Fifth Avenue, the "cottages," country 
 houses, private parks, private cars, steam-yachts, 
 bronzes, canvases, ivories, and jewels of our 
 wealthy fellow-citizens have been duly chronicled 
 [68] 
 
by laudator and satirist. Perhaps we have even 
 exaggerated the pathetic absurdity of some of 
 these purchases. Not all have been as grotesque 
 as is commonly supposed; not any has been as 
 significant. 
 
 After all, this loose spending of multi-million- 
 aires, though stupendous in its aggregate, remains, 
 in proportion to the total outlay of our hundred 
 million Americans, a very, very small thing. It 
 is merely a straw in the wind. Its true signifi- 
 cance lies in its indication of a custom and atti- 
 tude more general, in its hinting at a wider lav- 
 ishness — a lavishness which affects not only the 
 immoderately wealthy, but also the well-to-do, the 
 comfortable, the men in straitened circumstances : 
 in fact, all classes, not entirely excluding the poor. 
 
 Wherever we look we find evidences of this 
 new prodigality. The statistics of our consump- 
 tion of wealth tell a consistent story of gradually 
 rising standards of living. Our growing love of 
 athletic sports, baseball, golf, riding; our increas- 
 ing patronage of opera, theatre moving-picture, 
 and circus; our epidemic of motoring — are all 
 effects of this powerful impulse. Even more sig- 
 nificant is our enormously increased expenditure 
 for dress. To-day, more than ever before, "the 
 fashion wears out more apparel than the man." 
 The advertisements in newspaper and magazine, 
 as well as the wide offerings of department stores, 
 indicate the extent of the new spending. 
 
 Much of this expenditure is wise and educa- 
 tive. Pleasure is good; spending is not bad; lux- 
 
 [69] 
 
ury lies along the path of the race's progress. 
 Even ostentation itself is not all evil. Where our 
 spending is bad is where we do not perceive the 
 ordained limits of pleasure. It is only enjoyment 
 in ignorance and excess that is evil. The fortune 
 which is the making of the man who makes it is 
 the undoing of the headlong youth who inherits 
 it, his pulses beating fast. All pleasures in ex- 
 cess lead to pain; all are limited by capacity of 
 nerves and brain. Doubling wealth is not dou- 
 bling pleasure; a hundred-dollar mechanical doil 
 may be less "fun" than a ten-cent rag baby. 
 Above all, pleasure is limited by the time to enjoy 
 it; in enjoyment, time is more than money. 
 
 It is forgetfulness of this fact which makes 
 much of our American spending banal and sterile. 
 With much money to spend and few hours in 
 which to spend it, we become addicted to quick, 
 concentrated, expensive pleasures. We cannot 
 imitate the placid, fruitful economy of the Teu- 
 ton, who takes his beer and music inexpensively 
 and at his leisure. Nor are we like that abstem- 
 ious German professor who, on his vacations, 
 traveled on the slowest Bummelzug because that 
 way the joyous trip lasted longer. The meteoric 
 flights of our tourists through Europe are in 
 point; the automobile, also, illustrates the nerv- 
 ousness and swiftness of our pleasures. Motor- 
 ing is broadening and delightful, but we are rush- 
 ing into this amusement with more than our usual 
 national abandon, and hardly even find time to 
 speed. When a pleasure becomes the vogue, con- 
 
 [70 J 
 
veniences and even necessities are sacrificed to it. 
 We are like those travelers of old who sold their 
 lands to see other men's. 
 
 As spending, good and bad, becomes more lav- 
 ish, and indulgence in many pleasures, common 
 and venial, there follows a relaxation of strict old 
 customs. Dancing and card-playing cease to be 
 the lure of the Evil One, and a lady of excellent 
 repute may smoke an after-dinner cigarette or 
 take a "high-ball." The theatre competes rather 
 efEectively with the church sewing-circle, and a 
 rigid disapproval of enjoyment is banished to 
 country districts more and more remote. 
 
 All these new morals and manners, introduced 
 by our accession of wealth, do not mean, how- 
 ever, that American nature has been fundamen- 
 tally altered. National character changes slowly ; 
 what we call a revolution in such character is 
 nothing but an inconsiderable change in the rela- 
 tive influence of different groups. Doubtless there 
 lived in Puritan England witty, gay, and roister- 
 ing gentlemen who preferred cock-fighting to 
 psalms and a bawdy song to an orthodox sermon. 
 Under the Restoration, in a merrier but laxer 
 England, there lived Miltons and Bunyans and 
 Praise God Barebones who would have gone to 
 the stake sooner than to the playhouse. In the 
 earlier time the precisian, in the later the easy- 
 going, sensual man, was in the ascendant. Both 
 groups, however, lived at both times, and their 
 relative numbers probably changed but slightly. 
 
 Today, as always, two temperaments and two 
 
 [71J 
 
philosophies oppose each other in America, but, 
 as our wealth increases the line of cleavage con- 
 stantly shifts, and more pleasures are considered 
 permissible and even estimable. People who have 
 always abjured the theatre now make exceptions 
 in favor of Shakespeare, Barrie, and Lew Wal- 
 lace; others who formerly insisted upon a strict 
 Sabbath observance now lose zeal as social con- 
 ditions change. The two extremes persist. We 
 still have millions addicted to a morose godliness, 
 and taking pleasure in hating pleasure. Our glit- 
 tering watering-places, on the other hand, are 
 studded with plethoric, middle-aging pleasure- 
 seekers, with lolling, gilded youngsters, with over- 
 jeweled, over-strained, greedy young women — 
 hedonists all. Between these extremes, however, 
 are millions of serious, tolerant, pleasure-loving, 
 ha.rd-working men and women, who live more 
 liberally and more largely than did their parents, 
 and yet "draw the line" at vicious or merely fool- 
 ish forms of extravagance. 
 
 Whether we use our new wealth wisely or un- 
 wisely, however, there are many who believe that 
 its mere increase will intensify our proverbial 
 American materialism. For many decades we 
 have been upbraided for our flaunting of gold, 
 for our naked worship of wealth, for our applying 
 merely pecuniary standards to the highest and the 
 best. Concerning our materialistic check-book 
 vandals, the late Henry D. Lloyd wrote with 
 burning indignation: "Of gods, friends, learn- 
 ings, of the uncomprehended civilization which 
 
 [72 J 
 
they overrun, they ask but one question: How 
 much? What is a good time to sell? What is 
 a good time to buy? .... Their heathen eyes 
 see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing 
 but an intelligence-office, and hired men to help 
 them burglarize the treasures accumulated for 
 a thousand years at the altars of liberty and jus- 
 tice, that they may burn their marble for the lime 
 of commerce." 
 
 It is doubtful, however, whether America really 
 grows more materialistic as it grows wealthier. 
 Are rich nations more mercenary than poor? Do 
 peoples strive harder for what they have than 
 for what they lack? Are we more materialistic 
 than French, Italians, or Swiss, or more openly 
 and crassly materialistic than were the Americans 
 of Grant's day or Washington's? Ours is still 
 "The Land of Dollars," but surely our present 
 materialism is at least somewhat tempered by 
 idealism. Here and there in our American life 
 we encounter an ideahsm, linked seemingly with 
 our wealth, practical, business-like, but sincere, 
 almost sentimental, almost romantic. 
 
 A curious illustration of a certain over-moneyed 
 idealism is found in the benefactions of some of 
 our very wealthy men. In America, where class 
 sentiment is weak and men have no peerage to 
 which to aspire, and no well-defined leisure-class 
 opinion to which to appeal, even the wealthiest 
 are not entirely above the common judgment of 
 the nation, nor beyond the need of the approval 
 of their fellow-citizens. We consequently find 
 
 [ 73 ] 
 
that multimillionaires, who have acquired their 
 wealth legally and illegally, morally and immor- 
 ally, make wise donations to hospitals, libraries, 
 research laboratories, art-museums, and other 
 works of social progress. These benefactions 
 have their evil as well as their good side, but no 
 fair man can doubt their impulse. A little vain- 
 glory, a little ostentation in competitive benevo- 
 lence, weighs but lightly against the real sense of 
 social obligation which these gifts reveal. 
 
 These benefactions are significant. They show 
 vividly the effect of an enlightening public opinion 
 working on the wealthy as upon the rest of us. 
 The merely vacuous spender we have always with 
 us, but to-day a "monkey dinner" or a similar 
 grotesquerie is hardly "good for" a newspaper 
 head-line, while the doings of the Rockefeller In- 
 stitute are of perennial popular interest. 
 
 Even more important is the light which these 
 gifts throw upon the nature of our vast private 
 accumulations. To-day acquisition by our very 
 wealthy has outstripped enjoyment; it has be- 
 come, for them, easier to get than to spend. En- 
 joyment, like property, becomes attenuated, sec- 
 ondary, vicarious. There is more actual pleasure 
 in giving away a library (which in a rather real 
 sense you still own) than in keeping bonds and 
 stocks (of a railroad you have never seen) in a 
 safety vault into which you cannot enter except 
 with the consent of a stolid, gray-coated guar- 
 dian. The man who owns a thousand-acre farm 
 may know every tree, rock, rail fence. In what 
 
 [74] 
 
sense, however, has a man ownership in a share 
 of an option to subscribe to a certain stock at a 
 certain price? In what sense does any man own 
 ten millions of dollars? It is this mocking contra- 
 diction, inherent in the possession of unimaginable 
 resources by a single finite, petty biped out of 
 which our gigantic and increasing donations arise. 
 
 It is not, however, by donations and benefac- 
 tions, munificent as these may be, that the great 
 new wealth of America can be applied so as to 
 bring to the nation the maximum of advantage 
 and the minimum of harm. The final influence 
 of American wealth upon American .charactei* 
 must depend upon its distribution. Our wealth 
 has not exerted the smallest fraction of its pos- 
 sible beneficient effect. The fruitful waters have 
 not evenly submerged us, but have come unequally, 
 disproportionately, a flood here, a drought there, 
 insecure and dangerous. We have paid too scant 
 attention to the channels through which this vast 
 wealth flows, and are only now learning, to our 
 cost, that wealth which spurts and gushes and 
 trickles uncertainly, a torrent here, a trickling, 
 dying stream there, may do damage as well as 
 good. 
 
 Today opposing tendencies reveal themselves 
 in the concentration and in the diffusion of this 
 national wealth. We have intangible, elusive for- 
 tunes, with the fluidity of quicksilver, daily, stu- 
 pendously growing. We see dismaying contrasts 
 between men who have more than they need, and 
 men who need more than they have; between 
 
 [75] 
 
multimillionaires, bewildered by the magnitude of 
 their possessions, and abject wretches brutalized 
 by want. And yet these spectacular contrasts tell 
 only part of the story. Simultaneously there 
 occurs a slow but immense diffusion of our na- 
 tional wealth. 
 
 To prove this diffusion we might pile up statis- 
 tics concerning the rise in American wages, the 
 increase in savings-banks deposits, the extension 
 of life insurance, the increase in quantity and 
 improvement in quality of goods consumed by the 
 masses of the people, the rapidly growing num- 
 ber of stockholders in great American corpora- 
 tions. For all this, howe^'er, we have not the 
 space. One fact will show the tendency: in the 
 decade ending 1910 the value of our six million 
 farms increased twenty billions (twenty thousand 
 millions) of dollars. Some twenty million people 
 found their property worth twenty billion dollars 
 more in 19 10 than in 1900. 
 
 It is not wholly a favorable development — 
 this increase in the value of farm property. It 
 simultaneously means a higher cost of living and 
 a greater difficulty in securing a farm. But merely 
 as a deflection of wealth, a deflection of twenty 
 billions of dollars, this development is highly sig- 
 nificant. It means an unparalleled sprinkling 
 from a vast reservoir. An ever-larger section of 
 the people is emerging from former poverty, is 
 getting into a position where life may be faced 
 from the vantage-ground of a high wage or of 
 a small property. This diffusion means a far 
 
 [76] 
 
higher standard of comfort in country as in city, 
 among well-to-do, comfortable, and moderately 
 poor people. It means a lessening death-rate. 
 It means that babies can be more carefully treated 
 by physicians and nurses, and can be assured of 
 a better diet. It means that the children of 
 America may be better fed, better clad, better 
 housed, better amused, better educated than be- 
 fore. The new wealth, to the extent of its dif- 
 fusion and to the extent of its social utilization, 
 means a better school attendance at better schools, 
 an enormous increase in secondary education, a 
 far wider spread and democratization of univer- 
 sity education. 
 
 Even our inequality in wealth, enormous and 
 incomprehensible though it is, does not deflect 
 all advantages from the masses. Our income is 
 far less unequally divided, and the use of wealth 
 is more general than its possession. The rents 
 of the great city landowner are paid to him; his 
 houses are used by the people. Directly or in- 
 directly, modern wealth goes largely to supply 
 the needs, improve the position, and increase the 
 power of the great mass of the population. 
 
 If America were to go into the hands of a 
 receiver, if our total assets were to be taken over 
 by one single intelligence, interested uniquely in 
 making the best use of our hundred and eighty- 
 seven billions of wealth, we should doubtless find, 
 after a few decades of such stewardship, that 
 America had changed and American characteris- 
 tics, qualities, and aspects had changed equally. 
 
 [77] 
 
Our vast new wealth, wisely applied, would mean 
 the passing of illiteracy, the abolition of patho- 
 logical child labor, the careful preparation of our 
 entire population for all the difficult requirements 
 of modern life. It would mean the end of low 
 wages, of dangerous and unsanitary factories, of 
 excessive or deleterious toil, of unemployment, of 
 under-employment, of industrial uncertainty, and 
 that long train of vices which follow casual labor. 
 It would mean the end of evil housing conditions ; 
 the building of new and healthful, if not always 
 beautiful, suburbs; a bold and successful cam- 
 paign against t3^hoid, tuberculosis, and other 
 plagues; a diminution of city mortality, an in- 
 crease in the amount and a betterment of the 
 quality of life. It would mean improved recrea- 
 tion, enlarged pleasure, a diminution of drunken- 
 ness and disease, and an escape from that haunt- 
 ing fear of poverty which so accentuates the gam- 
 bling element in our civilization. It would lessen 
 that ruthlessness, recklessness, and cynical egotism 
 with which our present-day wealth is so intimately 
 associated. 
 
 In the absence of such an omnipotent social 
 intelligence, we must rely upon faultier instru- 
 ments to secure a larger social dividend from our 
 increasing wealth and our increasing economic 
 power. It is not a question of long division, 
 for a twenty-millionth part of one hundred and 
 eighty-seven billion dollars would not satisfy us, 
 and much of the wealth would disappear in the 
 very process of division. What is required is a 
 [78 J 
 
far more difficult operation : a change in our atti- 
 tude toward society, a responsibility on the part 
 of each for the wealth that each possesses, a re- 
 sponsibility on the part of all for the social and 
 equitable distribution of the new wealth as it 
 pours out unceasingly. The prevention of sense- 
 less and socially perilous differences is a part of 
 the adjustment which we must make. Our hope 
 lies in a social reorganization which will make 
 both opulence and poverty impossible, which will 
 increasingly apply the wealth of society to the 
 common needs of society. It is a realization press- 
 ing hard on the nations of to-day, and especially 
 upon America. 
 
 One might believe that this hope of a better, 
 abler, and happier nation resting upon the broad 
 pedestal of national resources and national wealth 
 was an ideal bounded by the sharp limitations of 
 our existing wealth. After all, one or two hun- 
 dred billions of dollars is not very much. Our 
 proper adjustment to our present wealth, how- 
 ever, is but the beginning of the true getting of 
 wealth. A better distribution and a better utili- 
 zation of our present wealth would mean an in- 
 crease in the intelligence and capacity of the 
 people who acquire wealth, than which no better 
 investment could be made. Measured by the men 
 of the coming generations, we are to-day singu- 
 larly unproductive. We are still pitifully igno- 
 rant of natural science, pitifully ignorant of 
 social science. About us are powerful, silent 
 genii, unreined natural forces, which will 
 
 [79] 
 
rear our civilization once we call them — and we 
 do not even know their names. We live in a 
 veritable welter of social waste, and exist upon 
 the mere scanty fragments of a booty torn to 
 pieces by contending claimants — and we know not 
 how to allay the strife. We are only slowly — 
 very slowly — learning. 
 
 As we look forward, we are overcome with 
 the sheer magnitude of our probable future wealth 
 and with our uncomprehended responsibility for 
 its use. What we now have is but an earnest of 
 the incomparably greater stores beyond. We 
 have not yet begun to exploit the resources of 
 our continent. We have not begun to learn from 
 science the magic which will open the earth to 
 our needs. We have hardly approached the 
 study of those great problems of social reorgani- 
 zation and of popular education which will make 
 of these gifts of nature a blessing and not a 
 curse. We are like an ignorant savage starving 
 in the midst of fertile fields; like the pioneer Bal- 
 boa, wading timidly into an ocean upon which 
 great vessels are destined to sail. 
 
 [80] 
 
PROPHET AND POLITICIAN 
 
PROPHET AND POLITICIAN 
 
 "Good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards 
 men are Uttle better than good dreams, except they be put 
 in act." 
 
 Of Great Place by Francis Bacon. 
 
 As week after week I watched with painful in- 
 terest the gradual decline at Paris of President 
 Wilson and foresaw his impending fall, I thought 
 increasingly of the similar discomfiture of that 
 autocratic democrat, Alexander the First of Rus- 
 sia, at the Congress of Vienna and after. No 
 comparison or assimilation of the two men can 
 be quite fair to either. Alexander was more vain, 
 more suspicious, more sentimental than is the Pres- 
 ident, and upon his thin and grandiose imagina- 
 tion a schemer or fanatic might write his will. 
 Mr. Wilson's mind is clearer and his will firmer. 
 On the other hand, the Tsar's democratic prin- 
 ciples, acquired in his youth, were more robust 
 than is Mr. Wilson's liberalism, which is a slim- 
 mer accumulation of middle age. Like Mr. 
 Wilson, Alexander represented the least spent and 
 most influential nation at the Congress, but living 
 in the infancy of democratic government he had 
 no strong group sentiment to which to appeal. 
 Moreover, he was beset by shrewder opponents 
 than was Mr. Wilson, for there was no Castle- 
 
 [83] 
 
reagh at Paris and no Talleyrand or Mettemich. 
 Like the President, however, the Tsar surren- 
 dered point by point, not knowing that he surren- 
 dered, and in the end proved as false to the teach- 
 ings of La Harpe as Mr. Wilson to the mandate 
 of the world's liberals. Striving for a virtuous 
 and pious Europe at peace, he closed his career 
 by fastening upon his own country and upon Eu- 
 rope the most intolerable of reactionary regimes. 
 
 It is easy to denounce the Tsar but it is quite 
 beyond the mark. After a century we now see 
 that he could not have built his imposing Federa- 
 tion of Europe, lacking both brick and straw. It 
 is equally futile to upbraid the President who, a 
 generation from now, may be thought of as a 
 straw dyke carried away by the flood, and his 
 failure ascribed to the set of these over-powering 
 currents rather than to his own weaknesses and 
 obscurities. But these weaknesses force upon us 
 nevertheless a psychological and ethical problem, 
 for Mr. Wilson's failure was a poignant moral 
 failure, involving everything in the man that held 
 our respect. I do not seek to praise or blame but 
 to understand; to measure the failure in terms of 
 character; to gauge the man and his method by 
 the nature even more than by the extent of his 
 failure. 
 
 It was not hypocrisy that caused Mr. Wilson 
 to preach the gospel of simple honesty between 
 nations and then write a new Brest-Litovsk. 
 Nothing is further from his record both at home 
 and abroad. Nor did he have any ulterior pur- 
 
 [84] 
 
pose or unworthy intention. The failings, to 
 which his defeat was due, were on a different 
 plane. He was, as we shall later see, over-confi- 
 dent — too sure of his ability to match his mind 
 against the best minds of Europe. He was ill 
 prepared and ill informed. He grew confused 
 and lost his perception of what could, and what 
 could not, be done. He was stubborn when he 
 should have been open-minded, vacillating when 
 he should have been decided. These are not in- 
 tentional, nor indeed grave sins, but rather the 
 errors of a man who has stumbled into a false 
 position. Indeed from the first he had grossly 
 misconceived his mission in Europe. He had 
 thought of himself as the censor of a treaty to 
 be presented to him, as the detached judge. That 
 treaty he had conceived, moreover, as a necessary 
 deduction from an agreed-on set of principles, like 
 the conclusions of the geometer which grew logi- 
 cally out of simple axioms. Mr. Wilson went to 
 Paris like some medieval Doctor of Theology, 
 with his theses written down on stiff parchment, 
 ready to meet the other good doctors in fair 
 and leisurely argument. Instead of Doctors of 
 Divinity it was hand-to-mouth diplomats whom he 
 met — men no worse than their calling — who 
 greeted him kindly and then reverently laid his 
 neat theses on the table under the map of Eu- 
 rope which was being sliced up. These diplo- 
 mats, though smaller, were cleverer than the 
 President, and they were playing their own game 
 with their own cards. In this candle-light game 
 
 [85] 
 
Mr. Wilson had as much real chance as poor 
 Moses Primrose with the reverend-looking man 
 in the tent. Mr. Wilson left for Paris with the 
 best wares ever brought to market, with eco- 
 nomic power, military power and the prestige of 
 disinterestedness; he comes back with empty 
 pockets and a gross of green spectacles. 
 
 That sounds as though he were a dupe, but the 
 word is too strong. He himself at rare intervals 
 saw the drift of events and perhaps foresaw his 
 own discomfiture, and no doubt bitterly repented 
 his initial errors, made on his sole responsibihty, 
 which were leading him to decisions he abhorred. 
 In his over-confidence he had bound, gagged and 
 delivered himself. He had agreed to secret cov- 
 enants of peace because that was the convenient 
 as well as the orthodox mode of diplomacy, and 
 had given up his chief weapon — the appeal over 
 the heads of diplomatists to the world. Perhaps 
 he did not quite realize the nature of the envi- 
 ronment he was thus creating nor its inevitable 
 effect upon himself. Around that cynical table, 
 where the treaty was patched together bit by bit, 
 his Fourteen Points, which had aroused nations 
 to enthusiasm, must have seemed pale and unreal, 
 and I imagine that Mr. Wilson, sitting there 
 alone, was a little ashamed, as Isaac Newton 
 might have been had he written a popular ballad. 
 Idealism was hardly "good form" in that intimate 
 group of four. 
 
 To his apparent surprise, moreover, he discov- 
 ered that his own "points" could be turned 
 [86] 
 
against their inventor. The Italians, though de- 
 manding the letter of their greedy pact with the 
 Allies, also demanded, in set Wilsonian phrase, 
 full Self-Determination for the people of Fiume. 
 The imperialists learned to quote the new Scrip- 
 ture to their purpose. But did Mr. Wilson not 
 foresee this? Did he believe that principles in- 
 terpreted and enforced themselves? His courte- 
 ous opponents understood the importance of in- 
 terpretation. Let anyone lay down the principles 
 — Mr. Wilson, the President of Liberia, or even 
 the Kaiser — if only they might apply them. 
 
 This simple faith of Mr. Wilson in his Four- 
 teen Points, unexplained and unelaborated, was 
 due, I believe, to the invincible abstractedness of 
 his mind. He seems to see the world in abstrac- 
 tions. To him railroad cars are not railroad cars 
 but a gray, general thing called Transportation; 
 people are not men and women, corporeal, gross, 
 very human beings, but Humanity — Humanity 
 very much in the abstract. In his political think- 
 ing and propaganda Mr. Wilson cuts away all 
 the complex qualities which things possess in real 
 life in order to fasten upon one single character- 
 istic, and thus he creates a clear but over-simple 
 and unreal formula. As a consequence he is 
 tempted to fall into inelastic categories; to see 
 things black and white; to believe that similar 
 things are identical and dissimilar things opposite. 
 Mexicans seem to him to be Anglo-Saxons living 
 in Mexico and Frenchmen, Italians and Russians 
 Anglo-Saxons on the continent of Europe. His 
 
 [87] 
 
thinking rarely concerns itself with concrete dif- 
 ferences; it is never a quantitative thinking; it is 
 never inductive. And this abstractness of Mr. 
 Wilson is part of a curiously a priori metaphysical 
 idealism. His world stands firmly on its head. 
 Ideas do not rest upon facts but facts on ideas. 
 Morals and laws are not created out of the rub 
 and wear of men and societies but are things in- 
 nate, uncreated, immutable, absolute and simple; 
 and human relations arise out of them. "In the 
 Beginning was the Word : and the Word was with 
 God: and the Word was God." The Keeper of 
 the Word, the Utterer of the Word is the man 
 who creates. If Mr. Wilson could proclaim the 
 Eternal Verities — the Ten Commandments of In- 
 ternational Life — lesser minds might be entrusted 
 with the humbler work of exegesis. His Fourteen 
 Points would, by the mere fact of their expression, 
 work themselves into the body of international 
 life and re-create it in their image. 
 
 I do not presume to belittle this philosophy nor 
 to deny to it all validity. Undoubtedly the im- 
 pressive, half-true generalizations of our Declara- 
 tion of Independence did contribute to a change 
 in political thought and conditions. Between the 
 Declaration and the Fourteen Points, however, 
 lay a deep gulf. The first was an appeal, and 
 what it lacked in precision it gained in eloquence. 
 The Fourteen Points, on the contrary, were con- 
 ceived as the basis of an organic constitution of 
 the world, and as such should have been exactly 
 determined and made to conform with each other 
 [88] 
 
and with the specific needs of the nations. I fear, 
 however, that Mr. Wilson never understood his 
 "points" in detail, either their extent or their mu- 
 tual limitations. Was his idea of "the freedom 
 of the seas" consonant with his League of Na- 
 tions? Should self-determination have the right 
 of way when an alien Hinterland clamored for 
 access to the sea ? You can not lay down fourteen 
 general formulas without raising innumerable 
 questions in political casuistry, important ques- 
 tions which must be answered. Mr. Wilson ap- 
 parently did not see that his Fourteen Points 
 were not an explicit programme but were some- 
 thing less and infinitely more — a splendid but 
 vague summary of decades of thought — not of 
 Mr. Wilson's thought but of the thought of the 
 world, derived from the long perceived needs of 
 millions of ordinary men and women. Having 
 restated his philosophy Mr. Wilson refrained 
 from taking the next step of working out a plan 
 of action. He went into the jungle with a map 
 of the world but without a compass. 
 
 Because of this abstractness, because of his em- 
 phasis upon generalization and his neglect of the 
 concrete facts and particular instances upon which 
 the generalization should have been based, Mr. 
 Wilson sat down at the Peace table knowing noth- 
 ing of the things he should have known. He knew 
 nothing of Shantung, Fiume, Dalmatia, Silesia, 
 Macedonia, and cared little about them so long 
 as his principle of self-determination prevailed. 
 He knew nothing of the complex economic in- 
 
 [89] 
 
terrelations, friendly and hostile, between various 
 European nations, for he trusted to his not very 
 clearly defined principle concerning "economic bar- 
 riers." He did not even want to know these 
 "details." 
 
 Had the President rightly conceived what min- 
 ute special knowledge and what practical realistic 
 judgment it required to write the Fourteen Points 
 into the treaty, he would have selected his Peace 
 colleagues from the best informed and most re- 
 sponsible and independent thinkers in the United 
 States. He would also have provided himself 
 with a group of experts with whom he himself 
 would have been in daily communication and at 
 whose feet he would have sat. Instead he em- 
 ployed a body of special students, most of them 
 capable and all conscientious, but a body apart, 
 without instructions, without authority, without 
 real contact with the President, disconnected. The 
 expert who studied Kiaochow was not supposed 
 to know what the President thought, though what 
 the President thought on the morning of the day 
 of decision was the decisive thing. Mr. Wilson's 
 theory was that all determinations must be his 
 and all must be based if not upon direct inspira- 
 tion then upon evidence sifted by him. But he 
 completely failed to perceive the magnitude of 
 such a task. No mind, however capacious, could 
 possibly have grasped all these intricacies, and 
 where the greatest man would have failed Mr. 
 Wilson failed. He was ignorant by reason of 
 his chosen method of work, his love of political 
 [90] 
 
abstraction, his distaste for concrete, complex, co- 
 ordinated research, by reason finally of his vol- 
 untary intellectual isolation. Working alone he 
 worked too slowly and never finished anything. 
 No wonder he was swamped by the impossible 
 and uncongenial task. 
 
 That task, even after weeks and months of 
 work on it, Mr. Wilson never really understood. 
 He- saw vaguely that the treaty was turning out 
 badly but he did not quite see what was the mat- 
 ter. The problem still presented itself to him 
 in abstract moral terms ; certain people were bad 
 and the proposals put forth by bad people were 
 bad proposals. Since his Fourteen Principles 
 were skillfully opposed to each other until at last 
 Mr. Wilson himself could not choose between 
 them, he fell back in his decisions upon a transient 
 sympathy. He liked certain people, among them 
 Lloyd George, a ready-witted, humorous, easy- 
 principled politician, one of those "cunning" men, 
 of whom Bacon says, that they are "perfect in 
 men's humours" but "not greatly capable of the 
 real part of business." Clemenceau, on the other 
 hand, he seems to have distrusted, and as a con- 
 sequence the French imperialists seemed — as in- 
 deed they were — insatiable. The Italian impe- 
 rialists also wanted all they could get and knew 
 no other way than to ask for more than they 
 could get. To Mr. Wilson's friendly eye the 
 British, on the other hand, appeared moderate, 
 and were, so it seemed, forced against their will 
 to accept what they wanted. But, unfortunately 
 
 [91] 
 
for Mr. Wilson's constanqr, the whole Confer- 
 ence whirled about like a top, diplomats changed 
 roles, and allies became opponents and opponents 
 allies. There were times when Mr. Wilson could 
 not determine the relative morality of his col- 
 leagues, but, like Alice judging the Walrus and 
 the Carpenter, was forced to the lame conclusion 
 that "they were both very disagreeable charac- 
 ters." And, in truth, beneath all apparent con- 
 cessions to Mr. Wilson and behind all temporary 
 alignments in his favor there existed at Paris and 
 had existed from the beginning, despite intense 
 mutual bitterness among these Powers, a hostile 
 bloc of four nations, held together by secret trea- 
 ties, which though uncomfortable were binding. 
 The British admitted that these treaties, notably 
 with Italy and Japan, were immoral but would 
 it not be still more immoral to break them ? The 
 President, realizing that his dwindling programme 
 was in danger of total extinction, was willing to 
 grant plenary absolution to any penitent Power 
 abjuring its arrangements. But the European 
 governments, as well as Japan, wanted no abso- 
 lution; they wanted colonies, money, economic 
 privileges. They wanted a good, hard, bristling 
 peace, a blockade-and-bayonet peace, a sinister 
 peace with just enough sentimental coating to get 
 it down. We were to provide the coating. And 
 in the end it was just such a peace that they in- 
 duced Woodrow Wilson to accept. 
 
 It is claimed in the President's defense that 
 no man could have broken through this ring of 
 
 [92] 
 
treaty -bound nations. But as early as June, 19 17, 
 Mr. Wilson knew of these secret treaties. Why 
 did he not then, when conditions were favorable 
 to us, insist upon a revision of Allied terms? 
 
 I believe that this fatal omission of the Presi- 
 dent was due in some part to his habit of ignor- 
 ing disagreeable realities. It would have been 
 unpleasant even to know about these treaties. At 
 bottom, however, the cause of his inaction lay 
 In his ingrained habits of thought. Mr. Wilson 
 placed his faith then as now not in actual, prac- 
 tical adjustments of aims, in a deed, but in his 
 own exalted words. In due course he would 
 speak out boldly and at his word the strong wall 
 of dishonest diplomacy would fall down. 
 
 Does so deep a self-confidence suggest the vic- 
 torious dream-world of fantasy rather than the 
 world of reality? Does it suggest a man ener- 
 vated by the secret vice of self-worship? 
 
 Here we are treading upon the most private 
 of preserves because most men believe that they 
 are modest — at least in proportion to their jus- 
 tification for vanity — and all, of us live in glass 
 houses. We cannot, however, intelligently discuss 
 the President's failure at Paris without consider- 
 ing this quality which contributed to his fall. Dur- 
 ing long years a man may safely indulge a small 
 vice which in his critical hour proves his undoing. 
 It is, moreover, one of the ironies of life that 
 achievement often brings with it false rewards 
 that make further achievement impossible. Mr. 
 Wilson's past success, his high station, his long 
 
 [93] 
 
continued greatness were not unlikely to give him 
 a somewhat distorted sense of his relation towards 
 his fellow-men. For almost twenty years, at 
 Princeton, Trenton and Washington, Mr. Wilson, 
 though fighting, had represented Authority. He 
 could remove men who were hostile or remove 
 himself from their influence. He could choose 
 his associates. But the great man who indulges 
 in the luxury of choosing his associates can hardly 
 escape excessive adulation, a sugary poison far 
 more virulent to an urbane, cultivated and sensi- 
 tive mind than to a loose-lipped braggart, just 
 as secret drinking is more dangerous than swill- 
 ing in public. No man in this century has read 
 as many million words of praise as Mr. Wilson. 
 It is no disgrace that he is not an Abraham Lin- 
 coln, who grew in humility as he grew in power, 
 and accepted praise and blame at their just worth, 
 gratefully yet critically. In Paris as in Rome the 
 President was again placed upon a diet of adula- 
 tion, but there it was a weapon not an ointment, 
 and compliments did not mean concessions. For 
 the first time in twenty years, moreover, Mr. 
 Wilson was forced to meet opponents on equal 
 terms. He could not depose M. Clemenceau or 
 Signor Orlando or Baron Makino. He could not 
 force them to acquiesce. Further, he no longer 
 had the necessities of the Allies as his ally. Day 
 by day the expectant gratitude of Italy, France, 
 Japan and Great Britain to America grew cooler 
 and their thanks even took on the color of a 
 reproach that we had been late in coming into the 
 
 [94] 
 
war and had not fared badly. Here was oppo- 
 sition not less real because flattering and evasive, 
 an opposition based on the principle of the "elas- 
 tic defense," always retreating but never giving 
 ground. In the end it was Mr. Wilson who gave 
 ground, who retreated while thinking he ad- 
 vanced, who presented the case of his opponents, 
 being flattered into believing that it was his own 
 case, invented by himself. It is significant of 
 the truly diplomatic policy of Mr. Wilson's an- 
 tagonists that he got the publicity and they got 
 the treaty. 
 
 At last in these painfully delayed negotiations 
 a day came when he would retreat no further. 
 On Sunday, April the sixth, he publicly announced 
 that he had cabled for the George Washington. 
 A thrill of intense excitement ran through Paris; 
 friends and enemies of the President asked "What 
 will he do?" To his friends the President re- 
 vealed his intentions. He had compromised too 
 much; hei-^i;after he would take his stand on the 
 Fourteen Points. These frie»»ds described to me 
 the President as marvelously cami, with set jaws 
 and "no bend in him anywhere." I went to bed 
 that night hoping that at last the President would 
 stand firm — there in the centre of the world. 
 He did not stand firm. He wavered, accepted 
 small compromises, gave in more than before. 
 The European correspondents smiled ironically. 
 Doubtless they thought of Bismarck's cruel char- 
 acterization of Salisbury: "A lath painted to 
 look like iron." 
 
 [95] 
 
It was not cowardice ; had the President known 
 at that late day, after innumerable concessions 
 and self-betrayals, how to bring the vital matter 
 of internationalism to a clear issue he would, I 
 feel confident, have risked all and stood up against 
 the world. He had, however, already surren- 
 dered too much ; he was bound by as many slight 
 threads as Gulliver in Lilliput. He could not now 
 strain at a gnat or even a camel after having 
 swallowed a whole menagerie. He might save 
 his face by making a final stand on the question 
 of Fiume but the Italians would prove that he 
 himself had already countenanced much harsher 
 violations of his own principles. AH he could 
 gain was a spectacular tactical success; the main 
 battle was already lost. 
 
 There was a still more compelling reason, as 
 I take it, why Mr. Wilson failed to make this 
 heroic decision. There are three sorts of minds 
 in the world. The first can see only one side of 
 every question; it is the mind of the very simple 
 man and of the fanatic. The second sees both 
 sides but sees them alternately, never together. 
 The third, which one may call the synthetic mind, 
 sees both (or all) sides and sees them contem- 
 poraneously, weighs them, balances them against 
 each other and comes, perhaps slowly, to a final, 
 firm judgment. Mr. Wilson's mind seems to be 
 of the second order. Granite-like though it 
 sometimes appears — it is wax to receive and wax 
 to retain, eminently impressionable and unstable. 
 It is perhaps because he himself knows this that 
 
 [96] 
 
he seeks to escape from the rude conflict with 
 other minds and thinks alone — which means to 
 think with the people who agree with what he 
 thought yesterday. Again it is this mind of his 
 with its alternating current that explains the amaz- 
 ing contradictions of his career, his disconcerting 
 changes of front, his infinite self-reversals. To 
 such a mind his seemingly friendly antagonists 
 at the Peace Conference could present an argu- 
 ment of great cogency. To throw over the peace 
 negotiations now would be to desert Europe and 
 to push her down into anarchy. Better a small 
 sacrifice of internationalism, better even the worst 
 peace with order than utter disruption, decades 
 of revolution and in the end a Bolshevik world. 
 This argument, we may readily believe, was no 
 part of the President's intellectual equipment 
 when he left Washington in December. It rep- 
 resented a recession from his earlier thought, a 
 violent fluctuation. For reasons, not at all occult, 
 Mr. Wilson was more than usually liable at Paris 
 to such fluctuations of conviction and will. He 
 stood alone. He had no "unmannerly" Kent at 
 his elbow to talk bluntly to him and no group of 
 intellectual equals with him, upon whose inde- 
 pendent judgment boldly given he could try out 
 new ideas. Not only had Mr. Wilson, with what 
 he has called his single-track mind, to shunt prob- 
 lems constantly arriving on many tracks but he 
 was forced to oppose his individual, impression- 
 able mind to more effective, more stable and 
 much less impressionable group minds. The 
 
 [97 J 
 
English mind at the Conference was a compact, 
 articulated group mind, a mind of a hundred 
 minds, taking up each other's slack, a mind elastic, 
 comprehensive, persistent ^nd working harmo- 
 niously. It did not waver like the mind of an 
 individual. The French mind, also a group mind, 
 though febrile was constant and unfluctuating. 
 The Japanese mind was concrete, concentrated 
 and amazingly firm. Back of each of these group 
 minds, moreover, was a national will; back of 
 President Wilson, with his dummy colleagues and 
 his unconsulted experts, was nothing with which 
 he was in touch, nothing from which he knew 
 how to draw support. He had no ballast. An 
 individual arguing against nations, he was sub- 
 ject to the enormous pressure of national wills. 
 Even the American people no longer knew what 
 Mr. Wilson thought, and not knowing ceased to 
 care. He might therefore swiftly change his 
 mind or even pocket his whole philosophy, without 
 America or himself quite knowing. 
 
 There was a final reason, I suppose, besides 
 his self-induced impotence and his too ready adop- 
 tion of principles opposed to his own, that made 
 Mr. Wilson accept his aborted treaty with little 
 show of reluctance. He had his League. It was, 
 he probably permitted himself to believe, the one 
 permanent result of the negotiations, the one cura- 
 tive agent. Let the treaty pass; in time it might 
 die of prenatal defects. The League would not 
 only live but would cure the treaty or create a 
 new one. 
 
 [98] 
 
It was natural for Mr. Wilson to adopt this 
 compensatory theory which seemed to convert his 
 defeat into a victory. His pride was involved. 
 Though he has in fact contributed little to the 
 detailed elaboration of the League plan (and that 
 little has not always been good) , still the impulse 
 was largely his, and he is therefore properly asso- 
 ciated in the public mind with the League, which 
 is almost spoken of as Mr. Wilson's League. 
 We are optimistic where our own children are 
 concerned and Mr. Wilson may well have per- 
 suaded himself that the League, though weak, 
 faulty, and in some respects reactionary, was still 
 sound enough to redeem the treaty. The truth, 
 I fear, is the exact opposite. Even a poor League 
 would have been better than none had the treaty 
 been tolerable. But a vicious treaty, making for 
 war and anarchy, must of necessity destroy the 
 League to which it is in principle opposed. How 
 can this League, based on the doctrine of unanim- 
 ity, be much better than the Peace Conference 
 itself? How can it, for example, undo the iniqui- 
 tous gift of Shantung to Japan when such re- 
 cession requires Japan's own consent? I do not 
 wish to prejudge the new Covenant but it is surely 
 a sign of Mr. Wilson's far-away abstractness and 
 of his failure to grasp near realities that he was 
 willing to bargain the treaty for the League, in- 
 stead of offering the League (and with it Amer- 
 ica's moral and material support to Europe) for 
 the only sort of peace that we should be willing 
 to maintain. It is even in doubt whether the 
 
 [99 J 
 
President looked very closely at his League or 
 assured himself that it was real and not coun- 
 terfeit. 
 
 Thus comes to an inglorious end the quest of 
 Woodrow Wilson in search of a new world. 
 There also comes to an end — for a time at least — 
 the hopes of millions of men. It is further dis- 
 heartening that the defeat will be ascribed to that 
 very political idealism which alone might have 
 made a success possible. Those who despise all 
 idealism in politics will exult over this new Don 
 Quixote overthrown and bespattered, this new 
 saint seduced. They will wish to revert to the 
 old time diplomatist, the dollar and steel and sau- 
 sage diplomatist, who has as few ideals as may 
 be but has his broad feet flat on the ground. They 
 will call for an end of prophets and idealists. 
 In their churches they are willing to read Isaiah 
 and Habakkuk but they want no latter-day 
 prophets stalking about on week days. 
 
 This theory that it was the idealism of Mr. 
 Wilson that undid him, is, I am convinced, quite 
 false. The President has at rare moments the 
 earnestness, the vision and the deep eloquence of 
 the Hebrew prophets, and it is these qualities 
 which, if they stood alone, would make him a 
 truly great man, one of the greatest. But Wood- 
 row Wilson is also a politician. No one could 
 have become President of Princeton or Governor 
 of New Jersey without knowing and, in some 
 sense, loving the currents and deceptive under- 
 currents of what we call political life. It was 
 
 [ lOO] 
 
not Woodrow Wilson, the prophet and idealist, 
 who was overturned at Paris, for whatever his 
 defects, his abstractness, his metaphysical ideal- 
 ism, his over-confidence, his vanity, he might al- 
 ways have retrieved himself and gained at least 
 a moral victory by a final refusal. The man who 
 was discomfited was Woodrow Wilson the poli- 
 tician, the man who thought he could play the 
 European game, who was not afraid of the dark, 
 who at times seemed to bargain for his own hand, 
 for his personal prestige and his political party, 
 instead of fighting always and solely, win or lose, 
 for his ideals. A man can not both be celestial 
 and subterranean; he can not at once stand on 
 the mountain top and in the cellar. When the 
 President of the United States who had stirred 
 mankind as it had not been stirred for decades 
 withdrew from the inspiration of the peoples of 
 the world and agreed to a "give-and-take peace" 
 secretly arrived at by bargaining — when Mr. Wil- 
 son surrendered the role of prophet and accepted 
 the lesser role of opportunist politician — he be- 
 came as one of the others, a little less than the 
 others. 
 
 [lOl] 
 
IN THE KING'S ROBING ROOM 
 
IN THE KING'S ROBING ROOM 
 
 Sir Leo Chiozsa Money — What particular service do you per- 
 form for the community as a coal-owner? 
 
 Witness — (The Duke of Northumberland) — As an owner of 
 coal I do not perform any service for the community. I 
 look after my property to my best advantage. I do not 
 know whether you call that service. 
 
 Sir Leo — The personal service you perform is very slight. 
 Minutes of the British Coal Commission. 
 
 (London Times and London Daily Herald.) 
 
 One suspects that even the "bobbie" at the door 
 has an inkling of the truth. He is the ideal Lon- 
 don policeman, as authentically English as West- 
 minster itself. In front of the door-way of the 
 House of Lords he stands, as stiff as a caryatid, 
 while inside Revolution holds its full-dress re- 
 hearsal. Outwardly he preserves his professional 
 cheery aloofness. "The Coal Commission, Sir? 
 It's in the King's Robing Room. Yes, Sir. Right 
 ahead, Sir." But even for a London policeman, 
 who has experienced all things, it is a bit con- 
 fusing to stand guard over a revolution. It is 
 like escorting a hurricane across the street. 
 
 As for the rest of London it is skeptical of 
 revolution, which, like suicide, is a thing "one does 
 not do." In this respectableEnglish view revolu- 
 tion is a foreign malady, the indicia of which are 
 [105] 
 
riots, the release of prisoners, promiscuous shoot- 
 ing on the streets and Sabbath breaking. None of 
 these signs do you note when you pass the police- 
 man and enter the King's Robing Room, a spa- 
 cious lofty chamber, the walls brilliantly decorated 
 with scenes from the lives of King Arthur and Sir 
 Galahad. Six men sit on one side of a long table 
 and six on the other and between them suave and 
 witty Justice Sankey, presiding officer and mod- 
 erator. The six men on the labor side do not 
 carry bombs and will not mount barricades. There 
 is Robert Smillie, the Miner's President, clear- 
 eyed, cool, a hard hitter and fair fighter, a guiding 
 mind. There is Herbert Smith, the Vice-Presi- 
 dent, slow to speak but effective in speech. Near 
 him sits Frank Hodges, the Miners' Secretary, 
 young, ardent, nimble-witted, with an education 
 begun in the mines, continued at the University, 
 and still continuing. Then there is Sidney Webb ; 
 R. H. Tawney, fellow of Balliol and promoter 
 of the Workers' Educational Association ; and Sir 
 Leo Chiozza Money, Socialist, author, statisti- 
 cian, alert as a lynx. These men are among the 
 ablest in Great Britain. The men on the other 
 side are also very capable but intellectually less 
 distinguished. The witnesses are clever, dull, fa- 
 cile, pedantic. Some of the testimony is technical, 
 some abstruse, some bookish. At times you imag- 
 ine that you are watching a hesitating glacier, not 
 a rapid revolution. 
 
 But that is how they manage in England. The 
 English are an ironic people taking a solemn pleas- 
 [io6] 
 
ure in grotesquely false appearances. Things 
 there are never what they seem. The servant, 
 who says "Thank you, Sir," is not a cringing but 
 an assertive person who knows he is better than 
 you, and the excessively dull Britisher, who seems 
 impervious to a joke, may be merely undercutting 
 your wit. No foreigner can gauge the democracy, 
 aristocracy, gravity or levity of this gifted, topsy- 
 turvy folk. It is only in England that revolutions 
 take place in the King's Robing Room in the min- 
 utes of a Coal Commission. 
 
 It is no ordinary commission. Your usual Royal 
 Commission is your only true grave-digger, talk- 
 ing to death the quick emotions generated during 
 decades of oppression and decently interring them. 
 Or an embalmer, who preserves from decay the 
 dead body of grievances to the end that, later, 
 spectacled undergraduates may deplore the evils 
 of a former day. From Royal Commission to 
 Parliamentary waste-paper basket has been the 
 road of the well-laid plans of zealous men who 
 imagined that they were making history. This 
 Coal Commission, unlike the others, is itself a 
 statutory body "with authority of Parliament be- 
 hind it." It is a continuing commission with the 
 widest terms of reference. It is bi-partisan, not 
 impartial. It is a commission with the right to 
 compel the production of persons and papers, and 
 it uses that right freely. 
 
 I was present when Mr. Smillie demanded the 
 appearance of various noblemen who receive their 
 income from mine royalties. "I ask you," he 
 [ 107 ] 
 
said to the Chairman, "to subpoena the Duke of 
 Northumberland, the Earl of Durham, the Mar- 
 quis of Bute, Lord Tredegar ..." As he pro- 
 nounced each name and title the Chairman re- 
 peated them, and in this contrast of voices and 
 intonations I seemed to discover one of the roots 
 of the elusive class conflict in England. It was 
 as though men of two nations spoke; the rough 
 proletarian accent of Smillie contrasted harshly 
 with the easy, cultured utterance of Justice San- 
 key, the neat clearness of his syllables, his quiet 
 cadences. It almost seemed as though the Justice 
 was mocking Mr. Smillie. But he was not mock- 
 ing ; it was merely the University conversing with 
 the board school. Behind his charming smile the 
 Justice, as he toyed with his pencil, was swiftly 
 deciding to bring the Peers here before the miners 
 with papers, documents and, if necessary, title 
 deeds. 
 
 Now the mere summoning of these Peers was 
 almost a revolutionary event, for it is unusual for 
 coal-diggers to subpoena Lords. It is a sign of 
 a social overturn. True, it is in the King's name 
 that they are summoned but King George the 
 Fifth, by the grace of God, had little enough to 
 do with it. Some day, perhaps, the King will 
 summon the King to the King's Robing Room to 
 show cause why the King shall not be deposed, 
 and, if summoned, the King will come. So the 
 Peers came and testified and went, came and went 
 in sober twentieth century morning clothes, and 
 all that spectacular part of the business is over. 
 [io8J 
 
But the question remains what does it all mean? 
 What did these miners and these Peers of the 
 Realm think of one another? And what is to 
 come of it? 
 
 The summoning of the Peers was not a mere 
 theatricalism but a formal challenge of the highest 
 social class by the lowest. Mr. Smillie knew, and 
 the Peers knew, that both are protagonists, the 
 champions of multitudes far greater than the 
 groups immediately represented. Back of the 
 miners stand millions of wage-earners and their 
 sympathizers who have never descended a shaft, 
 and back of the Peers millions of business and 
 professional men, and good men and women of 
 all trades and none, who do not aspire even to 
 knighthood. The calling of the Peers was a warn- 
 ing to all that the workers were taking high 
 ground. In earlier days, as in the heroic coal 
 strike of 1 844, the miners asked only for a pitiful 
 measure of justice, for the right to have their coal 
 honestly weighed, for the abolition of truck stores, 
 for a few pence more and a few minutes less. To- 
 day their demands reach down to the deepest roots 
 of our industrial system. They demand the nation- 
 alization of the mines, the control of the industry 
 by the miners, the abolition of profits. Through 
 their insistent questions there runs this revolution- 
 ary doctrine; the dukes, earls, and marquises did 
 not produce the coal; they perform no public 
 service; they derive their wealth from the labor 
 of the exploited miners ; they have no title to abso- 
 lute ownership; the State has the right and the 
 [ 109] 
 
duty to take over these mines, with or without 
 compensation. 
 
 When men feel deeply they tend to drop into 
 religious phraseology. 
 
 Mr. Smillie — "There is a very old book which 
 says : 'The earth is the Lord's and the ful- 
 ness thereof.' Would you deny that author- 
 ity?" 
 
 The Witness (Lord Durham) — "I prefer an- 
 other authority which says: 'Render unto 
 Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and 
 unto God the things that are God's.' " 
 
 Mr. Smillie — "That is exactly what I want to 
 be done at the present time, because if 'the 
 earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof,' 
 it cannot be the property of individuals." 
 
 Does not this battle of the texts recall the theo- 
 logical arguments of the "mad priest of Kent," 
 who five hundred years ago went from village 
 to village haranguing the peasants on the greens? 
 It is the same appeal to an original human equal- 
 ity, the same confident reliance upon God's own 
 intention. 
 
 "Good people," said John Ball, "things will 
 never go well in England, so long as goods be 
 not kept in common, and so long as there be 
 villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they 
 whom men call lords greater folk than we? If 
 all come from the same father and mother, Adam 
 and Eve, how can they say or prove that they 
 are better than we, if it be not that they make 
 [iioj 
 
us gain for them by our toil what they spend in 
 their pride? 
 
 "They are clothed in velvet and are warm in 
 their furs and ermine, while we are covered in 
 rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, 
 and we oatcake and straw and water to drink. 
 They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain 
 and labor, the wind and rain in the fields. And 
 yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold 
 their state." 
 
 Today, as five hundred years ago, but today in 
 the King's Robing Room instead of on the village 
 green, you hear again this eternal contrast be- 
 tween the lives of rich and poor, between ermine 
 and rags, between leisure and fine houses and 
 "pain and labor, the wind and rain in the fields." 
 After asking whether the late Duke of Hamilton's 
 annual income was not £240,000 Mr. Smillie jus- 
 tifies his question by pointing out that for forty 
 years the miners and their families on the Duke's 
 estate have been kept on the verge of starvation. 
 He establishes the fact that the late Duke's fam- 
 ily, consisting of one little girl, possesses five man- 
 sions and he continues his questioning of the 
 Duke's agent, Mr. Timothy Warren, as follows : 
 
 Mr. Smillie — "Do you know Hamilton Place 
 
 well?" 
 The Witness— ''Yt^y 
 Mr. Smillie — "It is a fairly large building with 
 
 a good many apartments?" 
 The Witness — "Very large." 
 [Ill] 
 
Mr. Smillie — "It stands in an enclosure sur- 
 rounded by a pretty high wall. Just outside 
 the wall on the west side of the palace there 
 are some of the most miserable homes in 
 Great Britain?" 
 
 The Witness — "I cannot use comparative 
 terms, but there are very indifferent houses 
 hundreds of years old." 
 
 Mr. Smillie — "Are you aware that in the town 
 of Hamilton the families of the men who are 
 producing the coal from the Duke's mines 
 are living four, five and six in a room; have 
 you any reason to doubt that statement?" 
 
 The Witness — "I do not doubt it." 
 
 At last comes the crucial ethical problem. Note 
 the implications of question and answer. 
 
 Question — "Supposing he owned the coal, do 
 you think it would be unjust that he (the 
 Duke) should live in Hamilton Place and at- 
 tend the Riviera and the racecourse, drawing 
 a shilling a ton for every ton produced by 
 the miners, while the miners who are risking 
 their lives get less than a shilling a ton for 
 hewing the coal? Would that be manifestly 
 unfair?" 
 
 Answer — "No." 
 
 I could give many illustrations from these ques- 
 tions to prove how drastic are the changes the 
 miners demand. Nothing less than complete na- 
 tionalization will be acceptable, and it is not abso- 
 lutely certain that the miners desire even to grant 
 
 [112] 
 
compensation. "Is it on the same plane," asks 
 Mr. Smillie of Lord Tredegar, "to confiscate a 
 cottage built with the life savings of a man and 
 confiscate land no landlord ever did anything to 
 create ? . . . Surely you as a legislator would be 
 the last to say that the State has not the right to 
 do what the majority think they have the right to 
 do. Are you aware that landlords in the House 
 of Lords who do not represent the people, have 
 confiscated by laws passed in that House millions 
 of acres of land?" 
 
 Such questions reveal a revolutionary intent 
 whether the titled mine-owners are to be reim- 
 bursed or not, for even if so compensated they 
 cannot escape income tax and death duties. If the 
 mines, railroads, ships and other great industrial 
 properties are gradually taken over by the nation 
 and are run by associations of workingmen there 
 will inevitably arise a conflict of interest between 
 the active groups controlling industry and the pas- 
 sive groups in possession of government bonds, 
 paid to the former owners of these properties. 
 The issue of such a conflict is patent. Year by 
 year, the wages of the men in these industries will 
 be slowly increased even if the enterprises must be 
 subventioned by taxes, in other words,. even if the 
 higher wages must be paid out of the incomes of 
 the present owners. This gradual encroachment 
 is but a sign of one of those vast and subtle sub- 
 versions in society, in which new values are cre- 
 ated and old values destroyed, in which some 
 groups become richer and some poorer, in which 
 
 [113 J 
 
the equilibrium or balance of society is altered, in 
 which power passes, not suddenly or completely 
 but gradually and partially, from one social class 
 to another. 
 
 Transitions of this sort never occur without 
 some friction and loss. When feudal society disap' 
 peared many men lost their hold on life, and the 
 advent of machinery, upon which our entire indus- 
 trial structure now rests, caused endless destitu- 
 tion and demoralization and the annihilation of 
 millions of petty existences. To eliminate the 
 profit-maker is to run the risk of a vast increase 
 in bureaucracy and red-tape, to uneducate men 
 trained in our present ideals and methods, and 
 perhaps to evoke or intensify a corporate egoism 
 of wage-earners, unenlightened and self-destruc- 
 tive. On the other hand such a transition, or rev- 
 olution, for that is what it is, will effect a greater 
 equalization of income and wealth; will divert 
 to productive purposes or to useful consumption, 
 vast quantities of goods now wasted in competi- 
 tive luxury; may create a new freedom for mil- 
 lions now industrially subject; may evoke new 
 productive energies, now dormant; may, finally, 
 create and firmly establish new ideals, which will 
 make the world saner and better. Honest and 
 intelligent men will differ as to whether this revo- 
 lution is to be welcomed or deplored, but there is 
 no wisdom in merely closing our eyes. We should 
 recognize the new currents upon which men's 
 minds are borne. The first social virtue is pre- 
 vision. 
 
 [114J 
 
That the conflict will come, is, in fact, already 
 upon us, seems obvious. It may be very peace- 
 ful, slow and dilatory conflict. It may give the 
 dispossessed millionaires and their children and 
 perhaps grandchildren ample time and means to 
 find their useful place in the new order. Among 
 the quiet revolutionists in England are men whose 
 outlook upon the economic inequalities of today is 
 like that of the more moderate abolitionists, who 
 wished to end "the peculiar institution" only 
 gradually and to recompense all slave-owners. 
 Whether this transition in England is to be suc- 
 cessful or for a time aborted, whether it is to be 
 salutary or destructive depends upon the mutual 
 attitude of these miners and Peers, and of the 
 classes standing behind them. That, as I take it, 
 is the chief lesson to be studied in the King's Rob- 
 ing Room. 
 
 What the miners think is easier to discern than 
 what the Peers think. A class, comprising mil- 
 lions must think aloud; like Hamlet's players it 
 "cannot keep counsel." How this class regards 
 the Peers and their royalties, the possessing 
 classes and their possessions, may be read in thou- 
 sands of books and pamphlets issued by trade 
 unionists, socialists and syndicalists. Their 
 thought is of more than one strand and is not al- 
 ways easy to disentangle. At bottom, however, 
 there is discontent with the distribution of na- 
 tional wealth and income, opposition to the indus- 
 trial system which permits this distribution, 
 eagerness to use political power for the destruc- 
 
 [115] 
 
tion of capitalism, willingness if necessary to 
 achieve this result by a general strike temporarily 
 paralyzing society. But the intense feeling behind 
 these convictions is more obscure and to predict 
 what the miners will do one must know what their 
 life has been, underground and above ground, dur- 
 ing a century and what it is today. A few gen- 
 erations ago miners' children of seven and eight 
 years were daily dragged to their work in the 
 mines owned by the ancestors of the titled owners 
 of today. Naked men and women, blackened 
 with coal dust, worked underground in a hideous 
 promiscuity. They died of pneumonia, tubercu- 
 losis and interesting occupational diseases like 
 "blackspittle." Today conditions, though 
 immensely improved, are still bad. In some dis- 
 tricts five-ninths of all miners' houses contain only 
 two rooms and one-ninth contain only one room. 
 The men who have worked or fought to free the 
 world still struggle for their own economic free- 
 dom, while a one-eyed Parliament grants tens of 
 millions to the men who own the mines. These 
 miners at their dangerous work and in their "very 
 indifferent houses" are disillusioned and angry. 
 Perhaps they are not quite just to the Peers; in 
 conflict men are seldom just. Nor need we be sur- 
 prised if the acrid hate evoked by the war is now 
 turned inward so that social classes forget the 
 amenities and are more than usually bitter and un- 
 just towards one another. 
 
 What the Peers think it is harder to discover, 
 for the Peers comprise men of diverse origins and 
 [ii6] 
 
varying abilities, some of the ablest men in Eng- 
 land and not a few mediocrities. They represent 
 two principles, the principle of aristocracy and the 
 principle of money. A titled millionaire is a mil- 
 lionaire and he considers his million as well as 
 title. Being aristocrats, with the prestige and 
 discipline of their caste behind them, these men 
 stand up straight and take punishment smilingly. 
 They speak out the truth and do not evade. The 
 Duke of Northumberland is asked whether he was 
 come before the Commission to defend his own 
 interests and he promptly answers "Certainly." 
 Perhaps this courage is in part due to an obdurate 
 persuasion that the British aristocracy having sur- 
 vived so many attacks — ^partly by concessions — 
 cannot now be destroyed. The British aristocracy 
 is excellent at survival; it surrenders but it never 
 dies. 
 
 Neither does it ever really learn. Some of its 
 members understand England and the world ex- 
 cellently, but the class as a whole approaches each 
 new crisis with no adequate conception of the 
 trend of modern development and it survives, as 
 Falstaff fought, "on instinct." If the miners do 
 not understand the Peers, the Peers do not even 
 try to understand the miners. They come to the 
 Coal Commission with little comprehension of the 
 motives and emotions of five million trade union- 
 ists. Their argument is largely legalistic, based 
 on ten years' possession, on ancient titles, which 
 were musty long before Cromwell and Elizabeth, 
 on the legal assumption that centuries of effortless 
 
 [117J 
 
profit-taking justify more centuries of effortless 
 profit-taking. These Peers have read their Morn- 
 ing Post and therefore know that something is 
 wrong, that the miners are thinking too much 
 and working too little, that the hungry are becom- 
 ing greedy and the poor, insatiable. But how can 
 they understand what the grimy miners are think- 
 ing? Though they are far from unintelligent, 
 their long-time security, their serene elevation 
 above the sweaty struggle for life and their conde- 
 scending marriage of convenience with the wealth 
 of Great Britain have blunted certain faculties. 
 Their diked minds are protected against the turbid 
 streams of thought that course through the back 
 streets of England. They are, without suspecting 
 it, out of date. Some would like "to button their 
 pockets and stand still"; others would prefer to 
 make "reasonable concessions"; almost all would 
 desire a general improvement in the physical con- 
 ditions of the wage-earners if it did not mean 
 too heavy an increase in the income tax. We are 
 dealing here with good men, patriotic, honorable, 
 decent, whose sins are sins of omission due to ig- 
 norance rather than greed and to tradition rather 
 than invention. They have merely let things go. 
 Moreover their vision is as much distorted by 
 what they know as by what they do not know. A 
 little history is a dangerous thing and all hered- 
 itary classes know their history. They know what 
 befell former agitators like Wat Tyler and his 
 band of "shoeless ruffians"; the rebel Fitz Osbert, 
 stripped naked and dragged at the tail of a horse 
 [ii8] 
 
over the rough stones of London and dead before 
 he reached Tyburn; the innumerable Jack Cades 
 and Robert Kets, hanged in chains, drawn and 
 quartered. What they do not so clearly perceive 
 is that the relation of classes has changed, that 
 the whole vast solid plane of industrial society 
 is being slowly tilted, that some classes are being 
 depressed and some elevated, and that behind 
 these tiresomely statistical representatives of the 
 miners is a compact strength and formidableness, 
 a conscious will, like that which enabled their own 
 ancestors centuries ago to extort these very mines 
 in return for real and imaginary services and dis- 
 services to the King and Realm. The true suc- 
 cessors of the acquisitive Peers of centuries ago 
 are not their lineal descendants, who have become 
 inert owners, but that active and indispensable 
 social group which today has the like will to ac- 
 quire and an infinitely deeper sense of moral justifi- 
 cation in acquiring — the organized and self-organ- 
 izing wage-earning class. 
 
 Nor do the Peers seem fully to realize the 
 strength of the group opposed to them. That 
 strength is only in part political; it is in still 
 greater measure economic. It consists chiefly of 
 the power to stop or limit work, the strike and the 
 strike on the job. The strike, that crippling wea- 
 pon of the wage-earners, having outgrown the 
 single shop, has now outgrown the single industry 
 and become the cessation of all essential work 
 throughout the community. It is a wholesale pas- 
 sive resistance of a class, which despite many de- 
 
feats, cannot ultimately be divided against itself, 
 cannot be coerced, cannot be destroyed and cannot 
 be dispensed with. The general strike, such as 
 we have never yet seen it, is neither more nor less 
 than an economic blockade of the whole nation. 
 Back of this giant strike, moreover, lies an even 
 more sybtle, deadly and uncontrollable weapon — 
 the refusal of men greatly to exert themselves. 
 This growing reluctance of wage-earners to give 
 more than they get is the Achilles-foot of our 
 modern industrial system. It is a weapon which 
 in the end injures those who use it as well as 
 those against whom it is used, and it is the more 
 dangerous because it destroys habits of industry 
 and injures the morale which a century of capital- 
 ism has strengthened among workers. But how 
 can you overcome the wage-earner's refusal to 
 work hard and his acquired habit of taking things 
 easy if he believes that the chief thing he is work- 
 ing for is the profit of mine-owners, already over- 
 rich? You can conscript labor if you care to take 
 the risk, but you cannot conscript enthusiasm, and 
 without enthusiasm labor today is a dead limb. 
 The miners' leaders have predicted, and in a sense 
 promised, that the men will work with all their 
 might if the management is theirs and the profits 
 are public profits, but not otherwise. It is of 
 course a threat even more than a prophecy, for 
 without enthusiastic labor private ownership of the 
 mines will be unprofitable. It is compulsion. But 
 the miners believe, rightly or wrongly, that they 
 have never gained anything except by compulsion. 
 [ i2o] 
 
This compulsion, which lies in the nature of 
 the situation rather than in the will of particular 
 men, reveals the secret of the semi-decorous meet- 
 ings between miners and Peers in the King's Rob- 
 ing Room. No sudden affection brought together 
 these two groups but a mutual recognition of 
 strength and opposition and the desire for a pre- 
 liminary testing. Because compulsion lies so near 
 the surface, the labor situation in England today, 
 as it is revealed in the Coal Commission, in gov- 
 ernment offices and in the swarming, dirty alleys 
 of industrial and mining cities is big with grave 
 possibilities. Acerbity grows between miners and 
 Lords as also between their adherents outside. 
 Never before have the wage-earners been so con- 
 scious of strength. The Triple Alliance of miners, 
 railroad men, and transport workers (fifteen hun- 
 dred thousand solidly organized men) believe that 
 they are able to stop the Industry of the nation, 
 to shut it up as one snaps a rat-trap. On the 
 other hand the War Office is preparing to enlist 
 soldiers as strike breakers, to turn the army 
 against the strikers. There is danger that in this 
 mood the struggle may be fought out on the 
 lowest plane with bloodshed and starvation as the 
 weapons. 
 
 Such is the drift of today, a movement steadily 
 gaining impetus towards a catastrophic collision. 
 Fortunately, however, we are dealing with Eng- 
 land, a moderate, sensible, practical nation, a na- 
 tion that sees more than it says, a nation with 
 poise and with traditions of self-government and 
 
fair play, a nation which respects individual liberty 
 and protects it as we in America do not yet do. 
 England has been faced before with dangers and 
 has avoided them by her moderation. "It is too 
 late for a peaceful solution," wrote Frederick En- 
 gels in 1845 oi the England of his day. "The 
 classes are divided more and more sharply, the 
 spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the 
 bitterness intensifies, the guerrilla skirmishes be- 
 come concentrated in more important battles, and 
 soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the ava- 
 lanche in motion. Then, indeed, will the war cry 
 resound throughout the land : 'War to the palaces, 
 peace to the cottages I' — but then it will be too late 
 for the rich to beware." 
 
 That was seventy-four years ago, and England 
 weathered the storm. She changed her policy, 
 protected the workers, gave them better wages, 
 shorter hour^, more education and more political 
 influence, and thus regained their allegiance. To- 
 day she is met by a revolt in some respects similar 
 in quality but entirely different in magnitude from 
 that which she faced three-quarters of a century 
 ago. There are many favorable factors: her 
 great wealth, which is a hostage to peace, the 
 intelligence of her workers, the calmness of her 
 leaders, her spirit of tolerance which is the great- 
 est asset of all. Nowhere in the world have plans 
 for the gradual admission of wage-earners to the 
 actual control of industry been so carefully formu- 
 lated as in England. But passions run high and 
 in both camps are fiery-tempered extremists, who 
 
 [ 122 ] 
 
hate all concessions and halting steps and prefer 
 to an orderly, elderly progress a swifter even 
 though it be a sanguinary solution. That is Eng- 
 land's choice of alternatives and that, eventually, 
 will be America's. Which shall it be ? 
 
 [ 123] 
 
THE CRUMBLING HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
THE CRUMBLING HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 Lloyd George — "A duke costs as much as a Dreadnought and 
 is twice as dangerous." 
 
 I HAD come to England to witness the Revolution 
 in 1911. 
 
 Like other Americans, I knew that the great 
 English political parties had locked horns over 
 the question of the House of Lords. I knew 
 that the British Government, backed by a ma- 
 jority of the nation, desired a vast constitutional 
 revolution, which would deprive the House of 
 Lords of its present right finally to reject legisla- 
 tion. I knew that a bill to attain this end was 
 being vigorously pushed through Parliament. 
 
 What I did not know — what, in fact, I had 
 come to seek — was the true inwardness of this 
 portentous impending change. What did it mean? 
 What had come over the tradition-loving English 
 people, who for eight hundred years had been rev- 
 erently submissive to the House of Lords ? What 
 was the offending of these Lords of England? 
 
 I closed my paper-bound volume, "Peers versus 
 People," as the little train, after its swift run from 
 Southampton, carried me into the swarming Lon- 
 don station. I avoided the skurrying porters who 
 clamored for my baggage; evaded the importuni- 
 
 [ 127] 
 
ties of station cabmen and taxi-drivers, and es- 
 caped into the street to call my own hansom. I 
 was unconsciously irritated by this excess of serv- 
 ice proffered by all these superfluous station peo- 
 ple. 
 
 It was evening. The London mist engulfed the 
 gay thronged streets. Myriads of pale lights 
 twinkled over the square — lights from street 
 lamps, from shop windows, from omnibuses, 
 from thousands of cabs which darted here, there, 
 everywhere, ready to pounce upon a prospective 
 "fare." 
 
 As I started to call one of these cabs, suddenly 
 there arose, out of the darkness, as though evokf ' 
 by some Aladdin's lamp, four tattered, pale-faced 
 men of the underworld. The four sprang forward 
 to render me this slight service. One, quicker than 
 his fellows, tore open the cab door, and received 
 his penny. Then the men vanished, slinking into 
 the gray mist. 
 
 "Whence come these men? What manner of 
 city was this that wasted four able-bodied men 
 on so paltry a task?" 
 
 Later that evening, when in the crossing currents 
 of the streets, my cab came to a halt, I caught an- 
 other fleeting glance at London misery. A naked, 
 dirt-caked arm, thrust from a sleeveless coat, 
 touched my shoulder; a haggard face peered into 
 the cab window, and a voice harsh with anxiety 
 asked, "Can I 'ave the luggage, sir?" As the 
 cab wound through the mazes of the London 
 traffic, I saw this tattered man doggedly running 
 [128] 
 
behind us. Not once did he lose sight of the cab. 
 At the hotel he was waiting, breathless. 
 
 "It's mine, sir," he panted. "You promised me 
 the luggage, sir." 
 
 For the chance of earning a shilling at work 
 which did not need him, this wretched man had 
 followed me through tortuous miles of London 
 streets. What a city it was ! 
 
 I did not wish to see deeper into this abyss. 
 I had not come to England to view bottomless 
 misery. But what is everywhere, cannot be hid. 
 On the following days I saw in street after street, 
 workless, homeless miserables, men with broken 
 shoes and dropping rags of clothes. I saw men 
 who, for the pennies of the passers-by, perfunctor- 
 ily swept crossings already clean. Other silent 
 supplicants were seated on cold pavements, upon 
 the flagstones of which they had crayoned rude 
 sketches to attract a slender alms. I saw abject 
 women, with trailing, bedraggled skirts, and with 
 a flat, sterile vacancy of expression, more tragic 
 than despair. There were drunken men, too, and 
 sodden women, and files of men — or of what had 
 once been men — waiting outside bakers' and 
 butchers' shops for crusts and refuse. The halt, 
 the blind, the unemployed, the shifty beggars, and 
 the wretches too timid to beg, passed in an unend- 
 ing procession. Long before sunset the lines had 
 formed for admission to the casual wards of the 
 almshouses. 
 
 "It's deplorable," commented my English 
 friend (he was a doctor with a fashionable prac- 
 
 [ 129 J 
 
tice and aristocratic prepossessions). "Still every 
 country has its poverty. Even in the States — " 
 "Yes," I admitted. "It is not for us to throw 
 
 stones." 
 
 Later, however, as on our silent homeward 
 walk, I summed up all the dismal impressions of 
 the day, I began to feel that after all there was 
 a difference. American poverty was overwhelming, 
 but it was not everywhere, and it was not so hope- 
 less. Men did escape from American slums, and 
 their children escaped. 
 
 But the English slum was a prison, in which 
 the fallen man and his children and grandchildren 
 rotted and rotted. There was a droop, a sagging, 
 to these people; an inexpressible indifference to 
 surroundings, an utter self-abandonment. You 
 could seek out poverty anywhere, but in London it 
 obtruded itself — stark, menacing, unescapable, 
 like the naked, dirt-caked arm of the superfluous 
 wretch who had followed my hansom. 
 
 "Doctor," I asked suddenly, "are you comfort- 
 able people not sometimes afraid?" 
 
 "Of those fellows? No," he replied, "they're 
 used to being underdogs. They're too spirit- 
 less to revolt. A people crushed to earth," he 
 laughed — somewhat unpleasantly — "is crushed to 
 earth." 
 
 I did not laugh. 
 
 "What if they should?" I asked. 
 
 He did not answer — and after a while we 
 talked of other things. 
 
 That question protruded itself again and again 
 
 [ 130] 
 
like the persistent arm of a beggar. "What if 
 they should?" 
 
 I did not like to think of it. I dared not im- 
 agine what might happen if in some day of na- 
 tional disaster, the gutters of London, should 
 empty themselves of their human refuse; if in 
 some day of weakness this careless, garish civiliza- 
 tion should be trampled under foot by its victims. 
 
 Later I learned that other men in England 
 thought similar thoughts. 
 
 "What if they should?" 
 
 From the gallery of the House of Commons 
 I listened to the debates on the Parliament (or 
 Veto) bill. It was all beautifully simple. The 
 measure provided that henceforth the House of 
 Lords should have no jurisdiction over any money 
 bill or any financial legislation whatsoever. It 
 provided that all other bills which had passed 
 the House of Commons in three successive ses- 
 sions, should become law without the consent of 
 the Lords, provided that two years had elapsed 
 between original introduction and final passage. 
 It provided that members of the House of Com- 
 mons should be elected for five instead of for 
 seven years. 
 
 The debates covered no new ground. The 
 terse, lucid, convincing sentences of the prime min- 
 ister, Mr. Asquith — sentences at once cold and 
 luminous; the more vacillating, but graceful and 
 subtle rejoinders of Mr. Balfour; the caustic, in- 
 cisive interruptions of Lord Hugh Cecil ; the stir- 
 ring eloquence of the home secretary, Mr. 
 
 [131] 
 
Churchill, formed but a repetition of what had 
 already been thrashed out in a hundred constitu- 
 encies. What was new and strange was not what 
 was said but the manner and tone of this great 
 controversy. 
 
 The Conservatives, who are the allies of the 
 Lords, were fighting with their backs to the wall. 
 Tenacious, obstinate, they seemed nevertheless to 
 foresee inevitable defeat. They presented no 
 united front, no clear-cut plan of campaign. It 
 was as though they had come to bury the Lords, 
 not to praise them. 
 
 Circled about the Conservatives sat the Lib- 
 eral, Labor and Irish members, all opponents to 
 the Lords. These men were elate with the hope 
 of victory. I marveled at a new spirit which had 
 stamped that inflexible expression upon (these 
 men's faces. Surely this conflict was more than a 
 mere constitutional battle. It was a war of ideals ; 
 of New against Old; a resistless sweep of demo- 
 cratic waters against ancient, crumbling barriers. 
 I wondered whence came this vast, new impetus. 
 
 The House rose, and I found myself again upon 
 the street. There in the light of the pale street 
 lamps, I saw an aging, workless man, dejectedly 
 marching, marching through a sleepless night. 
 Another appeared, more wretched than the first; 
 then another, and another. For an hour I stood 
 there, though the rain had begun to fall. Through 
 all that hour the weary march of the dispirited, 
 ghastly army never ceased. Out of mean streets 
 came dragging, shuffling men into the open square, 
 
 [ 132] 
 
and then, heeding nothing, casting not a glance at 
 the majestic building in which Lords and Com- 
 mons battle for supremacy, they disappeared 
 again, losing themselves in other mean streets. 
 
 As I went about gleaning opinions, I was sur- 
 prised to discover that personally most of the 
 Lords were liked, even by men opposed to their 
 rule. "The Peers are a good sort," a Liberal 
 leader told me. "They give time and money to 
 charity — more than their share — and they don't 
 shirk. Naturally they have their Lord Fitznoo- 
 dles, and some very old titles are held by some 
 very young rakes. But there are able Lords, too, 
 and the average Peer is no worse than the aver- 
 age Commoner." 
 
 "Then why — ?" I began. 
 
 "For that matter, continued the Liberal leader, 
 "your Virginian slaveholder was a gentleman, and 
 I have always suspected that the old nobles who 
 were guillotined during the French revolution 
 were not much worse than the fellows who guillo- 
 tined them. It's the Lords' political, not their per- 
 sonal character, that counts. Politically, they are 
 Conservatives, and always have been and always 
 will be Conservatives. When the Conservatives 
 control the House of Commons, the Lords have 
 nothing to do, and go quietly to sleep; when we 
 Liberials control the Commons, the Lords wake 
 up and reject or mutilate all our bills. If the 
 Lords were heaven-born legislators — which they 
 are not — we should still be against them, because 
 we cannot have a real party system or any ap- 
 
 [ 133 ] 
 
proach to a democracy so long as a permanent 
 Conservative majority in the Lords can undo 
 all legislation. Let the Lords keep their veto, 
 and we will have government for the Conserva- 
 tives by the Conservatives, for ever and ever." 
 
 "But why are they Conservatives?" I asked. 
 
 "Because," he answered, "they own everything 
 worth conserving." 
 
 As we parted, the Liberal discharged a final 
 Parthian shot. "If you really have any romantic 
 illusions about the noble House of Lords, look up 
 its record." 
 
 I did look up its record. I studied the votes 
 of the upper chamber from the year 1832, when 
 the obstinate Lords passed the Reform bill only 
 under threat of a violent insurrection, down to 
 their last obstructions in the last days of 19 10. 
 During all these years the Lords seemed to wage 
 one long Fabian warfare against progress. 
 
 Their record was the record of an unrepresent- 
 ative, hereditary clique of a selfish caste, willing 
 to sacrifice the masses of the people to augment 
 their own monopoly — a monopoly of wealth, land, 
 social prestige, and political power. When I had 
 read the record of the Peers, I repeated approv- 
 ingly the accusing question of Winston Churchill, 
 "Has the House of Lords ever been right in any 
 of the great controversies of the last one hundred 
 years?" 
 
 Not every one whom I met was as tolerant of 
 the Lords as was the Liberal statesman who had 
 found the Peers "a good sort." I discovered that 
 
 [134] 
 
the members of the Labor Party in Parliament 
 were in favor of the outright extinguishment of 
 the House of Lords ; for its destruction, root and 
 branch. Other men decried the upper house as 
 a ridiculous and barbarous anachronism ; as a sort 
 of political vermiform appendix; as a stupid, self- 
 satisfied, egoistic, plutocratic, reactionary and un- 
 improvable oligarchy. 
 
 In Hyde Park, which is a grass-covered forum 
 where any man may give expression to any views, 
 I came across an impassioned and intolerant an- 
 tagonist of the Lords. He was an old, tall, sal- 
 low, ascetic-looking orator, a man of one idea and 
 one purpose. To a changing crowd of curious 
 auditors, he inveighed — with a rude, ungrammat- 
 ical eloquence — -against the Lords collectively and 
 individually. He went into the moldy records of 
 the great titled families — the Russells, the How- 
 ards, the Digbys, the Seymours, the Cavendishes, 
 the Villiers, the Wellesleys — waxing indignant 
 over scandals half a millennium old. He was like 
 a modern Cato proclaiming, "Carthage must be 
 destroyed!" 
 
 In the eyes of this old man, the whole history 
 of the Lords from the 15th century, when the 
 turbulent Peers came to Parliament with enor- 
 mous retinues armed to the teeth, down to the 
 present humdrum day, was one long record of a 
 betrayal of England. The Lords, he admitted, 
 had gained some of the wisdom of the serpent, 
 but had acquired none of the innocence of the 
 dove. They had grown cautious as the people 
 
 [135] 
 
had grown strong, but they had learned nothing 
 and forgotten nothing. Obdurate though tim- 
 orous, retreating yet resisting, they had set their 
 faces against the light. They had often lacked 
 the courage of their greed and pride, and had con- 
 ceded much to fear but nothing to justice. They 
 had always fought for their rights, f/f^frprivileges, 
 their aggressions. They had fought against free, 
 untrammeled education. They had fought against 
 religious liberty, against equal rights to Noncon- 
 formists, Catholics, Jews. They had sought to 
 debar free churchmen from the universities. They 
 had held down the brave Irish people, and had 
 been as cruel to them as the famine. They had 
 kept a heavy hand upon the agricultural laborer. 
 They had confiscated the lands of England. They 
 had turned farms into hunting preserves. They 
 had girdled growing villages with hedges and 
 walls. They had locked up the minds of the vil- 
 lagers. They had been everywhere the enemies 
 of democratic progress and everywhere the friends 
 of political reaction. They had held the lands of 
 the city. They had debauched the population 
 through an unholy alliance with the brewers; 
 with the great, opulent, titled liquor-lords. Eng- 
 land and Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Em- 
 pire; the land, the towns, the army, the navy, the 
 church, the universities, had been one great hunt- 
 ing preserve, a place for younger sons, an ap- 
 panage of wealthy Lords and their wealthy allies. 
 They had remained wealthy by adopting men of 
 wealth; by a cooption which enlisted the newly- 
 [136 J 
 
made millionaire on the side of the Tudor noble; 
 by international marriage, which diverted Ameri- 
 can fortunes into an already huge reservoir of 
 wealth. They had held all the keys to social rec- 
 ognition and had remained immured in their noble 
 prejudices while, outside, the masses of the Brit- 
 ish people, laboring under this aristocratic incu- 
 bus, fought rather stolidly for progress, educa- 
 tion, recognition; and on the streets a swelling, 
 disregarded army of unemployed and unemploy- 
 ables marched ceaselessly, sullenly, dejectedly un- 
 der the dull street lamps. 
 
 One stinging phrase of the old Hyde Park ora- 
 tor — a phrase which I later learned was quoted 
 from the Joseph Chamberlain of radical days — 
 stuck in my mind. "The House of Lords," he 
 had said, "is a club of Tory landlords." 
 
 That, as I was soon to discover, was the crux 
 of the whole matter. The Lords are landlords. 
 
 The people of England are shut off from the 
 land. The cities are congested, the towns are 
 cramped, and the food of England comes from 
 abroad, while the Lords of England "join house 
 to house, lay field to field, till there be no place, 
 that they may be placed alone in the midst of the 
 earth." 
 
 Five hundred and twenty-five Peers own one- 
 fifth of the land of England. 
 
 England is a crowded country. There is only 
 a fraction over one acre to each man, woman 
 and child. But the Dukes average 142,564 acres 
 each; the Marquesses average 47,500 acres; the 
 
 [ 137] 
 
Earls, 30,217 acres; the Barons, 14,152 acres; 
 while his Grace, the Duke of Sutherland, contents 
 himself with 1,358,000 acres, the landed patri- 
 mony of a quarter of a million of England's fam- 
 ilies. 
 
 Nor is this all. The Lords are the centre of 
 a still more extended landed oligarchy. There 
 are seven million families in England. Of these 
 fewer than ten thousand own four-fifths of the 
 land. 
 
 The hereditary Lords of England have used 
 their privileges as legislators to evade their du- 
 ties as landlords. They have fostered the growth 
 of a land monopoly. They have upheld the law 
 of primogeniture (under which the eldest son be- 
 comes the sole heir) , and they have fought every 
 other proposal to bring equality and democracy 
 into the country districts. The Lords of Eng- 
 land, when not absentee landlords, are usually 
 kindly in whatever personal relations they have 
 with their farmers and laborers. But the labor- 
 ers vote as the Lord votes, and men of inde- 
 pendent judgment may not only lose their jobs 
 but be evicted as well from my Lord's crowded 
 cottages. 
 
 The noblesse oblige of the Lords has not had 
 the effect of making the agricultural population 
 either prosperous or contented. The wages of 
 farm laborers (including the value of all allow- 
 ances) amount in England to only four dollars 
 and a half a week and to only two dollars and 
 seventy-five cents a week in Ireland. 
 
 [138] 
 
"The agricultural laborers as a class" (so I 
 read in the report of the Royal Commission on 
 Labor) "earn only a bare subsistence, and the 
 great majority of them are in a chronic state of 
 poverty and anxiety." 
 
 The wretchedness of the Peer-ridden country 
 districts sends surplus hundreds of thousands of 
 unemployed men to swell the wretchedness of the 
 cities. Simultaneously the landlords — many of 
 them great Peers — receive a rent on all this pov- 
 erty of over two hundred millions of dollars an- 
 nually. From their immense holdings of city 
 lands, individual Lords receive other tens of mil- 
 lions annually. 
 
 It was through their tender solicitude for these 
 huge rents that the Lords were brought to their 
 present perilous pass. From 1906 to 1909, the 
 Liberal majority carried reform after reform 
 through the House of Commons — an Education 
 bill, a Scottish Land bill, a Land Valuation bill, 
 a Liquor Licensing bill, a bill against Plural Vot- 
 ing — only to have them defeated one after an- 
 other by the House of Lords. Then in 1909 a 
 Budget was introduced which the Lords believed 
 to be inimical to them as landlords; in other 
 words, in their private capacity. Whereupon the 
 Peers, to the dismay of their best friends, re- 
 jected the Budget. In an attempt to evade taxa- 
 ion, the Lords imperiled the future of their 
 House. 
 
 It is difficult for an American to understand 
 offhand why this action of the Peers was so revo- 
 
 [ 139] 
 
lutionary, for everyone acknowledges that the 
 Lords had a perfect legal right to do what they did. 
 
 But in England an action may be legal and 
 at the same time unconstitutional. Legally the 
 King has the right to reject any bill. For over 
 two hundred years, however, no King of England 
 has vetoed any law, however repugnant, with the 
 result that constitutionally the sovereign has 
 ceased to have the power. The royal veto has 
 oozed. 
 
 If to-day the King were to exercise this un- 
 doubted legal right, he might cease to be King 
 to-morrow. 
 
 Similarly the Lords are considered to have 
 lost any constitutional right which they may have 
 ever possessed, to initiate, amend or reject finan- 
 cial bills. As long ago as 1671, the House of 
 Commons asserted its exclusive jurisdiction over 
 "all aids given to the King," and in 1678, to make 
 its meaning clearer, the Commons added that "it 
 is the undoubted and sole right of the Commons 
 to direct, limit, and appoint in such bills the ends, 
 purposes, considerations, conditions, limitations, 
 and qualifications of such grants, which ought not 
 to be changed or altered by the House of Lords." 
 
 In i860, the House of Commons again asserted 
 its exclusive right as to "the matter, manner, 
 measure, and time." The King asks funds of the 
 Commons, not of the Lords, and at the end of 
 the session it is solely "the gentlemen of the House 
 of Commons" to whom he says, "I have to thank 
 you for the generous supply you have given me." 
 
 [ 140] 
 
If the Lords possessed a veto over finance they 
 could at will upset any government by the simple 
 expedient of withholding supplies. 
 
 The wiser Peers, among them Lord Cromer, 
 Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Lord James of 
 Hereford, solemnly warned the upper chamber 
 against the "formidable risks which would be in- 
 volved" in any rejection of the Budget. 
 
 '■You should think once," warned Lord Rose- 
 bery, "you should think twice and thrice, before 
 you give a vote which may involve such enor- 
 mous constitutional consequences." 
 
 Unfortunately, there were present a good many 
 "wild Lords" and "backwoodsmen" (Peers who 
 ordinarily do not attend because they have neither 
 the talents nor the inclination), and when the 
 vote was taken on the fatal 30th of November, 
 the Budget was overwhelmingly and contemptu- 
 ously rejected. 
 
 The Lords, to protect their own estates, com- 
 mitted an arbitrary and unprecedented breach of 
 the unwritten Constitution. 
 
 Whereupon the Ministry, which had now found 
 its clearly-defined issue, quite logically resigned. 
 New elections were ordered for January, 19 10, 
 and these resulted in a new victory for the Gov- 
 ernment. After reading the election returns, the 
 Lords quickly and unostentatiously passed the ob- 
 jectionable Budget. 
 
 The Liberal Government, supported by the 
 Labor and Irish members, now decided to end 
 the obstruction of the Lords once for all, and 
 
 [141 J 
 
resolutions were carried through the Commons 
 embodying the principles of the present Parlia- 
 ment bill. The Lords opposed these resolutions 
 with counter-resolutions. They were willing, they 
 claimed, to reform themselves. They were will- 
 ing to limit the hereditary principle. They were 
 willing to devise some plan of referendum. But 
 they were not willing to limit their veto, nor so 
 to change the Constitution of their House as to 
 give the Liberals an even chance of supremacy. 
 
 The sudden death of King Edward mollified 
 for a time all political antagonisms, and a con- 
 ference of Lords and Commons, of Conservatives 
 and Liberals, attempted to reach some compro- 
 mise. The conference failed. The two parties 
 were again in an impasse. 
 
 Again elections were ordered, and in Decem- 
 ber, 19 lo, for the third time, the Liberal, Labor 
 and Irish majority was sustained. On February 
 6th, the Parliament bill was introduced into the 
 Commons. It triumphantly passed its first and 
 second readings, and it is expected that during 
 this month the bill will pass its third reading with 
 a majority of over one hundred. From the Com- 
 mons the bill goes to the Lords to be accepted or 
 rejected. 
 
 As the crisis draws nearer, men on both sides 
 
 anxiously seek to gauge the eddies, currents and 
 tides of public opinion. So far there seems to 
 be no change. In the by-elections, honors have 
 been equal. There is lethargy in some districts 
 and loyalty to the Lords in others, but in the most 
 
 [ 142] 
 
unexpected quarters one discovers an intense de- 
 sire to fight the battle out now, even if it takes 
 all summer, even if it spoils the Royal Coronation. 
 
 It seemed to me, as I talked the matter over 
 with men of different minds, that this desire to 
 effect a speedy change was shared by many be- 
 sides members of Parliament. I found every- 
 where groups with reforms to urge, which waited 
 upon the removal of the obstructionist Lords. 
 
 I found the Irish counting the days until the 
 Veto bill would open the door to a near victory 
 for Irish autonomy. The Welsh demand for 
 church dis-establishment, the claims of working- 
 men for improved labor legislation, the desired 
 abolition of plural voting (under which system 
 one man may vote in all electoral districts in 
 which he owns property) — all these, and other 
 programmes, were in abeyance. 
 
 Vast projects of social reform were being care- 
 fully formulated. There were plans to insure 
 the working population against sickness and un- 
 employment; to reform the crudities and cruelties 
 of the absurd poor law; to modernize the educa- 
 tional system ; to loosen the hold of a great liquor 
 monopoly; to improve the administration of city 
 and county governments; to adjust the financial 
 relations of national and local authorities. Against 
 the obstruction of the House of Lords was ar- 
 rayed a mass of progressive sentiment, pervasive 
 and overwhelming. 
 
 The reconstruction of Great Britain and Ire- 
 land waited upon the abolition of the Lords' veto. 
 
 [143] 
 
"It is high time," a Radical statesman told 
 me. "Other nations are passing us. They have 
 better education!, better social legislation, and 
 much better economic arrangements. We build 
 Dreadnoughts and enroll a territorial army, but 
 you can't make soldiers — or workmen either — out 
 of starved children or the emaciated wretches you 
 can see on any street. In pounds and shillings 
 we are the richest country in Europe, but in 
 national efficiency other countries are ahead — and 
 will remain ahead until we get our other hand 
 free. When we get our other hand free, we'll 
 be a match for other nations." 
 
 He did not specify what nation he meant. He 
 did not need to. England to-day is uneasy about 
 Germany. She Is disquieted by the thought of 
 German soldiers, German sailors, German work- 
 men, merchants, statesmen. England is looking 
 to her defenses. She believes her navy to be as 
 invincible as ever, and her people as loyal. But 
 no longer is England so confident of the morale 
 of her millions ; of their intelligence, capacity, and 
 staying power; of their ability to withstand the 
 strain of a hundred years' industrial war. She 
 is beginning to fear that to enter upon some fu- 
 ture war, with millions upon the edge of destitu- 
 tion, is to court disaster; perhaps imperial disin- 
 tegration; perhaps, even, national extinction. 
 England, in her perilously exposed position, is 
 afraid. And back of this dread lies another 
 dread — the haunting, fugitive fear of the wretches 
 of slum and gutter. 
 
 [ 144] 
 
What if they should/ 
 
 In a very real sense it is the Pauper who has 
 toppled over the Peer. The naked, dirt-caked 
 arm of the superfluous wretch is pointing the way 
 that England must go, and that way leads straight 
 over the House of Lords; over its vested inter- 
 ests, its prejudices, its ignorances, its tenacious 
 obstructions. To the doors of the House of 
 Lords comes a pitiable, motley army of half-edu- 
 cated, half-fed, obscurely miserable men and 
 women, graduates of the farcical free schools of 
 their day; children of child laborers, aspirants 
 for the barbarous, tragically absurd workhouses. 
 Strong men come crying for work, and the Lords 
 have no answer. They are good enough men, 
 kindly enough and sincere. But they are shut 
 up in the narrow knowledge of their "order" and 
 they can not see an England beyond the gates of 
 their parks. 
 
 The Lords have no answer. Because they 
 have no answer, the Lords must go. 
 
 Will they go ? The bill to restrict their power 
 can not become law until they themselves accept 
 it. Will the Lords commit political hari-kari? 
 
 No one can tell. At the last moment there 
 may be a proverbial slip 'twixt cup and lip; 
 there may come a sudden veering of the wind of 
 popular favor, a patched-up compromise on the 
 basis of a self-reform of the Lords. For the 
 last few weeks the Peers have been trying to 
 agree upon a plan. They have sought to hang 
 together to avoid hanging separately. They wish 
 
 [ 145 ]: 
 
now to reform themselves — that is, the minority 
 does, and that by the simple expedient of un- 
 seating the majority. But the majority — it is 
 whispered — seeks no self-immolation. The coun- 
 try Peers have thrice put aside the crown of mar- 
 tyrdom. The House of Lords, which demands 
 the right to legislate for the people of the United 
 Kingdom, is unable to agree upon its own re- 
 construction. 
 
 With the people back of them, the Commons 
 can compel the Lords to accept the Veto bill. By 
 one of those delightfully simple expedients, in 
 which the English Constitution abounds, the 
 House of Lords can be persuaded to commit sui- 
 cide in self-defense. 
 
 The King has the right to create a Peer. The 
 right to create a Peer involves the right to create 
 a thousand Peers, successively or simultaneously. 
 The King acts upon the advice of his prime min- 
 ister, who expresses the will of the Commons. 
 At the word of the prime minister, the King may 
 create five hundred Peers, all of whom will come 
 to the House of Lords, pledged to vote for the 
 Parliament bill. 
 
 Suppose, however, the King refuses? It is his 
 legal right. But to refuse is to throw the mon- 
 archy into the melting pot. The King of Eng- 
 land is revered, because he never refuses. 
 
 Thus we approach the twilight of the Lords. 
 
 If the Peers accept their new subordinate role 
 
 as critics, and impartial advisers in legislation, 
 
 they may come to attain a moral, and an indirect 
 
 [146] 
 
political influence, if not greater, at least more 
 beneficent than their present power of interested 
 obstruction. If, however, the Lords protest, they 
 will be upon the horns of the following dilemma : 
 
 Either they will reluctantly pass the Parlia- 
 ment bill, and, having given their assent, will be 
 forever barred from claiming a restoration of 
 their veto. 
 
 Or they will withhold their assent and have the 
 bill passed over their heads by five hundred brand- 
 new Lords, thus losing not only their "absolute 
 veto" but also their present Conservative major- 
 ity, as well as suffering "socially" through a dilu- 
 tion of their order. To delay the blow is to double 
 its impact. 
 
 The people of Great Britain and Ireland, who 
 have been cramped and confined by the century- 
 long obstinacy of the Lords ; the masses who have 
 been shut off from the land and exploited in the 
 cities; the poor; the unemployed; the disinher- 
 ited, who are poor and unemployed and disin- 
 herited because a wealthy and noble class has 
 monopolized England — all these may be indiffer- 
 ent as to the manner of the Lords' going, so that 
 they go at once. 
 
 To the Lords, however, the choice, though be- 
 tween two evils, is between two unequal evils. 
 Unless an unexpected reprieve arrives at the last 
 hour, the old absolute veto of the House of Lords 
 must either die by its own hand or be ignomini- 
 ously hanged by the neck until it is dead. 
 
 What will the Lords do? 
 
 [147 J 
 
THE CONQUERING CHINESE 
 
THE CONQUERING CHINESE 
 
 It was a Chinese official at Peking who first gave 
 me the sense that China is unconquerable and con- 
 quering. 
 
 I had gone to this official to ask certain ques- 
 tions concerning political affairs. He had listened 
 quietly and answered with seeming frankness. He 
 had no illusions concerning the present situation. 
 The Chinese Government was weak; its finance 
 bad; there was no money for schools; no money 
 for anything. Officials were corrupt, and repeated 
 promises of reform were unfulfilled. The armies, 
 under the leadership of semi-independent generals, 
 could not be disbanded because they had not been 
 paid; to disband them would convert the soldiers 
 into brigands. The internal situation was serious. 
 
 The foreign situation was even worse. Upon 
 a map the official showed me how Japan was 
 encircling China. She held Korea and southern 
 Manchuria and from Port Arthur and Tsing-tao 
 menaced Peking. She had Formosa, claimed spe- 
 cial rights in Fu-kien and would not surrender 
 Shantung peninsula unless forced. Step by step 
 she was gaining industrial and political influence 
 throughout the republic. So long as the war 
 lasted Japan would have a free hand; in case of 
 an insurrection she could land troops, with the con- 
 
 [151] 
 
sent of the Powers, and once her armies were in 
 China it would be hard to dislodge them. 
 
 AH this he told me without any display of agi- 
 tation. His voice was almost uninflected and his 
 speech gestureless. As he sat at his desk with 
 his long, fine hands hidden in the sleeves of his 
 black silk Chinese coat, he seemed the incarnation 
 of passivity. It required a violent effort to realize 
 that this immobile and imperturbable Chinese had 
 spent four years in an American university, per- 
 haps had rowed with the crew or played on the 
 baseball team. The idea seemed incongruous. 
 Despite his Western knowledge, his mind was 
 tenaciously Chinese. He was detached, imper- 
 sonal, with a patient, unhurried mental attitude, 
 as though the noisy turmoil of centuries did not 
 count in a nation's destiny. 
 
 "If the worst comes to the worst," he con- 
 cluded, "we shall invite Japan to conquer us." 
 
 I stared. "Invite Japan ? That would be the 
 end of China." 
 
 He smiled indulgently. "You people of the 
 West are so impatient, so — ^may I say? — imme- 
 diate. You think in years instead of in centuries. 
 There can be no end of China. 
 
 "What can the conqueror, as we call him, do? 
 He can make money out of us and for us, and 
 he can rule us — for a time ; but he cannot absorb 
 us and we can and will absorb him. I would give 
 the Japanese just fifty years of control; then they 
 would go the way of the Manchus." 
 
 He went into details. He portrayed a new 
 [152] 
 
China growing up vigorously under its supposed 
 Japanese masters. He assumed that under the 
 foreign rule the Chinese would get railroads, tel- 
 egraphs, factories, schools, and universities, and 
 would become a wealthy and intelligent nation. 
 Every effort of Japan to exploit China would aid 
 China, and though the seat of empire might be 
 at Tokio, the real administrators, the tens and 
 hundreds of thousands of subordinate officials, 
 would be Chinese. Officer the army with Jap- 
 anese and it would still be a Chinese army. The 
 real power would remain with the Chinese people. 
 And in the end, in twenty, fifty, or at most a hun- 
 dred or two hundred years, the people would 
 exercise this power and the fragile Japanese dom- 
 ination would be shattered. The day of little 
 nations, he intimated, is over; the great masses 
 learn quickly and all the tricks of organization and 
 discipline and science can no longer be monopo- 
 lized by any one people. Perhaps the Chinese by 
 themselves would throw off the yoke ; perhaps they 
 would wait until Japan was embroiled with an- 
 other nation ; perhaps they would wait even longer 
 until the sated foreigners, by sheer pressure from 
 the population around thenii, became Chinese, as 
 the Normans became English. In the end it 
 would be the same, the little island folk would 
 succumb to the continental people. And the same 
 if Europe were ever to divide China. Jealousies, 
 boundary disputes, wars between these hasty na- 
 tions — and in the quiet fullness of time China, 
 educated and drilled, would come into her own 
 
 [153] 
 
again. Either she would drive out the invaders 
 or they would drive one another off, as Japan 
 drove out Russia and Germany. 
 
 "No," he declared, "China may be overrun, 
 but in the end will be triumphant. We are no 
 doubt the weakest and most unpolitical of nations, 
 but we are unconquerable." 
 
 As I left the office and found myself again 
 upon the thronged Peking streets, it seemed as 
 though these swarms of blue-clad Chinese had 
 taken on a new significance. Everywhere were 
 men in silk and cotton, with long skirts and cere- 
 monial skull-cap, or dressed in tight-fitting cotton 
 garments. The winter sunlight poured upon an 
 endless stream of ragged 'rickshaw-men, panting 
 hard as they ran at a dog-trot which they could 
 maintain for hours. Coolies passed under their 
 great loads ; the carters were drawing stone upon 
 the springless Peking carts. There followed men 
 leading asses and camels, and then more coolies 
 carrying on their shoulders the city's human refuse 
 that, like all things in China, is sedulously 
 hoarded. There were thousands and thousands 
 of these common Chinese folk, and beyond, in 
 the republic's eighteen provinces, hundreds of mil- 
 lions of them. The street was one vast hive of 
 crowding men. It was an ugly, sordid, malodor- 
 ous life that it revealed, but a life that endures. 
 
 These Chinese, I thought, have the viability 
 of rats. Wretched, laughing, philosophical, they 
 withstand heat and cold, dwell in the tropics or 
 in the frigid zone, perform labor that no white 
 
 [154] 
 
man would undertake, live on food upon which 
 a white man would starve. A comfortless race, 
 not despising comfort, but ignorant of what it is. 
 Living on a bowl of rice and a morsel of fish, 
 sleeping on a cold dirt floor or at best on a brick 
 oven with a straw mattress for a bed and a 
 wooden block for a pillow, living amid dirt and 
 vermin and intolerable stenches, these people have 
 reached the irreducible minimum of physical ex- 
 istence. Perfect machines, devised to give a max- 
 imum energy at a minimum cost. 
 
 Because its scale of living is low and because 
 it is fruitful, the Chinese nation is indeed inde- 
 structible. You cannot remove this population 
 or exterminate it or even lessen it. Scourge it 
 with famines, pestilences, and wars, like that 
 Taiping rebellion which destroyed ten to twenty 
 millions, and in the end the population is greater 
 than before. The procreative impulse rules 
 China as the Manchus never ruled it. Three out 
 of four babies die, but the fourth is more than 
 enough. Kill a hundred million Chinese and in 
 two generations there are more graves cluttering 
 the earth, but as many living as ever. The prin- 
 cipal product of China is cheap, rice-fed men, 
 who work and starve, or perhaps freeze to death 
 during the cold January nights, or die by the hun- 
 dreds of thousands in periodical famines, or ob- 
 stinately survive and raise more cheap, rice-fed 
 men. There are hundreds of millions of them 
 with vision bounded by a bowl of rice and the 
 desire for male offspring. The race is like the 
 
 [I5S] 
 
sea, inexhaustible, imperishable. It does not 
 wither away at the breath of Western civiliza- 
 tion. It does not disappear. It does not go 
 under. It persists. 
 
 It is, moreover, an impermeable race; to at- 
 tempt to interpenetrate it is as hopeless as to pour 
 water into a jar filled with mercury. I thought 
 of Macao. The Portuguese have been there for 
 over three centuries and have contrived to make 
 of it a beautiful city, living on opium, gambling, 
 and other vices, like a pretty prostitute in pink 
 ribbons. The picturesque streets have Portu- 
 guese names, but the city is irredeemably, un- 
 alterably Chinese. Look down from the green- 
 clad hills upon the flat roofs, blue and green and 
 red, of the clustered, wind-swept city, and you 
 see the homes not of Portuguese, but of Orientals. 
 Of a population of seventy-five thousand, only 
 a scant two thousand claim a dubious Portuguese 
 origin. 
 
 The same is true of Hongkong, with its British 
 bund and its foreign banks and its few thousand 
 white-faced men surrounded by swarming Chi- 
 nese. In the Hongkong city of Victoria, which 
 is a narrow strip between the granite hills and 
 the bay, the wealthy white inhabitants are forced 
 upward on to the terraced hillsides, where their 
 charming semi-tropical gardens look out upon the 
 blue water, while below, on the narrow plain, in- 
 undation after inundation of Chinese fills the city 
 to the saturation point. There are districts in the 
 city — Chinese districts, of course — where the pop- 
 
 [156] 
 
ulation averages over 640,000 to the square mile, 
 and the crowding tends to become worse. It is 
 a Chinese city. So, too, Tientsin, Shanghai, Han- 
 kow, though they have their foreign concessions, 
 small European islands in an Asiatic ocean, are 
 in population unmistakably Chinese. The white 
 man comes and goes; he lives on the surface of 
 China as a flea might live upon the hide of a 
 rhinoceros. The Chinese remain, breed, multiply. 
 Nor have the Japanese been much more suc- 
 cessful in interpenetrating China. Japan lies near 
 and she has swarming millions of hardy, indus- 
 trious, intelligent men accustomed to poverty and 
 almost forced to emigrate. Yet in the whole of 
 China there is only a scant one hundred and 
 twenty thousand Japanese of all sorts, or about 
 one to every three thousand Chinese. The Jap- 
 anese, following in the footsteps of the Russians, 
 developed southern Manchuria, and opened it to 
 immigration, but it was the Chinese, not the Jap- 
 anese, who immigrated. By hundreds of thou- 
 sands they poured from the northern provinces 
 by land and sea into Manchuria, began to culti- 
 vate the profitable soya bean and to prosper under 
 the new conditions brought about by Japan. The 
 Japanese themselves strove to colonize this rich 
 territory. They, too, have their population prob- 
 lem, their over-dense crowds. Their workmen 
 and little shopkeepers went to Mukden. They 
 worked hard; they scrimped. But year by year, 
 although the Japanese immigration increased, 
 Japanese were forced out because they could not 
 
 [157] 
 
compete, and year by yea^ the Chinese immigra- 
 tion swamped the country. The Japanese shop- 
 keepers found it hard to do business, to make 
 both ends meet; the Japanese wage-earners, ex- 
 cept in the more skilled trades, found it difficult 
 to get jobs. The water could not displace the 
 mercury. 
 
 So China endures, indestructible, impermeable. 
 Foreign adventurers come with blazon of trum- 
 pets, conquer, and are conquered. They, their 
 armies and camp-followers, drop into the vast 
 sea of the Chinese population and are submerged. 
 
 In the meanwhile China expands, steadily, con- 
 tinuously, overwhelmingly. It is no new phe- 
 nomenon. From the beginning the Chinese have 
 gradually spread over their present vast terri- 
 tory, including not only the eighteen provinces, 
 in which is massed the immense majority of the 
 population, but also over the great wastes of 
 Mongolia, Manchuria, eastern Turkestan, and 
 Tibet. The Manchurian immigration illustrates 
 this process. For a long time the Manchus held 
 their own and resisted all invasion. Within re- 
 cent periods, however, the Chinese entered in vast 
 numbers, until they formed the overwhelming 
 majority of the population, and they largely ab- 
 sorbed the minority by intermarriage. The pure- 
 blooded Manchus are becoming rare ; the country, 
 race, and civilization are Chinese. Here, as also 
 in Formosa, and indeed everywhere, the Chinese 
 have met with hopelessly inferior cultures, and 
 they have steadily expanded and conquered. 
 
 [IS8] 
 
This emigration never was, and is not to-day, 
 a spontaneous, joyous movement. The Chinese, 
 if one may generalize concerning so immense and 
 diverse a people, is essentially a stay-at-home. 
 He is not like the restless American pioneer who 
 drove his Conestoga wagon over the Appalach- 
 ians and sold his cleared land as soon as over- 
 taken by neighbors. The Chinese coolie is at- 
 tached to his home, his family, his birthplace. 
 He loves his ugly walled town or his austere and 
 filthy village, his broken-down, cheerless mud hut, 
 with its smoke-blackened walls, its gaping win- 
 dow-holes, its mud floor upon which pigs and 
 fowls and children forgather, its unsuspected ab- 
 sence of everything we consider essential — car- 
 pets, wall-paper, furniture, ornaments, books, 
 pictures, games, flowers. His religion attaches 
 him to the place where his ancestors died and 
 where he wishes his children's children's children 
 to be reared. Even the beggars, deformed, tat- 
 tered, and starving, cling desperately and lovingly 
 to their birthplace. The Chinese coolies, who 
 are to-day being brought over by tens of thou- 
 sands to till the lands of France and release 
 French peasants for the trenches, have no real 
 ambition to leave China. If they die en route or 
 in France, so it is stipulated in their bond of 
 service, their bodies are to be returned to their 
 homes in China. 
 
 Nothing but a dead, insistent, omnipresent pov- 
 erty could force the Chinese to emigrate. It is 
 a poverty everywhere found in China, in the north 
 
 [159] 
 
and south and east and west, in the mud villages 
 on the plains, in the farming districts in the moun- 
 tains, where generations of laborers have hewn 
 petty farms out of the steeply sloping hills and 
 in congested, one-storied cities like Canton, where 
 the house walls almost meet over the narrow, 
 sweaty streets, and hundreds of thousands are 
 pushed off the land to live in river junks. It is 
 a poverty caused by a low stage of industrial de- 
 velopment and by an over-high birth-rate, a pov- 
 erty which creates superfluous men, who toil at 
 carrying water, at pulling loads, at lifting weights, 
 at all forms of semi-useless labor for a wage 
 which barely buys millet or rice. It is a poverty 
 which keeps millions semi-employed and millions 
 unemployed. 
 
 Not all these superfluous Chinese emigrate; 
 only the smallest fraction of them have as yet 
 gone through that door. Chinese emigration, ex- 
 cept into Manchuria and Asiatic Russia, still 
 comes overwhelmingly from a few southern mari- 
 time provinces. It is the mobile, alert Cantonese 
 whom we find in San Francisco or New York; 
 the coolies of the north, the west and the middle 
 provinces are rarely met overseas. Yet China 
 has sent some eight to ten million sons to foreign 
 lands. 
 
 In the United States there are still almost a 
 hundred thousand Chinese, and but for the fact 
 that their coming was prohibited there would be 
 to-day millions of them. All along the east Pa- 
 cific, in Alaska, British Columbia, Mexico, Ecua- 
 [i6o] 
 
dor, Peru, and Chile, there are colonies of Chi- 
 nese. They are also found on the other side of 
 the American continent, in British Guiana, Trini- 
 dad, Jamaica, Cuba, Porto Rico. Of the Ha- 
 waiian population they formed in the year 1896 
 one-fifth; but, as in the Philippines, their num- 
 bers have been relatively reduced by the Chinese 
 Exclusion Act. A similar obstacle meets them in 
 Australia and British South Africa. Still, in both 
 these regions they have secured a slender foot- 
 hold. 
 
 It is in the countries surrounding China, how- 
 ever, especially in the fertile lands to the south, 
 that the Chinese carries himself, and in the end 
 his language and civilization. In Burma, An- 
 nam, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, in Java and 
 other Malaysian islands, he comes and conquers. 
 Over the indolent Cambodian, the apathetic Bur- 
 mese, the easy-going, pleasure-loving Malays of 
 all sorts, he gains a victory. He is an excellent 
 farmer, mechanic, sailor, miner, laborer; he is 
 sober, thrifty, docile, immensely enduring, and an 
 unloyal observer of the peace. The Chinese im- 
 migrant, schooled to an abject poverty, arrives in 
 these fertile lands empty-handed, ragged, without 
 any captial except his willingness to work. He 
 comes without the encumbrance of wife or chil- 
 dren, who in any case belong to the ancestral 
 home, to which he himself hopes eventually to 
 return. Having nothing, the emigrant binds him- 
 self by a harsh contract to work for a wealthier 
 fellow-countryman in the new land. He saves 
 [161] 
 
something above the cost of his daily rice; he 
 does hot lose the whole of his belongings at the 
 gambling table. Gradually he becomes a small 
 capitalist. He buys land and raises gambler and 
 pepper. Or he becomes a miner, or a shopkeeper 
 and usurer, holding the native population under 
 his sway. Year by year his numbers increase, his 
 control grows. He thrives upon law and order, 
 whether it be British, Japanese, or Siamese. He 
 gains his foothold. He opens the door to his 
 countrymen at home. 
 
 One cannot gauge this vast expansion without 
 the use of statistics, and for the most part the 
 statistics at our disposal are vague and conflict- 
 ing. Orientals abhor exact figures far more than 
 nature ever abhorred a vacuum. Some estimates 
 place the number of Chinese in Siam at 400,000; 
 others at 1,500,000; between these extremes one 
 has a wide liberty of choice. In Burma there are 
 supposed to be 40,000, many of whom have taken 
 Burmese wives, without even consulting their 
 wives at home. In Cochin-China there are some 
 60,000 of these immigrants, and of the city of 
 Saigon almost one-third is Chinese. In Siam, as 
 elsewhere, the Chinese, although scattered 
 throughout the country, tend to concentrate 
 chiefly in the cities. Bangkok is in very large 
 part inhabited by Chinese, who, as elsewhere in 
 the East, almost monopolize the local business. 
 
 It is a far distance from Peking or even from 
 Canton to Singapore, yet in that city, though 
 ruled by the British and in the Malay orbit, seven 
 [162] 
 
out of ten inhabitants are Chinese, who outnum- 
 ber the Europeans and Eurasians twenty to one 
 and the Malays more than four to one. In the 
 Straits Settlements as a whole the Chinese popu- 
 lation is 400,000 as compared with a Malay pop- 
 ulation of only 250,000. In the year 1915 a 
 round 100,000 immigrants came from China to 
 Singapore. 
 
 Every year there arrive at Singapore these 
 hundred thousand hardy Chinese, and many find 
 their way into Johore, where there are already 
 63,000 of their countrymen, or into Kedah or 
 into Java or into Borneo. Steadily their num- 
 bers increase as they make their way in the Ma- 
 laysian world. 
 
 This movement into Malaysia is only in its 
 beginnings. In these fertile islands there seems 
 to lie the second home of the Chinese. Here they 
 are to conquer a vast new territory. 
 
 They will not conquer it by force of arms. 
 There is little danger — perhaps no danger at all 
 — that within the present century China will be- 
 come an aggressive nation, building fleets and 
 raising armies to overcome this district and wrest 
 it from its Dutch, French, German, British, and 
 American rulers. It will be a peaceful conquest, 
 a gentle, unresisted economic invasion. The Chi- 
 nese conqueror will be an unimaginative laborer 
 without a cent in his pocket or a stone in his hand. 
 He will come solely for a job. But year by year 
 he will come in greater numbers. His will be 
 an economic warfare, a competition for lands, 
 
 [163] 
 
mines, trade, investment. He will be competing 
 with men who do not much want these things, 
 who take life easily as it comes, who are con- 
 tent to live and die as their forefathers did, with- 
 out fussiness or effort. Back of the Chinese emi- 
 grant, pushing him out and forward, will be the 
 three hundred, or, as it may come to be, the five 
 or eight hundred, millions of Chinese at home. 
 It will be a competition between gentle, lazy, in- 
 stinctive Malays and a very hardy population 
 schooled to misery and effort. A non-expansive 
 race will be pitted against a race which, though 
 peaceful, has always conquered, and which, 
 though far from missionary, has always imposed 
 its civilization. 
 
 The land over which and in which this contest 
 will be fought is one of the future paradises of 
 the world. There are a million square miles of 
 territory in the Malay Archipelago, and some fifty 
 million people. There is plenty of fertile land 
 here. Three of its islands are greater than Great 
 Britain, "and in one of them," says Russel Wal- 
 lace, "the whole of the British Isles might be set 
 down and they would be surrounded by a sea of 
 forests." The soil is immensely fertile, the tem- 
 perature high, the rainfall plenteous, so that the 
 rank vegetation and the rapidly growing forests 
 overcome the feeble efforts of the sparse popu- 
 lations, unable to uproot the trees and keep them 
 uprooted. To conquer these lands many millions 
 of industrious workers are necessary. 
 
 In only one of these islands has this conquest 
 [164] 
 
been made — in Java. This island came early 
 under Dutch rule, and as a result of its excellent 
 administration the population rapidly increased 
 in two centuries from 2,000,000 to over 30,000,- 
 000. It is still increasing. To-day Java, though 
 comprising less than seven per cent, of the area 
 of the Dutch East Indies, includes over two- 
 thirds of its population. It has 720 people to the 
 square mile, or more than any country in Eu- 
 rope. 
 
 It is in the other Malaysian islands, in those 
 still unpopulated, that a field for Chinese immi- 
 gration lies wide open. If these islands ulti- 
 mately attain a density of population as great 
 as that of Java they will hold 720,000,000 souls 
 instead of 50,000,000. These islands are yearly 
 becoming more habitable. Under the rule of Eu- 
 ropean and American governments the best meth- 
 ods of colonial administration will be applied, 
 as well as those new systems of combating trop- 
 ical diseases which have proved so successful in 
 Panama. They lie close to the southern prov- 
 inces of China, so close that a few dollars will 
 carry a steerage passenger bringing with him his 
 own rice. The Chinese thrives under good gov- 
 ernment; he spreads as a result of European im- 
 perialism, just as in Africa Mohammedanism 
 spreads under the political expansion of the Chris- 
 tian Powers. In the Dutch East Indies, we are 
 told, there are already "1,500,000 Chinese and 
 300,000 Arabs," and "these are the over-lords 
 of the land; and the Chinese are superior to the 
 
 [165 J 
 
Arab traders." "Throughout the length and 
 breadth of Malaysia," writes Dr. Francis Guille- 
 mard, "the Chinese has made his way." 
 
 Thus the meek inherit the earth, and the non- 
 resisting, unarmed Chinese conquers. How rapid 
 that conquest may be within the present century 
 it would be idle to speculate. But when we re- 
 member that before the war over a million Eu- 
 ropeans annually came to the United States, to 
 say nothing of Argentine and Brazil, we may 
 gather some idea of the limitless possibilities of 
 emigration from one of the greatest of human 
 reservoirs. It is not impossible or even improb- 
 able that another century will find 100,000,000 or 
 even 200,000,000 Chinese in this almost unoc- 
 cupied territory. As the temperate regions of 
 the world become more and more dependent upon 
 the product of these tropical regions, the field 
 for Chinese immigration, unless it be artificially 
 checked, will grow astoundingly. 
 
 At home, too, China seems about to expand. 
 We are constantly speaking of China as an im- 
 possibly overcrowded country, and on the basis 
 of her present industrial development she is in- 
 tolerably overcrowded. In proportion to area 
 and to her still undeveloped natural resources, 
 however, China is far from the limits of pos- 
 sible growth. The eighteen provinces have an 
 estimated population of less than 250 per square 
 mile (perhaps even less than 200), which is far 
 lower than that of Japan, Great Britain, France, 
 Germany, Italy, Massachusetts, or New Jersey. 
 [166 J 
 
China's vast mineral resources are almost un- 
 touched, her railroads and roads are unbuilt, her 
 new industrial system is not yet even sketched. 
 She is on the eve of a stupendous industrial revo- 
 lution, which will vastly increase her wealth and, 
 probably, her population; will create a middle 
 class, educated according to Western ideals; will 
 bring the north and south into far closer intel- 
 lectual relations than ever before, and which can- 
 not possibly proceed far without creating a na- 
 tional feeling. 
 
 A century hence China at home and China be- 
 yond the sea may not improbably consist of a 
 capable, energetic, intelligent, and highly trained 
 population of five or eight or even ten hundreds 
 of millions. With wealth, internal cohesion, and 
 a grip on modern economic and political methods, 
 how can such a nation remain in permanent sub- 
 jection? What can happen to its conquerors, if 
 conquerors there be, other than to be quietly 
 swallowed up in this measureless yellow sea? 
 
 China is enduring, permanent, unconquerable, 
 conquering. As one views the nation one thinks 
 of the words that Montaigne applied to a civil 
 polity, but which can be applied with even greater 
 force to a living nation. It is, he says, "a mighty 
 and puissant matter, and of very hard and diffi- 
 cult dissolution; it often endureth against mortal 
 and intestine diseases — yea, against the injury of 
 unjust laws, against tyranny, against the ignorance 
 and debordement of magistrates, and against the 
 licentiousness and sedition of the people." The 
 
 [167] 
 
thing which unites a people, which holds it to- 
 gether under oppression and even under prosper- 
 ity, is tenacious and lasting. And of all things, 
 that which a virile race finds easiest to resist is 
 foreign domination. 
 
 Finally, the Chinese have the qualities which 
 make for national perpetuation. They are not 
 a weak people, not a loose-fibered people, not an 
 imitative and pliable people, but strong, stub- 
 born, ultra-conservative, excessively self-centred. 
 They are more unimpressionable than the Eng- 
 lish, more stiff-necked, more immovable. Upon 
 Europeans who live among them they exert an 
 overpowering cultural pressure. They do not 
 yield, but force others to yield. Nor are they 
 a mere congeries of diverse peoples, like the East- 
 Indians, but one people, divided by its spoken 
 tongues, yet united by its written language; di- 
 vided by its past economic history, yet bound to 
 be united by its present economic development; 
 a nation sufficiently homogeneous racially, suffi- 
 ciently joined by a powerful and ancient tradi- 
 tion; a people long-viewed, patient, non-resistant 
 in the ordinary sense, but more tenaciously re- 
 sisting in a true sense than perhaps any people 
 in the world. The Chinese official was right — 
 there can be no end to China. 
 
 As I proceeded on my way through the dark- 
 ening streets, through the throngs and throngs 
 of rapidly moving 'rickshaws, there sounded the 
 loud horn of a motor-car in which two Americans 
 were being driven by a clever Chinese chauffeur. 
 [i68] 
 
The 'rickshaw men made way for the rapidly 
 moving car. They lazily glanced at it and smiled 
 as it passed; then each man looked at the man 
 straight ahead, put down his shoulders, and pulled 
 hard again at his 'rickshaw. The endless pro- 
 cession moved on; the dust-cloud raised by the 
 automobile had disappeared. 
 
 [169] 
 
JAPAN'S THWARTED EMIGRATION 
 
JAPAN'S THWARTED EMIGRATION 
 
 The Japanese emigrant is permitted to go wher- 
 ever he cannot thrive. He is not permitted to 
 go where he can thrive. This is the crux of the 
 whole Japanese emigration question. 
 
 It is an ironic choice that Is presented to the 
 emigrant from Japan. The relatively empty lands 
 where pioneers might build up a new civilization 
 are locked and barred and double-barred. They 
 are locked to the Japanese and opened to the white 
 man. On the other hand, Japan may people 
 Korea or Formosa if she can. Only she cannot. 
 Or she may enter China and displace the Chi- 
 nese. The privilege is as valuable as the right 
 to emigrate to Mars. 
 
 There was a time when the Japanese had no 
 wish to emigrate. During the seventeenth cen- 
 tury Japan adopted a policy of complete isola- 
 tion. All foreigners were forbidden to enter, 
 with the exception of a few Dutch traders, toler- 
 ated in the little island of Deshima. "So long as 
 the sun warms the earth," declared the Japanese 
 in 1640, "any Christian bold enough to come to 
 Japan, even if he be King Philip himself or the 
 God of the Christians, shall pay for it with his 
 head." Simultaneously the Nipponese were for- 
 bidden to leave the country, and no vessels might 
 
 [ 173] 
 
be built except for the coastwise trade. Japan 
 was willing to live unto herself. 
 
 Nor was emigration essential to Japan at this 
 time. So long as the population remained sta- 
 tionary, and was willing to live as its ancestors 
 had lived, room could be found at home in the 
 crowded little islands. Since the Restoration, 
 however, the population of Japan Proper has 
 increased to fifty-six millions, and the birth-rate, 
 unlike that of European and American countries, 
 is steadily rising. Emigration is always from 
 poor to rich countries, from lands of small to 
 lands of great industrial opportunity. Japan is 
 an ideal land from which to emigrate. It is small, 
 poor and crowded. Its people are hard-working, 
 economical and reasonably ambitious. They need 
 to get out. It is difficult for them to get out. 
 
 Of course there is some emigration, as there 
 has been during each of the last thirty years. 
 On June 30, 19 14, official statistics revealed some 
 three hundred and sixty thousand Japanese living 
 abroad. Of these almost one-half (48 per cent.) 
 lived in the United States (including the Ha- 
 waiian Islands) ; about a third (34 per cent.) in 
 China, and the remainder chiefly in other Asiatic 
 countries and in South America. Essentially emi- 
 gration has been to the Pacific islands and lit- 
 toral. 
 
 In absolute numbers this total emigration seems 
 reasonably large ; obviously there are many more 
 Japanese in foreign lands than there are Ameri- 
 cans abroad. Yet as an outlet for the ever-in- 
 
 [174] 
 
creasing Japanese population, emigration has not 
 counted at all. After immense effort, both indi- 
 vidual and collective, during several decades to 
 find outlets for surplus population, the entire 
 number of Japanese abroad is far less than is 
 the net increase in the population every six 
 months. In the coming decade Japan's popula- 
 tion will probably increase by from seven to eight 
 millions. To find homes abroad for even half 
 this increment would require an increase of over 
 i,ooo per cent, in the number of Japanese living 
 abroad. 
 
 The relative insignificance of the emigration 
 from Japan may be seen by comparing the total 
 number of Japanese living in foreign countries 
 with the number of Poles, Greeks, Norwegians, 
 Danes, Hungarians, Slovaks or Italians in for- 
 eign lands. Out of every thousand Nipponese in 
 the world only seven are to be found in foreign 
 countries; out of every thousand Italians no less 
 than one hundred and seventy live under alien 
 flags, and of these the majority are emigrants 
 or children of emigrants. It is true that past and 
 present social habits make it more difficult for 
 the Nipponese than for the Italian to acquire the 
 habit of emigration — and emigration is a habit — 
 but the chief obstacle lies abroad. Japanese im- 
 migration is opposed, frustrated. The Japanese 
 laborer in the United States and in several other 
 countries meets with distrust and ostracism. He 
 finds it difficult to learn the language, not only 
 because he is a poor linguist (as compared with 
 
 [175] 
 
the Korean or the Chinese), but because the new 
 language is structurally so difficult. He encoun- 
 ters social opprobrium and economic discrimina- 
 tion. He cannot conceal the color of his skin 
 and would not if he could. Uncomfortable and 
 even unsafe alone, he comes in groups, works in 
 groups, lives in groups, and because of this group 
 life he fails to be easily assimilated to the larger 
 life of the community to which he goes. The 
 external barrier creates an internal barrier; emi- 
 gration is stifled by the opposition of the white 
 races which hold the large and relatively empty 
 lands, and this opposition produces in turn a re- 
 luctance to emigrate and a clannishness among 
 those who have already emigrated. 
 
 Into the question of Japanese immigration into 
 the United States, into the rights and morality 
 of this intricate problem, I do not propose here 
 to enter. I am considering merely how the Amer- 
 ican refusal to open the door wide to Japanese 
 immigrants reacts upon conditions in Japan. That 
 America will continue to erect barriers against a 
 free Nipponese immigration is highly probable. 
 The reason is that at bottom we discover here 
 the possibility of a critical racial conflict, in which 
 the economic advantages are all on one side. Were 
 the Japanese to be admitted to the Pacific Coast 
 with absolute freedom and allowed to compete 
 on fair terms with Americans, there can be little 
 doubt that within two or three generations the 
 country west of the Rocky Mountains would be 
 Japanese, and not American, as the Hawaiian 
 [176 J 
 
Islands are Japanese. The impetus of an unre- 
 stricted Japanese immigration would be over- 
 whelming. Wages in Japan are about one-fifth 
 of American wages and the expansive force of 
 these low wages would rapidly people the western 
 coast. That the wages of the Japanese actually 
 in the United States are now high is not a de- 
 cisive fact, for these wages are high only because 
 immigration is impeded. They are monopoly 
 wages. If, however, Japanese were allowed to 
 enter by the hundreds of thousands, wages would 
 fall, native workmen would be displaced, and step 
 by step the race with the lower economic standard 
 would drive out the race with the higher stand- 
 ard, as, for example, the colored people of Ja- 
 maica are gradually driving out the whites. For 
 the world at large it might be better or worse to 
 have California and other Western States thus 
 Orientalized, but no race and no nation thinks 
 in terms of ultimate world good. The question 
 Is not only an economic but a race question, in- 
 volving the disputed half empty lands separating 
 the dense white populations from the yellow races. 
 It is a question involving hatreds, prejudices and 
 obscure and primitive instincts. Whatever its 
 ultimate issue, we may rest assured that for the 
 time being the emigration of Japanese to the 
 United States will be limited. 
 
 The forces at work in California, Washington 
 and Oregon operate equally In British Columbia 
 and Australia. Everywhere there is an instinctive 
 Exclusion Policy, an attempt on the part of the 
 
 [ 177] 
 
white races to monopolize five continents and to 
 leave to the yellow men, "beloved of the sun," 
 only a portion of one continent. Whether or not 
 certain of the South American countries will ulti- 
 mately join in this restriction policy cannot yet 
 be determined. Nor is it yet a crucial question 
 for them. For the time being, the emigration of 
 Japanese to Latin American countries is difficult, 
 costly, and small; the conditions of immigration 
 are not entirely inviting. The entire Japanese 
 population of the American mainland (including 
 Latin America) represents only about two 
 months' increase in the population of Japan, and 
 all the Japanese in Europe combined are equal 
 only to the excess of births over deaths in a single 
 day. The door to the Western world is shut. 
 
 There remains Asia — China, Manchuria, Si- 
 beria, the Malay Islands. 
 
 China presents no legal obstacle to Japanese 
 immigration; Japan may export a million men 
 annually to the neighboring Republic without 
 evoking protests from the Chinese Foreign Of- 
 fice. But there is a real obstacle far more in- 
 surmountable than any legal prohibition. In go- 
 ing to China Japan strikes against the Chinese 
 Wall. It is not a wall of brick and mortar and 
 granite blocks like that which defended the Chi- 
 nese from the Northern nomads. It is a human 
 wall, the immense resistance of a dense popula- 
 tion of ill-paid, hard-working, abstemious and 
 capable men. Into China the Japanese emigrant 
 cannot force his way, just as we Americans could 
 [178] 
 
not, if we wished, force our way into Japan. 
 After decades and even centuries, no non-Chinese 
 race has ever succeeded in displacing the Chinese ; 
 on the contrary, each race ends in being displaced 
 by them. After three centuries of Portuguese 
 rule, Macao is more Chinese than ever; after de- 
 cades of British rule, Hongkong is a thoroughly 
 Chinese city. Japan governs Formosa at will, but 
 she cannot people Formosa, for the Chinese are 
 already there — to stay. 
 
 The same obstacle meets the emigrant to Man- 
 churia. Japan, following in Russia's footsteps, 
 has given law and order to that distracted coun- 
 try and has opened it to immigration. But Chi- 
 nese come as well as Japanese, and in greater 
 numbers; they underbid and under-live the Jap- 
 anese. You can hire Chinese laborers for a little 
 over half of what you must pay Japanese work- 
 men. As a consequence the Chinese get the jobs, 
 and they live in Manchuria and breed there and 
 their children will breed there. Undoubtedly 
 there is room in all parts of China for the trained 
 Japanese, for the skilful artisan, the business 
 man, the professional worker. But there is no 
 room for the only class that counts — for the great 
 bulky mass of unskilled and undifferentiated work- 
 men and peasants. 
 
 Neither in China, nor in those Malay States 
 where Chinese immigration is permitted, nor in 
 Formosa, nor in the United States, Canada, Aus- 
 tralia or Europe is there at once a free economic 
 and a free legal right to emigrate in sufficient 
 
 [ 179] 
 
numbers to relieve the pressure of the ever-in- 
 creasing Japanese population. The birth-rate of 
 Japan rises; the farm-land is taken up; emigra- 
 tion is thwarted, either by the exclusion policy 
 of the whites or by superior Chinese economic 
 tenacity. The Japanese population is thrown 
 back upon itself. 
 
 [i8oJ 
 
JAPAN'S MENACING BIRTH-RATE 
 
JAPAN'S MENACING BIRTH-RATE 
 
 Of all Japanese problems that of population is 
 the least discussed, the least understood and the 
 most important. It is much more than important. 
 It is vital. 
 
 Everything in Japan turns on this question; 
 every phase of policy, every hope, ambition, effort, 
 frustration is unconsciously affected. Japanese 
 emigration, Japanese expansion, Japanese domes- 
 tic and foreign relations, Japanese groping 
 towards industrialism — all find their agent and 
 cause in great part in this blind outpouring of 
 infants. The flood of babies, upbuilding or de- 
 vastating according to how we view it, is the 
 most significant fact in modern Japan. 
 
 Overpopulation is no new problem. It is the 
 oldest in the world, older even than humanity. 
 With eyes open or shut, almost every tribe, clan 
 or nation at some time faces this pressure of new- 
 born babes, pushing out into life and grasping at 
 the limited supplies of food that are to maintain 
 the whole group. Like other nations Japan has 
 had to face this problem. Her population grew 
 steadily. In the sixth century there were about 
 five million Japanese ; by the eighth century, eight 
 and a half millions; by the sixteenth century, the 
 population seems to have been fifteen or twenty 
 
 [183 J 
 
millions, or three to four times that of England 
 in the same period. 
 
 Somewhere about the year 1700 the Japanese 
 population reached the point where under the eco- 
 nomic conditions then existing it was unable to 
 advance. Thereafter, for one hundred and fifty 
 years, it fluctuated between twenty-four and twen- 
 ty-seven millions, these totals, however, not in- 
 cluding the samurai or noble class, or the pariahs 
 and beggars. The country was full up ; there was 
 standing room only. There was no more rice or 
 millet or fish to feed new babies, although the 
 land was cultivated to the last acre and the seas 
 were scoured. Babies were born but they died. 
 Population was held down by disease, pestilence 
 and starvation. Small-pox, measles, dysentery and 
 typhus ravaged the land, and in little over a cen- 
 tury sixteen great famines swept the Islands. The 
 work of decimation was also aided by the harsh 
 criminal law, with its short shrift for offenders, 
 by decapitation and crucifixion. Gradually, more- 
 over, the people learned ways to lessen births. 
 Among the samurai and afterwards among well- 
 to-do merchants, late marriages came into vogue, 
 and in the large cities skilled physicians practised 
 birth prevention. Among the common people 
 abortion was quite usual. Thus by one means or 
 another, by famine, disease, pestilence, birth pre- 
 vention and infanticide, the population was held 
 in check. By the middle of the nineteenth century 
 an equilibrium had long since been established be- 
 tween birth-rate and death-rate. The birth-rate 
 [184] 
 
was probably lower than in any country in Europe. 
 
 Then came Perry, the breaking-down of Jap- 
 anese isolation, the Restoration, the new factories, 
 the growing world power of Japan. Speaking 
 figuratively it was Perry who called forth the new 
 millions of Japanese babies. The unconcealed 
 guns of the Commodore created commerce and an 
 industrial system, and out of these arose astonish- 
 ing cities of factory workers, like Tokyo and 
 Osaka. Japan drifted into the full tide of a giddy 
 industrialism, which meant wealth for the few, a 
 strenuous poverty for the many, congestion, speed 
 and babies. As the factories grew and as the new 
 cities overflowed into adjacent rice paddies, babies 
 — the future factory workers and docile clerks — 
 poured forth unceasingly from the farms. As in 
 other countries, new to industrialism, the birth- 
 rate outstripped custom and expectation. 
 
 In Japan the birth-rate was stimulated by 
 patriotic and religious motives, which heavily em- 
 phasized the duty of parenthood. But the chief 
 incentive to an increased birth-rate was the low 
 cost of living. The civilizaion of Japan was, as 
 it still is, an inexpensive civilization. The Japanese 
 were a rice, fish and millet eating people, and all 
 these articles were obtained at small cost. For 
 centuries the population had lived in poverty, un- 
 der conditions in which those survived who could 
 live on the least food rather than those who could 
 do more work on more food. 'As in other Asiatic 
 lands this non-exigent type of worker had won the 
 right to live and procreate. 
 
 [185 J 
 
Moreover the whole political and social philos- 
 ophy of Japan favored this abstemious, and there- 
 fore fecund, type. "When I was a child," a Jap- 
 anese statesman recently remarked, "I was taught 
 by my parents that I should not trouble myself 
 about taste in what I ate, because it was unworthy 
 of a man to complain in any way about what he 
 ate. More than this, we have been practising for 
 many years another mistaken Bushido teaching, 
 that a samurai or manly person should never com- 
 plain of hunger, even when he is really hungry^" 
 Japan's philosophy thus ignored those material 
 needs and desires which have held the population 
 of the Western World in check. Life was cheap ; 
 children cost little and since they could early be 
 employed, seemed to pay for themselves. Even 
 today, when industrialism has taken a firmer root, 
 one cannot look about at the frail little houses, the 
 cheap cotton clothes and wooden clogs, and the 
 inexpensive food and furnishings with which the 
 Japanese workers seem content, without realizing 
 how weak are here the instincts which in our 
 Western countries tend to set a limit to the pop- 
 ulation. 
 
 Once the lid was off, the new industrial system 
 demanded millions of cheap workers, men and 
 women. The millions were born. Since 1870 the 
 growth of the population has been portentous. In 
 1874 there were less than 34,000,000 people in 
 Japan Proper; today (November, 19 17) there 
 are no less than 56,000,000. This is a fairly high 
 rate of increase, though by no means unexampled. 
 [186] 
 
What is most significant, however, is that the rate 
 of increase is itself increasing. In 1886, 1,108,967 
 babies were born; in 191 1 no less than 1,747,803 
 (still births excluded). In the former year there 
 were 28.8 births per thousand of the population; 
 in the latter year 33.7 per thousand. The death- 
 rate remains stationary; the birth-rate steadily 
 grows. It is a phenomenon quite contrary to that 
 which is observed in Europe and America, where 
 both death-rate and birth-rate steadily fall. 
 Because of this growing birth-rate the already 
 crowded population of Japan Proper is increasing 
 at the rate of three-quarters of a million a year. 
 Where is room to be found for these new 
 millions ? 
 
 In agriculture, where the average farm today 
 is already less than three acres ? It is to the fields 
 that man looks instinctively for his support. Like 
 his forefathers for generations untold, he aspires 
 to the daily hard toil of ploughing, manuring, 
 sowing, weeding and reaping. It is so in Japan 
 as elsewhere. In the old days when the credulous 
 Nipponese still believed that the Food God had 
 sowed the first rice plant (which sprang from his 
 own body) in a wet field, and the seeds of millet, 
 panicum, wheat and beans in a dry field, the in- 
 stinctive recourse of millions of youths was to this 
 ancient and honorable occupation. It is the same 
 today when the Japanese farmer is perhaps the 
 graduate of an agricultural high school or even 
 possibly, of the Agricultural College of the Tokyo 
 Imperial University. 
 
 [187] 
 
Unfortunately there is a rigid and harsh law in 
 agriculture, a law of Nature and not of man. It 
 is the law of decreasing returns. This law decrees 
 that beyond a certain point every added laborer 
 employed on a farm and every added dollar in- 
 vested bring in a smaller return than the former 
 laborers employed or the former dollars invested. 
 Ten men will raise more on a given farm than 
 will five, but not twice as much. If you improve 
 your methods you may profitably employ a few 
 more men and a little more capital, but at last 
 there comes a time when each new laborer is em- 
 ployed at a disadvantage. The fields are then 
 full; agriculture has reached a point at which it 
 does not pay a nation to place more men in this 
 industry, a point at which agricultural wages be- 
 gin to fall and men instinctively move to other 
 occupations. 
 
 The law may be illustrated in the case of 
 England. That country could possibly employ her 
 entire population in agriculture, but only at such 
 a great disadvantage as to reduce the nation to 
 penury. Belgium would actually starve if all her 
 people were placed on the farms. As a conse- 
 quence, during the last century while the popula- 
 tion of England has rapidly increased, her farm- 
 ing population has actually decreased. She finds 
 other occupations for her yearly crop of new 
 workers. 
 
 The visual impression one gets of the Japanese 
 countryside, even without leaving the railway 
 compartment, is that the fields are already over- 
 [i88] 
 
crowded. As you travel through the beautiful 
 island of Hondo, encircling with a wide sweep the 
 majestic Fuji mountain, you are never out of sight 
 of the bare-legged Japanese farmer, up to his 
 knees in the flooded paddies or working with 
 spade or ladle on the land, with a courage born 
 of centuries of hard wrestling with Nature. The 
 country seems one long, straggling, inchoate vil- 
 lage ; everywhere are men and nowhere — or seem- 
 ingly nowhere — horses, cattle, sheep and swine. 
 The clustering men, the ubiquitous women and 
 children, seem to have crowded the domestic ani- 
 mals from off the land. And in many parts of 
 the country this is literally true. A horse or a 
 cow takes up too much room for its support. It 
 is hard for men to perform the labor of horses, 
 but where farms are very small and very dear, 
 and fodder is expensive, there is no other way. 
 It is for this reason that the tiny farms in the 
 more densely populated parts of Japan swarm 
 with men and are bare of domestic animals. 
 
 When we grasp the smallness of Japan and the 
 size of its population, we readily understand why 
 the land is so crowded. Japan Proper is a narrow 
 and diminutive country. Its area of roughly 150,- 
 000 square miles is somewhat smaller than that 
 of California, while its population is twenty times 
 as great. Moreover, like Italy, Japan is chiefly a 
 country of mountains and its arable land under 
 cultivation amounts to only some 25,000 square 
 miles, a farm area less than half that of the single 
 state of Iowa. It follows that Japan is the classic 
 land of intensive agriculture. Its dwarf farms are 
 [189 J 
 
not really farms at all in our sense of the word, 
 but gardens. There are no pastures, no barn- 
 yards, but merely little squares of land, now cov- 
 ered with water, now filled with mud drying in 
 the sun, and now vividly green with the beautiful 
 rice plants. These little patches of terraced and 
 irrigated land have nothing in common with our 
 one hundred and sixty acre farms. In Japan the 
 average agricultural family (and there are five 
 and a half millions of them) occupies only two and 
 three-quarters acres each. Only one family in ten 
 has as much as five acres (two cho) and over one- 
 third of all rural families have farms of less than 
 one and one-quarter acres. It is morcellement 
 carried to a tragic absurdity. 
 
 The living to be made out of these petty farms 
 by the overflowing, fecund Japanese is of the 
 meagrest. His is the most meticulous farming in 
 the world. Every inch of ground is carefully cul- 
 tivated, every possible saving seduously made. 
 Human waste is collected with faithful care and 
 is piously returned to the land. Nothing could 
 be more painstaking than this strenuous, small- 
 scale agriculture. A solicitous government aids 
 these farmers by means of experiment stations 
 which give advice and instruction, and above all 
 the farmers help themselves. By dint of hard 
 labor and hard scrimping, they manage to secure 
 some sort of a living from their three acres. 
 
 In judging the lot of these Japanese farmers 
 we must not be misled by the large crops which 
 they secure from a single acre. The yield in the 
 paddy fields, where most of the rice is grown, is 
 
 [ 190 J 
 
high and in a large part of the area there are two 
 crops a year. Science, moreover, has steadily in- 
 creased the average crop, which today is almost 
 exactly one-third larger than twenty years ago. 
 But while the yield per acre is great, the yield per 
 farm or per family is pitiably small. Judged by 
 our standards, or by those of West Europe, the 
 lot of the Japanese farmer on his three acre farm 
 is extremely bad. 
 
 In a majority of cases this petty farmer does 
 not even own his whole farm. Of the five and 
 one-half million farming families in Japan Proper, 
 only one-third own all the lands they cultivate, 
 less than a third are tenants, and over a third com- 
 bine tenantry with ownership. Naturally the lot 
 of the tenant is even worse than that of the small 
 proprietor. For his rent the tenant pays on an 
 average half the total yield, while the landlord 
 meets the onerous and ever-mounting land taxes. 
 For the tenant there is very little surplus and next 
 to no opportunity to acquire property of his own. 
 Land values are high. Good paddy lands, in No- 
 vember, 1915, sold at an average at about $800 
 (1600 yen) per acre, ordinary paddy lands at 
 about $600 and poor paddy lands at about $350; 
 the price of the upland farms was about half as 
 much. The pressure of population upon the small 
 farm area raises land values to a point where it 
 is extraordinarily difficult for a tenant to become 
 an independent proprietor. 
 
 But for the rural trades, and especially the silk 
 industry, many of these little farmers and tenants 
 could not live at all. It is the American demand 
 
 [191] 
 
for raw silk that saves the smaller Japanese farm- 
 ers from being crushed. About three-fifths of all 
 the silk used in the United States comes from 
 Japan, and it is in the little farm houses of the 
 archipel'ago that the deft peasant women, in com- 
 petition with their sisters in Italy and China, pre- 
 pare this silk. In all, over 1,700,000 Japanese 
 rural families devote themselves to this and other 
 occupations, and thus eke out the scanty returns 
 from agriculture. Of the farming families al- 
 most a third have some occupation subsidiary to 
 farming. 
 
 Thus the Japanese farmer, assiduous, econom- 
 ical and hard-pressed, has managed in the past to 
 hold his own. In fact he has more than held his 
 own. He has accomplished this largely as a result 
 of a better agricultural education, for today sev- 
 eral hundreds of thousands of Japanese have 
 passed through the agricultural schools. By 
 means of these better farming methods, the study 
 of soils, the use of better seeds and of better fer- 
 tilizers, the farmer has actually improved his lot. 
 Not only does he raise more rice than before, as 
 well as more rye, barley, wheat, beans, potatoes, 
 sweet potatoes and other crops, but the value of 
 these commodities has increased. He gets a better 
 price for his rice. As a result the farmer who 
 once went bare-headed now affects a hat, he wears 
 rather better clothes, his house is somewhat better 
 furnished, and not only does > he send his boy to 
 school, as he is obliged to do, but not infrequently 
 sends him to high school. Endurance, skill, science 
 and governmental guidance, together with favor- 
 [ 192] 
 
able changes in agricultural world conditions, have 
 enabled the microscopic Japanese farmer to better 
 his conditions even in the face of an increased 
 pressure of the farming population upon the nar- 
 row land area of Japan. 
 
 There are Japanese who believe that this prog- 
 ress can go on indefinitely. They point out that 
 there is a margin of uncultivated land. One can 
 still create new farms in the island of Hokkaido, 
 and if all the mountain land with a slope of less 
 than fifteen per cent, were brought under cultiva- 
 tion, an additional ten million acres would be 
 available, or enough land for an extra ten million 
 or more of rural dwellers. It is not an easy thing, 
 however, to reclaim these lands and it cannot be 
 done without the investment of much labor and 
 capital, an Investment which is unprofitable unless 
 very high agricultural prices are maintained. Nor 
 can it be expected that the farmer of Japan will 
 forever be contented with his present meagre 
 earnings. In the olden feudal days he received 
 part of his reward in social prestige; though he 
 stood below the samurai, he was above the mer- 
 chants and mechanics. Today, however, Japan is 
 accepting pecuniary standards in these matters, 
 and the honest farmer, who with his family earns 
 fifty or a hundred dollars a year, is rated lower 
 than the little merchant who gains five hundred or 
 a thousand dollars. Moreover, in Japan as else- 
 where, the city offers social and intellectual pleas- 
 ures unattainable on the farm. With each year 
 therefore the farmer desires a better living and a 
 more agreeable life. So overwhelming is the pres- 
 
 [ 193] 
 
sure of population already, and so powerful Is the 
 attraction of even the slums of the great cities, 
 that the exodus from the farms becomes greater 
 every year. 
 
 Finally there seems little chance of any con- 
 siderable improvement in the lot of the Japanese 
 farmer without increasing the size of his farm. 
 Intensive cultivation Is the most wasteful farming 
 in the world; while it saves materials it is exces- 
 sively lavish in human labor, the most valuable 
 commodity of all. It prevents the adequate use of 
 draft animals and of labor-saving machinery. The 
 ambition of the Japanese farmer is to add an 
 acre or two to his Lilliputian farm, in order to 
 employ his own labor and that of his family more 
 effectively. But for each farmer to cultivate a 
 larger area means a lessening of the number of 
 farms on the present area. 
 
 Japan seems therefore to have reached the 
 stage where the pressure of a growing population 
 upon the farmland of the country will become in- 
 creasingly intense. Even though new farms be 
 created In the cold northern island of Hokkaido 
 and on the mountain slopes there will not be room 
 in the field of agriculture for more than the small- 
 est portion of the new increases in the Japanese 
 population. The countryside has doubtless not 
 reached the point of saturation, where it can take 
 in no new inhabitants. What is clear, however, is 
 that the movement already begun from country to 
 city will be sharply intensified. The new children 
 will be met at manhood with the alternative of 
 finding a place in Japanese cities. In Japanese fac- 
 
 [ 194 ] 
 
tories, workshops and offices, or else of taking 
 ship and emigrating, either to the overseas pos- 
 sessions of Japan or to lands further away in 
 which the foreigner rules. 
 
 In Japan itself, however, there seem to be few 
 misgivings concerning the population problem. 
 Although the population is increasing by seven 
 and a half millions a decade, the steadily rising 
 birth-rate is hailed by all classes as a healthy sign 
 of development. On the population question the 
 Japanese are supremely optimistic. 
 
 In part, no doubt, this optimism is due to a 
 general hopefulness of the people. Japan's recent 
 military successes against China and Russia and 
 her victory over the German garrison at Tsingtao 
 have inspired in the population a vast self-confi- 
 dence. Her industrial successes have had a simi- 
 lar effect. Her factories are multiplying, her 
 commerce is expanding, her merchant marine is 
 increasing by leaps and bounds. Money wages 
 are rapidly advancing. Her attitude towards the 
 question of population therefore is not like that 
 of England of today, a country well advanced in 
 industrialism, like a middle-aged manufacturer, 
 successful and discreet. Japan's attitude is like 
 that of England a hundred years ago, in the first 
 flush of a youthful, optimistic industrialism. Japan 
 still believes that the more babies the better. 
 
 In fact the high and above all increasing birth- 
 rate among the Japanese seems to fit in with all 
 the main trends of thought in the Empire. It suits 
 the militarists, who believe that Japan, to become 
 a world power, must have a population of one 
 
 [I9SJ 
 
hundred millions, in order to exert the outward 
 pressure which will move frontiers and change the 
 face of the world. To have empire, say the im- 
 perialists, we must have children; we must have 
 children, say the capitalists, to have cheap labor 
 and successful industries. Let us have children, 
 cry all the Japanese people, in order to maintain 
 our institutions, our religion based on ancestor 
 worship, our family piety, our ancient rule of 
 simple living and hard work. 
 
 The majority of men, and still more of women, 
 upon whom the brunt of this pressure falls are 
 as yet unrepresented in these discussions. The 
 fathers of most Japanese babies are voteless and 
 speechless; they do not discuss social problems. 
 Yet they too, if they were consulted, would doubt- 
 less agree that large families were of benefit to 
 the Emperor and the Empire. And theories or no 
 theories they continue to breed. 
 
 The Japanese savants also think on this subject 
 as do the people, and what is more significant act 
 as do the people. In France we observe celibate 
 intellectuals adjuring peasants and workmen to 
 raise large families ; in Japan the intellectuals have 
 many children, five, seven, even nine to a family. 
 They too seem quite unalarmed concerning the 
 present growth of the population. In February 
 of last year there was a convocation of economists 
 at Kyoto to celebrate the 150th anniversary of 
 Thomas Robert Malthus, and the meeting was 
 devoted to a discussion of the population ques- 
 tion. There were excellent papers, philosophical, 
 statistical, expert, but no note of pessimism seems 
 [196] 
 
to have been struck. The general opinion, appar- 
 ently, was that agriculture, industrial development 
 and emigration would take care of any increase 
 likely to occur. Beneath all the economic argu- 
 ments there ran a semi-religious, fatalistic, pre- 
 Darwinian conception that no child is born without 
 Nature providing in advance for its sustenance. It 
 is an instinctive human attitude which appears and 
 reappears through the centuries in West and East. 
 "Some persons," observes the Chinese philosopher 
 Ch'engtze (of the Sung dynasty), "say that there 
 are more people than the land can possibly sup- 
 port. This is not so. Take the plants for ex- 
 ample. If you place a certain number of them 
 on the hillside, they take root and grow. The 
 economy of Nature always provides for things 
 that are produced. It is against reason, therefore, 
 that there should be more men than the land can 
 support." 
 
 So the Japanese population increases. At the 
 present geometrical rate of growth, Japan proper 
 (exclusive of Korea, Formosa, Saghalien and 
 other possessions) would attain a population of 
 one hundred millions in about forty years. But 
 already the pressure of the growing population 
 makes itself felt. Prices are rising, rents increas- 
 ing; the great cities become intolerably congested 
 and the cleavage between rich and poor grows 
 deeper and wider. There is an outward pushing 
 of Japan towards the iron mines of China ; there is 
 a feverish industrial activity; there is a growing 
 dissatisfaction among the poor, a growing skep- 
 ticism, an unrest, partly though vaguely revolu- 
 
 [ 197] 
 
tionary and partly imperialistic. Finally a febrile 
 quality appears in Japan's public opinion. 
 
 Because of this population pressure, Japan to- 
 day is beset by perplexing difficulties, by divided 
 counsels, by an uninformed discontent, which 
 pushes her forward into all sorts of adventures. 
 Though growing richer she feels an increased 
 economic pressure. She is in the shadow of a 
 great trial. 
 
 As England profited by her birth-rate a hun- 
 dred years ago and came successfully through her 
 great trial, so Japan may do in the twentieth cen- 
 tury. But the situation is not entirely the same. 
 England then possessed a far smaller population 
 than Japan now possesses; she had greater agri- 
 cultural and infinitely more valuable mineral re- 
 sources; she was a pioneer in industrialism 
 whereas Japan is only the latest recruit, making 
 her way against better equipped rivals. More- 
 over, England during the period of her highest 
 birth-rate was able to send her surplus population 
 not only to her own empty colonies but also to the 
 United States and other foreign countries. Japa- 
 nese emigration, on the other hand, is thwarted 
 and checked. 
 
 Japan must meet the problem which England 
 and other countries have successfully met, the 
 problem of adjusting her political and economic 
 development to her increasing birth-rate. She 
 must meet this problem under difficulties greater 
 and more perplexing than those which have faced 
 the other nations in their great trial. 
 
 [198] 
 
THE CLASH OF THE RACES 
 
THE CLASH OF THE RACES 
 
 We must not forget that these men and women 
 who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, 
 hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions 
 as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs — we 
 must not forget that these simple, rough-handed 
 people are the ancestors of our descendants, the 
 fathers and mothers of our children. 
 
 So it has been from the beginning. For a cen- 
 tury a swelling human stream has poured across 
 the ocean, fleeing from poverty in Europe to a 
 chance in America. Englishman, Welshman, 
 Scotchman, Irishman; German, Swede, Nor- 
 wegian, Dane; Jew, Italian, Bohemian, Serb, 
 Syrian, Hungarian, Pole, Greek — one race after 
 another has knocked at our doors, been given 
 admittance, has married us and begot our children. 
 We could not have told by looking at them whether 
 they were to be good or bad progenitors, for 
 racially the cabin is not above the steerage, and 
 dirt, like poverty and ignorance, is but skin-deep. 
 A few hours, and the stain of travel has left the 
 immigrant's cheek; a few years, and he loses the 
 odor of alien soils ; a generation or two, and these 
 outlanders are irrevocably our race, our nation, 
 our stock. 
 
 That stock, a little over a century ago, was al- 
 [201 ] 
 
most pure British. True, Albany was Dutch, and 
 many of the signs in the Philadelphia streets were 
 in the German language. Nevertheless, five- 
 sixths of all the family names collected in 1790 
 by the census authorities were pure English, and 
 over nine-tenths (90.2 per cent.) were British. 
 Despite the presence of Germans, Dutch, French, 
 and Negroes, the American was essentially an 
 Englishman once removed, an Englishman stuffed 
 with English traditions, prejudices ,and stubborn- 
 nesses reading English books, speaking English 
 dialects, practising English law and English eva- 
 sions of the law, and hating England with a truly 
 English hatred. In all but a political sense 
 America was still one of "His Majesty's do- 
 minions beyond the sea." Even after immigra- 
 tion pdured in upon us, the English stock was 
 strong enough to impress upon the immigrating 
 races its language, laws, and customs. Neverthe- 
 less, the incoming millions profoundly altered our 
 racial structure. To-day over thirty-two million 
 Americans are either foreign-born or of foreign 
 parentage. No longer an Anglo-Saxon cousin, 
 America has become the most composite of 
 nations. 
 
 We cannot help seeing that such a vast trans- 
 fusion of blood must powerfully affect the char- 
 acter of the American. What that influence is to 
 be, however, whether for better or for worse, is 
 a question more baffling. Our optimists conceive 
 the future American, the child of this infinite in- 
 termarrying, as a glorified, synthetical person, re- 
 [ 202 ] 
 
plete with the best qualities of all component 
 races. He is to combine the sturdiness of the 
 Bulgarian peasant, the poetry of the Pole, the 
 vivid artistic perceptions of the Italian, the Jew's 
 intensity, the German's thoroughness, the Irish- 
 man's verve, the tenacity of the Englishman, with 
 the initiative and versatility of the American. The 
 pessimist, on the other hand, fears the worst. 
 America, he believes, is committing the unpardon- 
 able sin; is contracting a mesalliance, grotesque 
 and gigantic. We are diluting our blood with the 
 blood of lesser breeds. We are suffering adultera- 
 tion. The stamp upon the coin — the flag, the 
 language, the national sense — remains, but the 
 silver is replaced by lead. 
 
 All of which is singularly unconvincing. In our 
 families, the children do not always inherit the 
 best qualities of father and mother, and we have 
 no assurance that the children of mixed races have 
 this selective gift and rise superior to their parent 
 stocks. Nor do we know that they fall below. 
 We hear much concerning "pure" races and "mon- 
 grel" races. But is there in all the world a pure 
 race? The Jew, once supposed to be of Levitical 
 pureness, is now known to be racially unorthodox. 
 The Englishmen is not pure Anglo-Saxon, the Ger- 
 man is not Teutonic, the Russian is not Slav. To 
 be mongrel may be a virtue or a vice. We do not 
 know. The problem is too subtle, too elusive, 
 and we have no approved receipts in this vast 
 eugenic kitchen. Intermarrying will go on, 
 whether we like it or loathe it, for love laughs at 
 [203! 
 
racial barriers and the maidens of one nation look 
 fair to the youths of another. Let the kettle boil 
 and let us hope for the best. 
 
 But the newcomer brings with him more than his 
 potential parenthood, and he influences America 
 and the American in other ways than by marriage 
 and procreation. He creates new problems of ad- 
 justment. He enters into a new environment. He 
 creates a new environment for us. Unconsciously 
 but irresistibly he transforms an America which 
 he does not know. He forces the native American 
 to change, to change that he may feel at home in 
 his own home. 
 
 When we seek to discover what is the exact 
 influence of the immigrant upon his new environ- 
 ment, we are met with diiEculties almost as insur- 
 mountable as those which enter into the problem 
 of the immigrant's influence upon our common 
 heredity. Social phenomena are diflicult to iso- 
 late. The immigrant is not merely an immigrant ; 
 he is also a wage-earner, a city-dweller, perhaps 
 an illiterate. Wage-earning, city-dwelling, and 
 illiteracy are all contributing influences. Your im- 
 migrant is a citizen of the new factory, of the 
 great industrial State, within, yet almost over- 
 shadowing, the political State. Into each of our 
 problems — wages and labor, illiteracy, crime, vice, 
 insanity, pauperism, democracy — the immigrant 
 enters. 
 
 There is in all the world no more difficult, no 
 more utterly bewildering problem than this of the 
 intermingling of races. Already thirty million im- 
 [204] 
 
migrants have arrived, of whom considerably over 
 twenty millions have remained. To interpret this 
 pouring of new, strange millions into the old, to 
 trace its result upon the manners, the morals, the 
 emotional and intellectual reactions of the Ameri- 
 cans, is like searching out the yellow waters of 
 the Missouri in the vast flood of the lower Missis- 
 sippi. Our immigrating races are many, and they 
 meet diverse kinds of native Americans on vary- 
 ing planes and at innumerable contact points. So 
 complex is the resulting pattern, so multitudinous 
 are the threads interwoven into so many perplex- 
 ing combinations, that we struggle in vain to un- 
 weave this weaving. At best we can merely follow 
 a single color, noting its appearance here and its 
 reappearance there, in this vast and many-hued 
 tapestry which we call American life. 
 
 Fortunately we are not compelled to embark 
 upon so ambitious a study. We are here con- 
 cerned, not with the all-inclusive question, "Is Im- 
 migration good or bad?" but with the problem 
 of how immigration has contributed to certain 
 broad developments in the character and habits 
 of the American, and even to this question we 
 must be content with a half-answer. 
 
 When we compare the America of to-day with 
 the America of half a century ago, certain differ- 
 ences stand out sharply. America to-day is far 
 richer. It is also more stratified. Our social 
 gamut has been widened. There are more vivid 
 contrasts, more startling differences, in education 
 and in the general chances of life. We are less 
 [205 J 
 
rural and more urban, losing the virtues and the 
 vices, the excellences and the stupidities, of coun- 
 try life, and gaining those of the city. We are 
 massing in our cities armies of the poor to take 
 the place of country ne'er-do-wells and village 
 hangers-on. We are more sophisticated. We are 
 more lax and less narrow. We have lost our 
 earlier frugal simplicity, and have become extrava- 
 gant and competitively lavish. We have, in short, 
 created a new type of American, who lives in the 
 city, reads newspapers and even books, bathes fre- 
 quently, travels occasionally; a man, fluent intel- 
 lectually and physically restless, ready but not pro- 
 found, intent upon success, not without idealism, 
 but somewhat disillusioned, pleasure-loving, hard- 
 working, humorous. At the same time there 
 grows a sense of a social mal-adjustment, a sense 
 of a failure of America to live up to expectations, 
 and an intensifying desire to right a not clearly 
 perceived wrong. There develops a vigorous, if 
 somewhat vague and untrained, moral impulse, an 
 impulse based on social rather than individual 
 ethics, unesthetic, democratic, headlong. 
 
 Although this development might have come 
 about in part, at least, without immigration, the 
 process has been enormously accelerated by the 
 arrival on our shores of millions of Europeans. 
 These men came to make a living, and they made 
 not only their own but other men's fortunes. They 
 hastened the dissolution of old conditions; they 
 undermined old standards by introducing new; 
 their very traditions facilitated the growth of that 
 [206] 
 
traditionless quality of the American mind which 
 hastened our material transformation. 
 
 How we estimate this influence of the immi- 
 grant depends upon our definition of the term. In 
 a sense we are all immigrants, from the straightest 
 lineal descendant of Miles Standish to the burly 
 "Hunkie" unloaded at Ellis Island this morning; 
 from the men who came over in the Mayflower 
 to the men who came over in the newest liner. 
 We may, however, arbitrarily define immigration 
 as beginning with 1820, the first year for which 
 we have statistics. Prior to that date the trans- 
 atlantic movement was feeble. During the Colonial 
 period only a trickling stream flowed across the 
 ocean. The Revolutionary War cut us off from 
 Europe. England was hostile, the rest of the 
 world indifferent. America was little known and 
 not well-known. During the forty years ending 
 in 1820, less than a quarter-million Europeans 
 came to America. At present more immigrants 
 land on a single summer day than arrived a cen- 
 tury ago during a whole year. 
 
 The very poverty of the European masses pre- 
 vented their exodus. A ticket for the hold of one 
 of the pitching little sailing-vessels cost about ten 
 pounds. But where should a laborer in those days 
 find ten pounds ? Men were born, grew up, mar- 
 ried, begot children, and died at a ripe old age 
 without ever owning a pound, without ever touch- 
 ing or seeing a five-pound note. To buy his 
 passage the emigrant sold himself. He became 
 an "indentured" servant liable to a number of 
 [207] 
 
years of unpaid labor in America. This service 
 was neither brief nor easy. Adults usually in- 
 dentured themselves from three to six years ; chil- 
 dren from ten to fifteen, or until they came of age. 
 If, on the way over, a man's parents died — and 
 this event was common enough — the orphan 
 served their time as well as his own. At Phila- 
 delphia, at Boston, at New York, dealers in "in- 
 dentured servants" boarded the boat to look for 
 a "likely boy" or a not too old housekeeper. 
 Parents sometimes sold their children, to remain 
 free themselves. The traffic, though lucrative to 
 the ship-owner and advantageous to the farmer, 
 pressed hardly on the poor "indentured servants," 
 often chained together and peddled off in the 
 Colonial villages. 
 
 It is not strange that immigration increased. 
 Gradually transportation facilities improved, 
 America became better known, and* the European 
 population more mobile. Immigrants, already 
 established in America, sent home money to per- 
 mit other immigrants to come. The endless chain 
 began to revolve. In 1828 the number of arriving 
 immigrants exceeded twenty-seven thousand, as 
 compared with less than eight thousand only four 
 years earlier. In 1832 another powerful impulse 
 carried the immigration to over sixty thousand 
 annually. During the next twelve years immigra- 
 tion maintained itself at a fairly constant level, 
 averaging, almost seventy thousand a year. Then 
 in 1 845 there came to the transatlantic movement 
 a stupendous and unprecedented growth. Soon 
 [208] 
 
the two-hundred-thousand mark was reached, then 
 three hundred thousand, and finally, in 1854, no 
 less than four hundred and twenty-seven thousand 
 immigrants arrived. In proportion to our popula- 
 tion, it was the greatest immigration this country 
 has ever had. 
 
 No one who knew the state of Europe need 
 have wondered at this human flood. The feudal 
 conditions in Germany, which had survived the 
 French Revolution and Napoleon, were at last dis- 
 integrating; industry was beginning, the power 
 loom was destroying the old hand-weavers ; educa- 
 tion was spreading, and the population was on the 
 move, intellectually and physically. To these con- 
 ditions, making for a freer-footed peasantry, a 
 special occurrence contributed. The bitter winter 
 of 1845 destroyed innumerable vineyards. The 
 melting snows swelled the Danube, the Elbe, the 
 Main, the Moselle, the Rhine, devastating the 
 surrounding country. The potato crop, the main 
 resource of the German peasant, failed utterly, 
 and during the winter of 1846 hosts of people 
 stolidly starved. Those who had the means to 
 leave discovered that America was the one way 
 out, and so on the white Strasburg road long lines 
 of carts began to make their way from Bavaria 
 and Wiirtemberg, from Baden and Hesse-Cassel, 
 to the nearest seaport. "There they go slowly 
 along," wrote a sympathetic observer, "their 
 miserable tumbrils drawn by such starved, droop- 
 ing beasts that your only wonder is how they can 
 possibly hope to reach Havre alive." The carts 
 [209 J 
 
were littered with the scanty property of the emi- 
 grants, and "piled on the top of all are the women 
 and children, the sick and bedridden, and all who 
 are too exhausted with the journey to walk. One 
 might take it for a convoy of wounded, the relics 
 of a battlefield, but for the rows of little white 
 heads peeping from beneath the ragged hoods." 
 
 If these German emigrants, these new adven- 
 turers, were poor, what may we say of the Irish, 
 who in their fearfully overcrowded island were, 
 at the best on the verge of starvation ? The hor- 
 rible ravages of the potato famine of 1846 among 
 the wretched poor of Ireland need no repetition. 
 Untold thousands died in their huts ; others, find- 
 ing no relief in the towns congested with starving 
 folk, lay down in the streets and died. "Along 
 the country roads," writes Justin McCarthy, "one 
 met everywhere groups of gaunt, dim-eyed 
 wretches, clad in miserable old sacking and wan- 
 dering aimlessly with some vague idea of finding 
 food." 
 
 This was the impulse, this "vague idea of find- 
 ing food," which in the fifties brought millions of 
 West Europeans across the ocean. The voyage 
 was desperate. The vessels, officered by ignorant, 
 underpaid, and often brutal captains, and crowded 
 to the gunwale with despised passengers, carried 
 fever in their holds. The dead were consigned to 
 the sea, the sick and stricken were put off at New 
 York or Boston, to fill the hospitals and alms- 
 houses. The Germans, some of whom had means, 
 moved in a never-ending line to the western 
 [210] 
 
frontier. The less mobile Irish were to a great 
 extent stranded in the Eastern cities. 
 
 This immigration was by no means cordially 
 welcomed. From 1835 on, a strongly antagonistic 
 attitude manifested itself in the "Native-Ameri- 
 can" and "Know-Nothing" movements, both of 
 which were largely anti-Catholic in animus and 
 political in form. The Nativists demanded a re- 
 striction of immigration and the appointment of 
 only native Americans to political office. The 
 "Know-Nothing" party, which arose out of the 
 enormous immigration of the late forties, elected 
 a number of Senators and Representatives, but re- 
 mained without effect on national legislation. 
 Immigration went on unimpeded. 
 
 The conditions, however, in which the newly 
 arrived immigrants found themselves, and the con- 
 ditions which they made for themselves, were by 
 no means all that might have been desired. 
 America did nothing to protect the newcomers, 
 and the first and most lasting impression which 
 the alien received was often the lodging-house 
 shark or some other of the numerous exploiters 
 who infested the landing-place at Castle Garden. 
 Nor did the majority of immigrants bring with 
 them high standards of living. The new-comers 
 from southern and western Ireland had spent 
 their early lives in the utmost squalor, in crowded, 
 wretched. Ill-lit, ill-ventilated hovels, with no floor 
 and no furniture, and no beds but heaps of filthy 
 straw or filthier rags. From miserable huts of 
 this sort these immigrants migrated to horrible 
 [211] 
 
tenements in loathsome American alleys. The 
 transition meant no immediate radical improve- 
 ment in their habits. 
 
 As a matter of history, most of the conditions 
 and influences now ascribed to immigration were 
 ascribed to it half a century and more ago. Then, 
 as now, the resident had a prejudice against the 
 new-comer, because of his lower standards. 
 Though the native refused to associate with the 
 alien, he none the less objected to the latter's isola- 
 tion, to the clannishness of the Irish and to the 
 close congregation of Germans, who formed racial 
 clots in the American vascular system. It was 
 complained that these aliens "have their own 
 theatres, recreations, amusements, military and 
 national organizations; to a great extent their 
 own schools, churches, and trade-unions ; their own 
 newspapers and periodical literature." A quiet 
 social ostracism prevailed, emphasized from time 
 to time by attacks upon Catholic churches or Ger- 
 man Turner societies, by persecutions of foreign- 
 born children in the schools, and by occasional 
 vehement denunciations from rostrum and pulpit. 
 
 In the meanwhile, however, the immigrant 
 was quietly being changed by America and was 
 quietly changing America. After 1854 immigra- 
 tion fell off rapidly, and during the early years of 
 the Civil War it dwindled to less than a hundred 
 thousand a year. The country was expanding at 
 an unprecedented rate. The war absorbed native 
 and foreign born, and the growing West made its 
 appeal to all. Industry grew stupendously, the 
 [212] 
 
railroads opened new territories, and cities sprang 
 up everywhere. The immigrants were learning 
 American ways, were marrying American wives, 
 were begetting and rearing American children. 
 The son of the German or Irish immigrant was 
 more American than the Americans. 
 
 What happened in the forties and fifties has 
 been repeated again and again, though in less 
 spectacular form. The source of immigration has 
 changed, but the impulse has remained the same. 
 Hundreds of thousands have come to escape re- 
 ligious or political persecution, but the movement 
 of the millions has been an economic movement, 
 impelled by economic causes and subject to eco- 
 nomic laws. Immigration ebbed and flowed, de- 
 clining after panics and depressions in America, 
 and increasing to torrential floods with each 
 European calamity or with each sudden improve- 
 ment in American industry. Progress, however, 
 was upward. Immigrants were insulted, cheated, 
 occasionally murdered, but those who survived 
 and prospered wrote glowing letters home, while 
 the men who died from tuberculosis and dynamite 
 explosions wrote no letters. Year by year the in- 
 flow increased. The average gross immigration 
 during the years 1905-19 12 was only a little under 
 a million a year. 
 
 A change, however, has come over this move- 
 ment. Of the total immigration from 1820 to 
 i860, over one-half was British and Irish, and 
 over one-fourth German. Since 1881, our immi- 
 graats have come chiefly from southern and east- 
 
 [213] 
 
ern Europe. To-day there climb out of the ship's 
 steerage Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Lithu- 
 anians, Poles, Magyars, Russians, Hebrews, 
 Syrians, Armenians, Turks, Croatians, Slovenians, 
 Slovaks, Servians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Mon- 
 tenegrins, Dalmatians, Bosnians, and Herzegovi- 
 nians. Improved transportation and improved 
 conditions in Europe have contributed to this de- 
 velopment. We could not have expected many 
 more immigrants from Ireland. That country's 
 population is less than five years of our total in- 
 flow; if all our immigrants were to come from 
 Ireland, not a soul would be left by the year 191 8. 
 Sweden's population is that of New York City; 
 Norway's that of Chicago. We could empty both 
 countries in a decade. Germany's large popula- 
 tion grows, but conditions there are improving so 
 rapidly that the Empire now attracts immigrants. 
 Eastern and southern Europe, on the other hand, 
 are awakening. The railroad, trolley, newspaper, 
 telegraph, telephone, invade the interior. Men 
 begin to move. The attraction of America reaches 
 ever farther. To-day the peasant in Dalmatia, 
 Syria, Basilicata, is nearer America, knows more 
 about us, than did the man from Galway, or 
 Bavaria half a century ago. The Italian in New 
 York City goes to a moving-picture theatre on 
 Elizabeth Street and sees on the screen the faces 
 of friends who, a few months before, embarked 
 from Naples for the Tripolitan war. For a few 
 soldi an urchin of Palermo actually sees "Little 
 Italy." 
 
 [214] 
 
That is the history of our immigration, a com- 
 ing together of the New and the Old World. The 
 attraction of America penetrates ever deeper into 
 Europe, from the maritime peoples living on the 
 fringe of the ocean, to the inland plains, and then 
 into somnolent, winter-locked mountain villages. 
 Simultaneously Europe changes America. You 
 can alter any country if you pour in enough mil- 
 lions. These immigrants, moreover, are of a 
 character to effect changes. America's attraction 
 is not to the good or to the bad, to the saint or 
 to the sinner, but to the young, the aggresive, the 
 restless, the ambitious. The Europeans in 
 America are chosen men, for there is a rigorous 
 selection at home and a rigorous selection here, 
 the discouraged and defeated returning by the 
 shipload. These immigrating races are virile, 
 tenacious, prolific. Each shipload of new-comers 
 carries to American life an impulse like the rapidly 
 succeeding explosions of a gasolene-engine. 
 
 Moreover, these immigrants, peasants at home, 
 become city-dwellers here. The city is the heart 
 of our body social. It is the home of education, 
 amusement, culture, crime, discontent, social con- 
 tacts — and power. The immigrant, even in the 
 gutter of the city, is often nearer to the main cur- 
 rents of our national life than is the average resi- 
 dent of the country^ His children are more 
 literate, more restless, more wide-awake. 
 
 With such numbers, such qualities, and such a 
 position within the social network, one might 
 imagine that the immigrant would gradually trans- 
 
 [215] 
 
form us in his own likeness. But no such direct 
 influence is visible. As a nation we have not 
 learned politeness, although we have drawn mil- 
 lions of immigrants from the politest peoples in 
 the world. Our national irreverence is not de- 
 creased, but, on the contrary, is actually increased, 
 by the mass of idols, of good old customs, memo- 
 ries, religions, which come to us in the steerage. 
 Nor is the immigrant's influence in any way inten- 
 tional. Though he hopes that America will make 
 him, the immigrant has no presumptuous thought 
 of making America. To him, America is a fixed, 
 unchanging environmental thing, a land to browse 
 on. 
 
 This very passivity of the newly arrived immi- 
 grant is the most tremendous of influences. The 
 workman who does not join a union, the citizen 
 who sends his immature children to the factory, 
 the man who does not become naturalized, or 
 who maintains a standard of living below an in- 
 adequate wage, such a one by contagion and 
 pressure changes conditions and lowers standards 
 all about him, undermining to the extent of his 
 lethargy our entire social edifice. The aim of 
 Americanization is to combat this passive in- 
 fluence. Two forces, like good and evil, are op- 
 posed on that long frontier line where the immi- 
 grant comes into contact with the older resident. 
 The American, through self-protection, not love, 
 seeks to raise the immigrant to his economic 
 level, the immigrant, through self-protection, not 
 through knowledge, involuntarily accepts condi- 
 [2l6] 
 
tions which tend to drag the American down to 
 his. In this contest much that we ordinarily ac- 
 count virtue is evil ; much that is ugly is good. The 
 immigrant girl puts on a corset, exchanges her 
 picturesque headdress for a flowering monstrosity 
 of an American hat, squeezes her honest peasant's 
 foot into a narrow, thin-soled American shoe — 
 and behold, it is good. It is a step toward assimi- 
 lation, toward a more expensive if not a more 
 lovely standard of living. It gives hostages to 
 America. It makes the frenzied saving of the 
 early days impossible. Docility, abnegation, and 
 pecuniary abasement are not economic virtues, 
 however highly they may be rated in another 
 category. 
 
 In still other ways this assimilation alters and 
 limits the alien's influence. Much is lost in the 
 process. The immigrant comes to us laden with 
 gifts, but we have not the leisure to take nor he 
 the opportunity to tender. The brilliant native 
 costumes, the strange, vibrant dialects, the curious 
 mental molds are soon faded or gone. The old 
 religions, the old customs, the traditional man- 
 ners, the ancient lace do not survive the melting- 
 pot. Assimilation, however necessary, ends the 
 charm and rareness of our quaint human importa- 
 tions. 
 
 For this esthetic degeneration the immigrant 
 must not be blamed. To gain himself he must 
 lose himself. He must adopt "our ways." The 
 Italian day laborer finds that macaroni and lettuce 
 are not a suitable diet for ten hours' work on the 
 [217] 
 
subway or the Catskill dam. The politeness of 
 sunny southern Europe is, at a discount in our 
 skurrying, elbowing crowds. The docility of the 
 pe?tsant damns a man irretrievably in the struggle 
 to rise, and conservatism in gentle, outlandish 
 manners is impossible in kaleidoscopic America. 
 The immigrant, therefore, accepts our standards 
 wholesale and indiscriminately. He "goes the 
 limit" of assimilation — slang, clothes, and chew- 
 ing-gum. He accommodates himself quickly to 
 that narrow fringe of America which affects him 
 most immediately. The Talmudist in Russia is, 
 for better or worse, no Talmudist here: he is a 
 cloak-presser or a real-estate broker. The Greek 
 shepherd becomes an elevator-boy or a hazardous 
 speculator in resuscitated violets. The Sicilian 
 bootblack learns to charge ten cents for a five-cent 
 shine; the candy-vender from Macedonia haggles 
 long before he knows a hundred English words; 
 the Pole who never has seen a coal-mine becomes 
 adept at the use of the steam-shovel. 
 
 Another limit to the immigrant's influence is 
 due to the fact that the America to which he 
 a,dapts himself is the America that he first meets, 
 the America at the bottom. That bottom changes 
 as America changes from an agricultural to an 
 industrial nation. For the average immigrant 
 there is no longer a free farm on a Western 
 frontier: there is only a job as an unskilled or 
 semi-skilled workman. For that job a knowledge 
 of his letters is not absolutely necessary. Nor is 
 a knowledge of English. There are in America 
 [218] 
 
to-day a few millions of aliens who cannot speak 
 English or read or write their native tongue, and 
 who, from an industrial point of view, are almost 
 mere muscle. The road from bottom to top be- 
 comes steeper and more inaccessible. Stratification 
 begins. 
 
 Because of his position at the bottom of a strati- 
 fied society, the immigrant — especially the recent 
 immigrant — does not exert any large direct in- 
 fluence. Taken in the mass, he does not run our 
 businesses, make our laws, write our books, paint 
 our pictures, preach to us, teach us or prescribe 
 for us. His indirect influence, on the other hand, 
 is increased rather than diminished by his position 
 at the bottom of the structure. When he moves, 
 all superincumbent groups must of necessary shift 
 their positions. This indirect influence is mani- 
 fold. The immigration of enormous numbers of 
 unskilled "interchangeable" laborers, who can be 
 moved about like pawns, standardizes our in- 
 dustries, facilitates the growth of stupendous busi- 
 ness units, and generally promotes plasticity. The 
 immigrant, by his mere presence, by his mere 
 readiness to be used, speeds us up; he accelerates 
 the whole tempo of our industrial life. He 
 changes completely "the balance of power" in in- 
 dustry, politics, and social life generally. The 
 feverish speed of our labor, which is so largely 
 pathological, is an index of this. The arrival of 
 ever fresh multitudes adds to the difiiculties of 
 securing a democratic control of either industry or 
 politics. The presence of the unskilled, unlettered 
 [219] 
 
immigrant excites the cupidity of men who wish 
 to make money quickly and do not care how. It 
 makes an essentially kind-hearted people callous. 
 Why save the lives of "wops"? What does it 
 matter if our industry kills a few thousand more 
 or less, when, if we wish, we can get millions a 
 year from inexhaustible Europe? Immigration 
 acts to destroy our brakes. It keeps us, as a 
 nation, transitional. 
 
 Of course this transitional quality of America 
 was due partly to our virgin continent. There 
 was always room in the West; a man did not 
 settle, but merely lighted on a spot, like a migra- 
 tory bird on its southern journey. Immigration, 
 however, intensified and protracted this develop- 
 ment. Each race had to fight for its place. 
 Natives were displaced by Irish, who were dis- 
 placed in turn by Germans, Russians, Italians, 
 Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians. Whole trades were 
 deserted by one nation and conquered by another. 
 The peoples of eastern Europe inundated the 
 Pennsylvania mining districts, displacing Irish, 
 English, and Welsh miners. The Irish street 
 laborer disappeared; the Italian quietly took his 
 shovel. Russian Jews revolutionized the clothing 
 trade, driving out Germans as these had driven 
 out native Americans. The old homes of dis- 
 placed nations were inhabited by new peoples ; the 
 old peoples were shoved up or down, but, in any 
 case, out. Cities, factories, neighborhoods changed 
 with startling rapidity. Connecticut schools, once 
 attended by descendants of the Pilgrims, became 
 [ 220 ] 
 
overfilled with dark-eyed Italian lads and tow- 
 headed Slavs. Protestant churches were stranded 
 in Catholic or Jewish neighborhoods. America 
 changed rapidly, feverishly. That peculiar quiet 
 restlessness of America, the calm fear with which 
 we search with the tail of our eye to avoid swirl- 
 ing automobiles, the rush and recklessness of our 
 life, were increased by the mild, law-abiding 
 people who came to us from abroad. 
 
 There was a time when all these qualities were 
 good, or at least had their good features. So long 
 as we had elbow-room in the West, so long as we 
 were young and growing, with a big continent to 
 make our mistakes in, even recklessness was a 
 virtue. But to-day America is no longer elastic, 
 the road from bottom to top is not so short and 
 not so unimpeded as it once was. We cannot any 
 longer be sure that the inimigrant will find his 
 proper place in our Eastern mills or on our West- 
 ern farms without injury to others — or to him- 
 self. 
 
 The time has passed when we exulted in the 
 number of grown-up men, bred at another coun- 
 try's expense, who came to work for us and fer- 
 tilize our soils with their dead bones. The time 
 has passed when we believed that mere numbers 
 were all. To-day, despite night schools, settle- 
 ments, and a whole network of Americanizing 
 agencies, we have teeming, polyglot slums and the 
 clash of race with race in sweatshop and factory, 
 mine and lumber-camp. We have a mixture of 
 ideals, a confusion of standards, a conglomeration 
 [221] 
 
of clashing views of life. We, the many-nationed 
 natioii of America, bring the Puritan tradition, 
 a trifle anaemic and thin, a little the worse for dis- 
 use. The immigrant brings a babel of traditions, 
 an all too plastic mind, a willingness to copy our 
 virtues and vices, to imitate us for better or for 
 worse. All of which hampers and delays the for- 
 mation of a national consciousness. 
 
 From whatever point we view the new America, 
 we cannot help seeing how intimately the changes 
 have been bound up with our immigration, espe- 
 cially with that of recent years. The widening of 
 the social gamut becomes more significant when 
 we recall that with unrestricted immigration our 
 poorest citizens are periodically recruited from 
 the poor of the poorest countries of Europe. Our 
 differences in education, while they have other 
 causes, are sharply accentuated by our enormous 
 development of university and high schools at the 
 one end, and by the increasing illiteracy of our 
 immigrants at the other. In cities where there 
 are large immigrant populations we note the be- 
 ginning of a change in our attitude toward the 
 public schools, toward uinversal suffrage, toward 
 many of the pious, if unrealized, national ideals 
 of an earlier period. 
 
 Fundamentally, however, the essential fact 
 about our present-day immigration is not that the 
 immigrant has changed (though that fact is of 
 great importance), but that the America to which 
 the immigrant comes has changed fundamentally 
 and permanently. And the essential fact about 
 [ 222 J 
 
the immigrant's effect on American character is 
 this, that the gift of the immigrant to the nation 
 is not the qualities which he himself had at home, 
 but the very qualities which Americans have al- 
 ways had. In other words, at a time when Ameri- 
 can industrial, political, and social conditions are 
 changing, partly as a result of immigration itself, 
 the immigrant hampers our psychological adjust- 
 ment to such changes by giving scope and exercise 
 to old national characteristics which should be ob- 
 solescent. 
 
 America to-day is in transition. We have 
 moved rapidly from one industrial world to an- 
 other, and this progress has been aided and stim- 
 ulated by immigration. The psychological change, 
 however, which should have kept pace with this 
 industrial transition, has been slower and less com- 
 plete. It has been retarded by the very rapidity 
 of our immigration and by the tremendous edu- 
 cational tasks which that influx placed upon us. 
 The immigrant is a challenge to our highest ideal- 
 ism, but the task of Americanizing the extra mil- 
 lions of new-comers has hindered progress in the 
 task of democratizing America. 
 
 [ 223]