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HN64 .R82™" ""'™'^">' '-"'™^ 
 Sin and societ\ 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 032 570 529 
 
SIN AND SOCIETY 
 
SIN AND SOCIETY 
 
 AN ANALYSIS OF LATTER-DAY INIQUITY 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS 
 
 PROFESSOR or SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN ; AUTHOR OF 
 ** SOCIAL CONTROL," ** THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGY," ETC. 
 
 WITH A LETTER FROM 
 PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 ®tie 'Ri'otx^iDz pn0, Cambtibge 
 
 1907 
 
 E.M. 
 
M N 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1907 BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published No-vember iQcy/ 
 
 ^,x.\f7.5 1 
 
TO MY DEAR WIFE 
 
 ROSAMOND 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book deals with sin, but it does not en- 
 treat the sinner to mend his ways. It seeks to 
 influence no one in his conduct. It does seek 
 to influence men in their attitude toward the con- 
 duct of others. Its exhortation is not Be goody 
 but Be rational. To modify conduct one touches 
 the heart. To modify the judgments on con- 
 duct one speaks to the intellect. The latter is 
 the method of this book. Its aim is to enlighten 
 rather than to move. 
 
 ' In praising or blaming each of us exerts a 
 power over his fellows. When the praises or 
 blames of many men run together, they become 
 a torrent no one can withstand. Why let this 
 moral power run to waste ? j Why not use this 
 public opinion to protect our dearest posses- 
 sions ? 
 
 In its reactions against wrong-doing the pub- 
 lic is childishly naive and sentimental. It is con- 
 tent with the surface look of things. It lays 
 emphasis where emphasis was laid centuries ago. 
 It beholds sin in a false perspective, seeing pec- 
 cadillos as crimes, and crimes as peccadillos. It 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 never occurs to the public that sin evolves along 
 with society, and that "the perspective in which 
 it is necessary to view misconduct changes from 
 age to age. Hence, in to-day's warfare on sin, 
 the reactions of the public are about as service- 
 able as gongs and stink-pots in a modern battle. 
 Rationalize public opinion ; modernize it and 
 bring it abreast of latter-day sin ; make the blame 
 of the many into a flaming sword guarding the 
 sacred interests of society — such is the lesson 
 this little book seeks to impress, 
 
 Edward Alsworth Ross. 
 Madison, Wis., September, 1907. 
 
A LETTER 
 
 Oyster Bay, N. Y., 
 September 19, 1907. 
 My dear Professor Ross : 
 
 It was to Justice Holmes that I owed the 
 pleasure and profit of reading your book on 
 Social Control. The Justice spoke of it to me 
 as one of the strongest and most striking pre- 
 sentations of the subject he had ever seen. I got 
 it at once and was deeply interested in it. Since 
 then I have read whatever you have written. I 
 have been particularly pleased with the essays 
 which, as you tell me, you are now to publish 
 in permanent form, i You define "^sin " as con- 
 duct that harms another in contradistinction to 
 " vice," by which we mean practices that harm 
 one's self ;' and you attack as they should be at- 
 tacked the men who at the present day do more 
 harm to the body politic by their sinning than 
 all others.) With almost all that you write I am 
 in full and hearty sympathy. As you well say, 
 if a ring is to be put in the snout of the greedy 
 strong, only organized society can do,jt. You 
 war against the vast iniquities in modern busi- 
 
X A LETTER 
 
 ness, finance, politics, journalism, due to tne 
 ineffectiveness of public opinion in coping with 
 the dominant types of wrong-doing in a huge, 
 rich, highly complex industrial civilization like 
 ours. You show that the worst evils we have 
 to combat have inevitably evolved along with 
 the evolution of society itself, and that the per- 
 spective of conduct must change from age to age, 
 so that our moral judgment may be recast in 
 order more effectively to hold to account the 
 really dangerous foes of our present civilization. 
 You do not confine yourself to mere destructive 
 criticism. Your plea is for courage, for upright- 
 ness, for far-seeing sanity, for active constructive 
 work. There is no reason why we should feel 
 despondent over the outlook of modern civili- 
 zation, but there is every reason why we should 
 be fully alert to the dangers ahead. Modern 
 society has developed to a point where there is 
 real cause for alarm lest we shall go the way of 
 so many ancient communities, where the state 
 was brought to ruin because politics became the 
 mere struggle of class against class. Your book 
 is emphatically an appeal to the general sense of 
 right as opposed to mere class interest. As you 
 put it, the danger is as great if the law is twisted 
 
A LETTER xi 
 
 to be an instrument of the greed of one class as 
 if it is twisted to be an instrument of the venge- 
 fulness of another. You reject that most mis- 
 chievous of socialist theses, viz. : that progress 
 is t o be sec ured by the strife of _dasses. You 
 insis t, as all healthy-minded patriots should in- 
 sist, thatj)ublic opinion, if only sufficiently en- 
 lightened and aroused, is'ecjual to the necessary 
 regenerative tasks ■ and can yet dominate the 
 future. Your book is wholesome and sane and 
 I trust that its influence will be widespread. 
 Sincerely yours. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. NEW VARIETIES OF SIN I 
 
 II. THE GRADING OF SINNERS 21 
 
 III. THE CRIMINALOID 43 
 
 IV. THE GRILLING OF SINNERS 73 
 ^V. SINNING BY SYNDICATE 103 
 
 VI. THE RULES OF THE GAME 133 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 The sinful heart is ever the same, but 
 sin changes its quality as society develops. 
 Modern sin takes its character from the 
 mutualism of our time. Under our present 
 manner of living, how^ many of my vital 
 interests I must intrust to others ! Nowa- 
 days the water main is my well, the trol- 
 ley car my carriage, the banker's safe my 
 old stocking, the policeman's billy my fist. 
 My own eyes and nose and judgment de- 
 fer to the inspector of food, or drugs, or 
 gas, or factories, or tenements, or insurance 
 companies. I rely upon others to look after 
 my drains, invest my savings, nurse my sick, 
 and teach my children. I let the meat trust 
 butcher my pig, the oil trust mould my 
 candles, the sugar trust boil my sorghum, 
 the coal trust chop my wood, the barb wire 
 company split my rails. 
 
 But this spread-out manner of life lays 
 
4 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 snares for the weak and opens doors to 
 the wicked. Interdependence puts us, as it 
 were, at one another's mercy, and so ushers 
 in a multitude of new forms of wrong- 
 doing. The practice of mutualism has 
 always worked this way. Most sin is prey- 
 ing, and every new social relation begets 
 its cannibalism. No one will " make the 
 ephah small " or "falsify the balances " un- 
 til there is buying and selling, " withhold 
 the pledge " until there is loaning, " keep 
 back the hire of the laborers" until there 
 is a wage system, "justify the wicked for a 
 reward" until men submit their disputes to 
 a judge. The rise of the state makes possi- 
 ble counterfeiting, smuggling,»peculation, 
 and treason. Commerce tempts the pirate, 
 the forger, and the embezzler. Every new 
 fiduciary relation is a fresh opportunity for 
 breach of trust. To-day the factory system 
 makes it possible to work children to death 
 on the double-quick, speculative building 
 gives the jerry-builder his chance, long- 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 5 
 
 range investment spawns the get-rich- 
 quick concern, and the trust movement 
 opens the door to the bubble promoter. 
 
 The springs of the older sin seem to be 
 drying up. Our forced-draught pace re- 
 lieves us of the superabundance of energy 
 that demands an explosive outlet. Spasms 
 of violent feeling go with a sluggish habit 
 of life, and are as out of place to-day as are 
 the hard-drinking habits of our Saxon an- 
 cestors. We are too busy to give rein to 
 spite. The stresses and lures of civilized 
 life leave slender margin for the gratifica- 
 tion of animosities. In quiet, side-tracked 
 communities there is still much old-fash- 
 ioned hatred, leading to personal clash, but 
 elsewhere the cherishing of malice is felt 
 to be an expensive luxury. Moreover, bru- '; 
 tality, lust, and cruelty are on the wane^j 
 In this country, it is true, statistics show 
 a widening torrent of bloody crime, but 
 the cause is the weakening of law rather 
 than an excess of bile. Other civilized peo- 
 
6 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 pies seem to be turning away from the sins 
 of passion. 
 
 The darling sins that are blackening the 
 face of our time are incidental to the ruth- 
 less pursuit of private ends, and hence quite 
 "without prejudice." The victims are_used 
 or sacrificed not at all from personal ill- 
 will, but because they can serve as pawns 
 in somebody's little game. Like the way- 
 farers run down by the automobilist, they 
 are offered up to the God of Speed.^ The 
 essence of the wrongs that infest our articu- 
 lated society is betrayal rather than aggres- 
 sion. Having perforce to build men of 
 willow into a social fabric that calls for 
 oak, we see on all hands monstrous treach- 
 eries, — adulterators, peculators, boodlers, 
 grafters, violating the trust others have 
 placed in them. The little finger of Chi- 
 cane has come to be thicker than the loins 
 of Violence. 
 
 The sinister opportunities presented in 
 this webbed social life have been seized 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 7 
 
 unhesitatingly, because such treasons have 
 not yet become infamous. The man who 
 picks pockets with a railway rebate, mur- 
 ders with an adulterant instead of a blud- 
 geon, burglarizes with a " rake-off" instead 
 of a jimmy, cheats with a company pro- 
 spectus instead of a deck of cards, or 
 scuttles his town instead of his ship, does 
 not feel on his brow the brand of a male- 
 factor. The shedder of blood, the oppressor 
 of the widow and the fatherless, long ago 
 became odious, but latter-day treacheries 
 fly no skull-and-crossbones flag at the mast- 
 head. The qualities which differentiate 
 them from primitive sin and procureThem 
 such indulgence may be clearly defined. 
 
 MODERN SIN IS NOT SUPERFICIALLY 
 REPULSIVE 
 
 ] 
 
 To-day the sacrifice of life incidental to 
 quick success rarely calls for the actual 
 spilling of blood. How decent are the pale 
 slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and 
 
8 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 the purveyor of polluted water, compared 
 with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit 
 or assassin ! Even if there is blood-letting, 
 the long-range, tentacular nature of mod- 
 ern homicide eliminates all personal colli- 
 sion. What an abyss between the knife- 
 play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect 
 to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, 
 or to furnish cars with safety couplers ! 
 The providing of unsuspecting passengers 
 with "cork" life-preservers secretly loaded 
 with bars of iron to make up for their 
 deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually 
 akin to the treachery of Joab, who, taking 
 Amasa by the beard "to kiss him," smote 
 Amasa " in the fifth rib ; " but it wears a 
 very different aspect. The current methods 
 of annexing the property of others are 
 characterized by a pleasing indirectness 
 and refinement. The furtive, apprehensive 
 manner of the till-tapper or the porch- 
 climber would jar disagreeably upon the 
 tax-dodger " swearing off" his property. 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 9 
 
 or the city official concealing a " rake-off" 
 in his specifications for a public building. 
 The work of the card-sharp and the thim- 
 blerigger shocks a type of man that will 
 not stick at the massive " artistic swindling " 
 of the contemporary promoter. A taint of 
 un worthiness, indeed, always attaches to 
 transactions that force the person into hu- 
 miliating postures. Your petty parasite or 
 your minor delinquent inspires the con- 
 tempt that used to be felt for the retailer. 
 The confidence man is to the promoter 
 what the small shopkeeper was to the mer- 
 chant prince. 
 
 MODERN SIN LACKS THE FAMILIAR I 
 
 I 
 TOKENS OF GUILT J 
 
 The stealings and slayings that lurk in 
 the complexities of our social relations ar.e 
 not deeds o f the di ve, the dark allgy,.J;he 
 lonely road, and the midnight hour. They 
 require no nocturnal prowling with muf- 
 fled step and bated breath, no weapon or offer 
 
lo NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 of violence. Unlike the old-time villain, the 
 latter-day malefactor does not wear a slouch 
 hat and a comforter, breathe forth curses 
 and an odor of gin, go about his nefarious 
 work with clenched teeth and an evil 
 scowl. In the supreme moment his linea- 
 ments are not distorted with rage, or lust, 
 or malevolence. One misses the dramatic 
 setting, the time-honored insignia of tur- 
 pitude. Fagin ajid Bill Sykes arid Simon 
 Legree are vanishing types. Gamester, mur- 
 derer, body-snatcher, and kidnapper may 
 appeal to a Hogarth, but what challenge 
 finds his pencil in the countenance of the 
 boodler, the savings-bank wrecker, or the 
 ballot-box stuffer? Among our criminals 
 of greed, one begins to meet the " grand 
 style " of the great criminals of ambition, 
 y\ Macbeth or Richard III.'^ The modern 
 ,'high-power dealer of woe wears immacu- 
 late linen, carries a silk hat and a lighted 
 ' cigar, sins with a calm countenance and a 
 serene soul, leagues or months from the evil 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN ii 
 
 he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence 
 the eventual blood and tears do not obtrude 
 themselves. 
 
 This is why good, kindly men let the 
 wheels of commerce and of industry red- 
 den and redden, rather than pare or lose 
 their dividend. This is why our railroads 
 yearly injure one employee in twenty-six, 
 and we look in vain for that promised 
 " day of the Lord " that " will make a man 
 more precious than fine gold." 
 
 MODERN SINS ARE IMPERSONAL J 
 
 The covenant breaker, the suborned 
 witness, the corrupt judge, the oppressor 
 of the fatherless, — the old-fashioned sin- 
 ner, in short, — knows his victim, must 
 hearken, perhaps, to bitter upbraidings. 
 But the tropical belt of sin we are sweeping 
 into is largely impersonal. Our iniquity is 
 wireless, and we know not whose withers 
 are wrung by it. The hurt passes into that 
 vague mass, the "public," and is there lost 
 
12 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 to view. Hence it does not take a Borgia 
 to knead " chalk and alum and plaster " 
 into the loaf, seeing one cannot know just 
 who will eat that loaf, or what gripe it 
 will give him. The purveyor of spurious 
 life-preservers need not be a Cain. The 
 owner of rotten tenement houses, whose 
 " pull " enables him to ignore the orders of 
 the health department, foredooms babies, it 
 is true, but for all that he is no Herod. 
 
 Often there are no victims. If the crazy 
 hulk sent out for "just one more trip" 
 meets with fair weather, all is well. If no 
 fire breaks out in the theatre, the sham 
 "emergency exits" are blameless. The 
 corrupt inspector who O. K.'s low-grade 
 kerosene is chancing it, that is all. Many 
 sins, in fact, simply augment risk. Evil 
 does not dog their footsteps with relent- 
 less and heart-shaking certainty. When 
 the catastrophe does come, the sinner salves 
 his conscience by blasphemously calling it 
 an " accident " or an "act of God." 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 13 
 
 Still more impersonal is sin when the 
 immediate harm touches beneficent insti- 
 tutions rather than individuals, when, fol- 
 lowing his vein of private profit, the sinner 
 drives a gallery under some pillar uphold- 
 ing our civilization. The blackguarding 
 editor is really undermining the freedom 
 of the press. The policy kings and saloon 
 keepers, who get out to the polls the last 
 vote of the vicious and criminal classes, 
 are sapping manhood suffrage. Striking 
 engineers who spitefully desert passenger 
 trains in mid-career are jeopardizing the 
 right of a man to work only when he 
 pleases. The real victim of a lynching 
 mob is not the malefactor, but the law- 
 abiding spirit. School-board grafters who 
 blackmail applicants for a teacher's posi- 
 tion are stabbing the free public school. 
 The corrupt bosses and "combines" are 
 murdering representative government. 
 The perpetrators of election frauds unwit- 
 tingly assail the institution of the ballot. 
 
14 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 Rarely, however, are such transgressions 
 abominated as are offenses against persons. 
 
 Because of the special qualities of the 
 Newer Unrighteousness, because these de- 
 vastating latter-day wrongs, being comely 
 of look, do not advertise their vileness, and 
 are without the ulcerous hag-visage of the 
 primitive sins, it is possible for iniquity to 
 flourish greatly, even while men are get- 
 ting better. Briber and boodler and grafter 
 are often "good men," judged by the old 
 tests, and would have passed for virtuous 
 in the American community of seventy 
 years ago.Y' Among the chiefest sinners are 
 now enrolled men who are pure and kind- 
 hearted, loving in their families, faithful 
 to their friends, and generous to the needy.;^ 
 
 One might suppose that an exasperated 
 public would sternly castigate these mod- 
 ern sins. But the fact is, the very quali- 
 ties that lull the conscience of the sinner 
 blind the eyes of the onlookers. People^re 
 sentimental, and bastinado wrong-doing 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 15 
 
 not according to its harmfulness, but ac- 
 cording to the infamy that has come to 
 attach to it. Undiscerning, they chastise 
 with scorpions the old authentic sins, but 
 spare the new. They do not see that bood- 
 ling is treason, that blackmail is piracy, 
 that embezzlement is theft, that specu- 
 lation is gambling, that tax-dodging is 
 larceny, that railroad discrimination is 
 treachery, that the factory labor of children 
 is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is 
 murder. It has not come home to them 
 that the fraudulent promoter "devours 
 widows' houses," that the monopolist 
 "grinds the faces of the poor," that mer- 
 cenary editors and spellbinders " put bitter 
 for sweet and sweet for bitter." The cloven 
 hoof hides in patent leather; and to-day, 
 as in Hosea's time, the people " are de- 
 stroyed for lack of knowledge." The mob 
 lynches the red-handed slayer, when it 
 Qught to keep a gallows Haman-high for 
 the venal mine inspector, the seller of in- 
 
1 6 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 fected milk, the maintainer of a fire-trap 
 theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted 
 in reputation, but the exploiter of infant 
 toil, or the concocter of a soothing syrup 
 for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar 
 of society. The petty shoplifter is more 
 abhorred than the stealer of a franchise, 
 and the wife-whipper is outcast long before 
 the man who sends his over-insured ship 
 to founder with its crew. 
 
 There is a special cause for the condon- 
 ing of sins committed in the way of busi- 
 ness and without personal malice. Busi- 
 ness men, as a rule, insist upon a free hand 
 in their dealings, and, since they are con- 
 spicuous and influential in the community, 
 they carry with them a considerable part 
 of the non-business world. The leisured, 
 the non-industrial employees, the bulk of 
 professional men, and many public servants, 
 hold to the unmitigated maxim of caveat 
 emptor, and accept the chicane of trade as 
 reasonable and legitimate. In England till 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 17 
 
 1487 any one who knew how to read 
 might commit murder with impunity by 
 claiming "benefit of clergy." There is 
 something like this in the way we have, 
 granted quack and fakir and mine oper- 
 ator and railroad company indulgence to 
 commit manslaughter in the name of 
 business. 
 
 On the other hand, the active producers, 
 such as farmers and workingmen, think 
 in terms of livelihood rather than of profit, 
 and tend therefore to consider the social 
 bearings of conduct. Intent on well-being 
 rather than on pecuniary success, they are 
 shocked at the lenient judgment of the 
 commercial world. Although they have 
 hitherto deferred to the traders, the pro- 
 ducers are losing faith in business men's 
 standards, and may yet pluck up the cour- 
 age to validate their own ethics against 
 the individualistic, anti-social ethics of 
 commerce. 
 
 Still, even if the mass turns vehement. 
 
1 8 NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 
 
 it is not certain the lash of its censure can 
 reach the cuticle of the sinner. A differ- 
 entiated society abounds in closed doors 
 and curtained recesses. The murmurs of 
 the alley do not penetrate to the boule- 
 vard. The shrieks from the blazing ex- 
 cursion steamer do not invade the distant 
 yacht of her ow^ners. If the curses of 
 tricked depositors never rise to the circles 
 of "high finance" that keep the con- 
 science of the savings-bank w^recker, why 
 should the popular hiss stay the commer- 
 cial buccaneer? All turns on the power 
 of the greater public to astringe the flaccid 
 conscience of business men until they be- 
 come stern judges of one another. If we 
 have really entered upon the era of jan- 
 gling classes, it is, of course, idle to hope for 
 a truly public sentiment upon such matters. 
 Nevertheless, in the past, antiseptic cur- 
 rents of opinion have mounted from the 
 healthy base to the yellowing top of the 
 social tree, and they may do so again. 
 
NEW VARIETIES OF SIN 19 
 
 While idealists are dipping their brushes 
 into the sunset for colors bright enough 
 to paint the Utopias that might be if so- 
 ciety were quite made over, one may be 
 pardoned for dreaming of what would be 
 possible, even on the plane of existing 
 institutions, if only in this highly articu- 
 lated society of ours every one were re- 
 quired to act in good faith, and to do what 
 he had deliberately led others to expect 
 of him. 
 
II 
 
 THE GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
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THE GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 American government, the London 'Times 
 once said, is " cheap and nasty," meaning 
 thereby that the public organs of our demo- 
 cracy are by no means so aloof and self-suf- 
 ficing as they are abroad. This is especially 
 true of the law-enforcing apparatus. Inl, 
 England the judiciary is far more exalted 
 and independent than it is with us. It is" 
 better manned and paid, more stately, more 
 secure, more disdainful of public clamor. 
 Our law officers, on the other hand, are not 
 socially and politically so distinct from 
 the people. Their individuality is not so 
 completely merged in their function as 
 upholders of the maj esty of the law. Keenly 
 sensitive to the state of the public mind, 
 they are losing rather than gaining in inde- 
 pendence. We dream that we live under a 
 government of laws ; we are actually under 
 a government of men and of newspapers.^ 
 
24 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 In a people uncleft by deep class dis- 
 tinctions every man can as censor take 
 part in the defense of society against evil- 
 doers. Each of us emits a faint, compulsive 
 beam, and since the agencies for focus- 
 ing these into a fierce, w^ithering ray of 
 indignation become every day more per- 
 fect, public opinion as regulator of con- 
 duct steadily gains on priest and judge 
 and sheriff. More and more the law-'^ 
 enforcing machinery slows down the,' 
 moment it ceases to be urged by public * 
 sentiment. The accumulation of "dead" 
 laws in the statute book proves how slight 
 
 ft is its automatic action. \Much of the con- 
 
 j i 
 
 I trol once embodied in the organs of the 
 
 i ' law is coming to be diffused throughout 
 
 ; the community. Constituted authorities 
 
 are settling and crumbling ; they threaten 
 
 to become as obsolete for defense as have 
 
 *. the stone walls of the mediaeval city. In 
 
 twenty-two years we have lynched over 
 
 thirty-three hundred persons as against 
 
 J ^j 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 25 
 
 about twenty-six hundred legally exe- 
 cuted. ' Moral vengeance, the lynching of \ 
 the personality rather than the person, is, j 
 however, the characteristic role of theNJ 
 public. Cell and noose are still needed for ' 
 the low-browed, but public condemnation 
 is dreadful to the newer types of delinquent. 
 Courts must still try people, if we do not 
 want them to be tried by newspapers ; but 
 there never was a time when formal ac- 
 quittal rehabilitated a man less than it does 
 to-day. 
 
 Public opinion has become so mighty 
 a regulator of conduct, not because it has 
 grown wiser, but because of the greater 
 ease of ascertaining, focusing, and direct- 
 ing it. There is nothing to indicate a gain 
 in intelligence at all answering to its en- 
 largement of authority. Now, as ever, the 
 judgments the average man passes upon 
 the conduct of his fellow are casual, in- 
 consistent, and thoughtless. The public 
 sentiment drawn from such sources is not 
 
26 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 fit to safeguard the paramount interests 
 
 of society. Like a stupid, flushed giant at 
 
 bay, the public heeds the little overt of- 
 
 ^ fender more than the big covert offender. 
 
 f' • It resents a pinprick more than a blow at 
 
 ^ the heart. It parries a frontal stroke, 
 
 but ignores a flank attack. The key to 
 
 ' 'Such folly is to be found in certain crude 
 
 notions vs^hich lie at the base of its moral 
 
 judgments and lead astray its instinct of 
 
 \/ self-preservation. 
 
 I THE ERROR THAT SINNERS OUGHT TO BE 
 / GRADED ACCORDING TO BADNESS OF 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 This criterion favors the new, spread- 
 ing, and threatening types of wrong-doing 
 as contrasted with the old, stationary 
 types. Mark how its ratings fly in the face 
 of common sense. The highwayman, 
 with his alternative, " Your money or 
 your life ! " does less mischief than the 
 entrenched monopolist who offers the 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 27 
 
 public the option, " Your money or go 
 without ; " but he is, no doubt, a more 
 desperate character. The government clerk 
 who secretly markets advance crop in- 
 formation would hardly steal overcoats, 
 whereas the hall thief is equal to the 
 whole gamut of larceny. The life insur- 
 ance presidents who let one another have 
 the use of policy-holders' funds at a third of 
 the market rate may still be trusted not 
 to purloin spoons. The official who sells 
 a gold-brick concern the opportunity to 
 use the mails is an accomplice in whole- 
 sale robbery ; but for all that he has his 
 scruples against pocket-picking. 
 
 No poisoner would shrink from the 
 slow poisonings of the adulterator, where- 
 as the latter would probably draw the line 
 at administering a deadly drug to his un- 
 suspecting customer. Despite the essential 
 identity of their work, the ravisher is un- 
 doubtedly a more brutal type than the 
 procurer, and the cut-throat is coarser than 
 
28 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 the bandit who ditches a train in order to 
 rob it. The embezzler who guts a savings 
 bank, the corrupt labor-leader who wields 
 the strike as a blackmailer's club, is vir- 
 tually the assassin of scores of infants and 
 aged and invalid; yet he has sensibilities 
 that make him far less dangerous in most 
 situations than the housebreaker or the 
 sandbagger. Equally limited are the men 
 responsible for the needless extinction of 
 lives by the car stove, at the grade cross- 
 ing, before the fenderless trolley-car, on 
 the over-insured hulk, or in the treacher- 
 ous, unfireproofed apartment house. These 
 partial villains, with their piebald con- 
 sciences, lack the stigmata of the true crim- 
 inal type. In their crania Lombroso would 
 miss the marks of atavism. They are not 
 the prey of wicked impulses, not Nature's 
 criminals. Bone of our bone and flesh of 
 our flesh, they are in their wrong-doing 
 merely the creatures of Crooked Think- 
 ing and Opportunity. 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 29 
 
 The grading of sinners according to 1 
 badness of character goes on the assump- j 
 tion that the wickedest man is the most I ,^ 
 dangerous. This would be true if men-i 
 were abreast in their opportunities to doj 
 harm. In that case the blackest villain 
 would be the worst scourge of society. 
 But the fact is that_th e pate nt ruffian Js 
 confined to the socia l base raent, and en- 
 joys few opportunities. He can assault or 
 molest, to be sure ; but he cannot betray. 
 Nobody depends on him, so he^ cannot 
 c ommit b reach of trust, — that ajch, sin 
 of our time. He does not hold in his hand 
 the safety or welfare or money of the 
 public. He is the clinker, not the live 
 coal ; vermin, not beast of prey. To-day y , 
 the villain most in need of curbing is the/ / 
 respectable, exemplary, trusted personage "^ 
 who, strategically placed at the focus oft 
 a spider-web of fiduciary relations, is able 
 from his office-chair to pick a thousand 
 pockets, poison a thousand sick, pollute a \ 
 
30 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 thousand minds, or imperil a thousand 
 lives. It is the great-scale, high-voltage 
 sinner that needs the shackle. To strike 
 harder at the petty pickpocket than at the 
 prominent and unabashed person w^ho in 
 a large, impressive w^ay sells out his con- 
 stituents, his followers, his depositors, his 
 stockholders, his policy-holders, his sub- 
 scribers, or his customers, is to " strain at 
 a gnat and swallow a camel." 
 
 No paradox is it, but demonstrable 
 fact, that, in a highly articulate society, 
 the gravest harms are inflicted, not by 
 the worst men, but by those with virtues 
 enough to boost them into some coign of 
 vantage. The boss who sells out the town 
 and delivers the poor over to filth, disease, 
 and the powers that prey, owes his chance 
 to his engaging good-fellowship and big- 
 heartedness. Some of the most dazzling 
 careers of fraud have behind them long 
 and reassuring records of probity, which 
 have served to bait the trap of villainy. 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 31 
 
 Not that these decoy-virtues are counter- 
 feit. They are, in fact, so genuine that 
 often the stalwart sinner perseveres in the 
 virtue that has lifted him into the high 
 place he abuses. The legislator conscien- 
 tiously returns the boodle when he finds 
 he cannot " deliver the goods." The boss 
 stands by his friends to his own hurt. The 
 lobbying lawyer is faithful to his client. 
 The corrupting corporation-president is 
 loyal to his stockholders. The boughten 
 editor never quite overcomes his craft-in- 
 stinct to print " all the news there is." In a 
 word, the big and formidable sinners are 
 gray of soul, but not black, so that chastise- 
 ment according to their character rather 
 than according to their deeds lets them off/ 
 far too easily. 
 
 V 
 
32 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 THE ERROR THAT SINNERS SHOULD BE 
 GRADED ACCORDING TO THE HARM 
 THEY INFLICT UPON PARTICULAR IN- 
 DIVIDUALS 
 
 Primitive-minded people abhor the, 
 w^rong-doer, not from a sense of danger, 
 but out of sympathy w^ith his victim. This 
 is w^hy our mobs lynch for murder, assault, 
 rape, arson, wife-beating, kidnapping, and 
 grave-robbing, but pass over such imper- 
 sonal offenses as peculation, adulteration, 
 rebating, ballot-fraud, bribery, and grafit- 
 ; ( ing. The public, w^hile less ferocious than 
 1 1 the mob, is nearly as sentimental. It needs{ 
 1 a victim to harrow up its feelings. Villain}?^ 
 must be staged with blue lights and slow 
 music. The injury that is problematic, or 
 general, or that falls in undefined ways 
 upon unknown persons, is resented feebly, 
 or not at all. The fiend who should rack 
 his victim with torments such as typhoid 
 inflicts would be torn to pieces. The villain 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 33 
 
 who should taint his enemy's cup with ' 
 fever germs would stretch hemp. But — ■ 
 think of it! — the corrupt boss who, in 
 order to extort fat contracts for his firm, 
 holds up for a year the building of a filtra- 
 tion plant designed to deliver his city from 
 the typhoid scourge, and thereby dooms 
 twelve hundred of his townspeople to sink 
 to the tomb through the flaming abyss of 
 fever, comes off scatheless. 
 
 The popular symbol for the criminal is 
 a ravening wolf, but alas, few latter-day 
 crimes can be dramatized with a wolf and 
 a lamb as the cast ! Your up-to-date crim- 
 inal presses the button of a social mechan- 
 ism, and at the other end of the land or 
 the year innocent lives are snuffled out. 
 The immediate sacrifice of human beings 
 to the devil is extinct. But fifteenth-century 
 Marshal de Retz, with his bloody offerings 
 to Satan, has his modern counterpart in the 
 king whose insatiate greed, transmitted 
 noiselessly through administrative belting 
 
34 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 and shafting, lops off the right hands of 
 Congolese who fail to bring in their dues 
 of rubber; in the avaricious nobleman who, 
 rather than relinquish his lucrative timber 
 concession on the Yalu, pulled the wires 
 that strewed Manchuria with corpses. Yet, 
 thanks to the space that divides sinner from 
 sinned-against, planetary crimes such as 
 these excite far less horror than do the 
 atrocities of Jack the Ripper or black Sam 
 Hose. The public, being leaden of imagi- 
 nation, is moved only by the concrete. It 
 heeds the crass physical act, but overlooks 
 the subtile iniquities that pulse along those 
 viewless filaments of interrelation that bind 
 us together. At the present moment no- 
 thing would add so much to the security of 
 life in this country as stern dealing with the 
 patent-medicine dispensers, the quack doc- 
 tors, the adulterators, the jerry-builders, the 
 rookery landlords, and the carrying cor- 
 porations. These, however, escape, because 
 the community squanders the vials of its 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 35 
 
 wrath on the old-style, open-air sinner, who 
 has the nerve to look his victims in the face 
 as he strikes. 
 
 The childishness of the unguided public 
 appears very clearly from a certain modern 
 instance. What is it that is doing the most 
 to-day to excite wrath against the rich ? Is 
 it the clash of capital and labor, the insen- 
 sate luxury flaunted by the Emerged Tenth, 
 the uncovering of the muddy sources of cer- 
 tain great fortunes, the exposure of colossal 
 frauds by high " captains of industry," the 
 frequent identification of the " men who do 
 things " with the men who " do " people, 
 the revelation of the part played by " busi- 
 ness interests" in the debauching of our 
 local governments ? No, it is none of these. 
 It is the injuries pedestrians and other users 
 of the highway have suffered from a few 
 reckless drivers of the automobile ! 
 
 A dense population lives in peace by aid) 
 of a protecting social order. Those who rackV' 
 and rend this social order do worse than A' 
 
\J 
 
 36 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 T hurt particular individuals ; they wound 
 [_society itself. The men who steal elections, 
 who make merchandise of the law, who 
 make justice a mockery, who pervert good 
 custom, who foil the plain public intent, 
 who pollute the wells of knowledge, who 
 dim ideals for hire, — these are, in soher 
 truth, the chiefest sinners. They are cutting 
 the guy ropes that keep the big tent from 
 collapsing on our heads. They shouldbe the 
 first to feel the rod. To spare them because 
 such sins furnish no writhing victim to stir 
 our indignation is as if a ship's passengers 
 should lynch pilferers, but release mis- 
 creants caught boring with augers in the 
 vessel's bottom. 
 
 \ As society grows complex, it can be 
 ' harmed in more ways. Once there were no 
 I wrongs against the whole community save 
 I treason and sacrilege, and against these, 
 strong reaction habits early grew up in the 
 I public mind. Later, our frontier communi- 
 \ ties learned to react promptly with a rope 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 37 
 
 on the man who furnished whiskey to the 
 Indians, started a prairie fire, cut a levee, 
 spread smallpox, or turned revenue in- 
 former. Now, however, there are scores ( 
 of ways in which the common weal may ) 
 take hurt, and every year finds society morej 
 vulnerable. Each advance to higher organ- 
 ization runs us into a fresh zone of danger, 
 so there is more than ever need to be quick 
 to detect and foil the new public enemies 
 that present themselves. 
 
 THE VAIN IMAGINATION THAT THERE ARE, * ' 
 EXCELLENCES WHICH CONSTITUTE A 
 SUFFICIENT SET-OFF TO SIN 
 
 The proper grading of sinners is skewed 1 • 
 by taking into account their education, [/ 
 breeding, manners, piety, or philanthropy. P 
 The primitive tribal assembly takes an all- 
 round view of the culprit, and the sentence 
 it pronounces passes upon his walk and con- 
 versation as well as upon his guilt. The 
 court of justice, however, wisely throws out 
 
38 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 such considerations as irrelevant, and nar- 
 rows down to the question, " What punish- 
 ment does this deed deserve ? " In no other 
 way can men be made to stand on a level 
 before the law. Now, long ago we attained 
 in theory the equality of all men before 
 God, and the equality of all men before the 
 P^' law ; but the equality of all men before the 
 bar of public opinion is still to be achieved. 
 No judge would dare show himself such a 
 respecter of persons as is the public. How 
 often clean linen and church-going are ac- 
 cepted as substitutes for right-doing ! What 
 a deodorizer is polite society ! Who smells 
 the buzzard under his stolen peacock 
 plumes ! Any one can sense turpitude in the 
 dingy " hobo," but a well-groomed Cap- 
 tain Kidd, of correct habits, with a family 
 " reared in the lap of luxury " as a back- 
 ground, is well-nigh irresistible. 
 
 There are other ways in which sinners 
 profit by the delusion that the cardinal 
 thing in men is something else than good 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 39 
 
 faith. The heads of religious, philan- 
 thropic, and educational work have influ- 
 ence, and hence the adept of the Higher 
 Thimblerig seeks by gifts to the cause and 
 by a feigned interest to gain their valuable 
 favor and thus compound with society for 
 his offense. Too often, in their zeal for 
 the special social good committed to their 
 charge, they rashly sacrifice the greater 
 good, and ply the whitewash brush on pub- 
 lic enemies. Nothing can check this creep- 
 ing paralysis of the higher nerve-centres 
 of society but the heartfelt conviction 
 that no fillip to religion, philanthropy, or 
 education can atone for tampering with 
 the underpinning of social order. What, in 
 sooth, are professors, preachers, charity- 
 workers, and organizers of philanthropy 
 but betrayers, if, wrapped up in their im- 
 mediate aims, they condone the social 
 transgressions of -their patrons ? Fair play 
 and trustful cooperation, bedded on truth 
 and honesty, are the very foundations of 
 
 I I I I I Ik 
 
40 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 social existence, without which the higher 
 life could not endure ; and no college, 
 church, hospital, or social settlement can 
 avail to counterpoise crime that weakens 
 these foundations. 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter is 
 this : — 
 
 Our social organization has developed to 
 a stage where the old righteousness is not 
 enough. We need an annual supplement to 
 the Decalogue. The growth of credit in- 
 stitutions, the spread of fiduciary relations, 
 the enmeshing of industry in law, the in- 
 terlacing of government and business, the 
 multiplication of boards and inspectors, — 
 beneficent as they all are, they invite to sin. 
 What gateways they open to greed ! What 
 fresh parasites they let in on us ! How idle 
 in our new situation to intone the old 
 litanies ! The reality of this close-knit life 
 is not to be seen and touched ; it must be 
 thought. The sins it opens the door to are to 
 
GRADING OF SINNERS 41 
 
 be discerned by knitting the brows rather 
 than by opening the eyes. It takes imagi- 
 nation to see that bogus medical diploma, 
 lying advertisement, and fake testimonial 
 are death-dealing instruments. It takes im- 
 agination to see that savings-bank vs^recker, 
 loan shark, and investment swindler, in 
 taking livelihoods take lives. It takes 
 imagination to see that the business of 
 debauching voters, fixing juries, seducing 
 law-makers, and corrupting public ser- 
 vants is like sawing through the props of a 
 crowded grand-stand. Whether we like 
 it or not, we are in the organic phase, and 
 the thickening perils that beset our path 
 can be beheld only by the mind's eye. 
 
 The problem of security is therefore 
 being silently transformed. Blind, instinc- 
 tive reactions are no longer to be trusted. 
 Social defense is coming to be a matter for 
 the expert. The rearing of dikes against ) 
 faithlessness and fraud calls for intelligent A 
 social engineering. If in this strait the pub- 
 
\1 
 
 42 GRADING OF SINNERS 
 
 lie does not speedily become far shrewder in 
 the grading and grilling of sinners, there is 
 nothing for it but to turn over the defense 
 of society to professionals. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 The Edda has it that during Thor's visit 
 to the giants he is challenged to lift a cer- 
 tain gray cat. " Our young men think it 
 nothing but play." Thor puts forth his 
 whole strength, but can at most bend the 
 creature's back and lift one foot. On leav- 
 ing, however, the mortified hero is told 
 the secret of his failure. " The cat — ah ! 
 we were terror-stricken when we saw one 
 paw off the floor; for that is the Midgard 
 serpent which, tail in mouth, girds and 
 keeps up the created world." 
 
 How often to-day the prosecutor who 
 tries to lay by the heels some notorious 
 public enemy is baffled by a mysterious re- 
 sistance ! The thews of Justice become as 
 water; her sword turns to lath. Though 
 the machinery of the law is strained askew, 
 the evil-doer remains erect, smiling, un- 
 scathed. At the end, the mortified cham- 
 
46 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 pion of the law may be given to understand 
 that, like Thor, he was contending with 
 the established order; that he had unwit- 
 tingly laid hold on a pillar of society, and 
 was therefore pitting himself against the 
 reigning organization in local finance and 
 politics. 
 
 The real weakness in the moral position 
 of Americans is not their attitude toward 
 the plain criminal, but their attitude to- 
 ward the quasi-criminal. The shocking 
 leniency of the public in judging conspic- 
 uous persons who have thriven by anti- 
 social practices is not due, as many imagine, 
 to sycophancy. Let a prominent man 
 commit some offense in bad odor and the 
 multitude flings its stones with a right 
 good will. The social lynching of the self- 
 made magnate who put away his faded, 
 toil-worn wife for the sake of a soubrette, 
 proves that the props of the old morality 
 have not rotted through. Sex righteousness 
 continues to be thus stiffly upheld simply 
 
• THE CRIMINALOID 47 
 
 because man has not been inventing new 
 ways of wronging woman. So long ago 
 were sex sins recognized and branded that 
 the public, feeling sure of itself, lays on 
 with promptness and emphasis. The slow- 
 ness of this same public in lashing other 
 kinds of transgression betrays, not syco- 
 phancy or unthinking admiration of success, 
 but perplexity. The prosperous evil-doers 
 that bask undisturbed in popular favor have 
 been careful to shun — or seem to shun — 
 the familiar types of wickedness. Over- 
 looked in Bible and Prayer-book, their 
 obliquities lack the brimstone smell. Sur- 
 pass as their misdeeds may in meanness and 
 cruelty, there has not yet been time enough 
 to store up strong emotion about them; and 
 so the sight of them does not let loose the 
 flood of wrath and abhorrence that rushes 
 down upon the long-attainted sins. 
 
 The immunity enjoyed by the perpe-/\ 
 trator of new sins has brought into being 
 a class for which we may coin the term 
 
J 
 
 48 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 criminaloid? By this we designate such as 
 prosper by flagitious practices which^have 
 not yet come under the efl^ective ban of 
 
 ApubUc opinion. Often, indeed, they are 
 guilty in the ey es of the law; but since they 
 are not .culpable Jjl the eyes^of lhe_puhlic 
 and in their own eyes, their spiritual atti- 
 tude is not that of the criminal. The law- 
 maker may make their misdeeds crimes, 
 but, so long as morality stands stock-still in 
 the old tracks, they escape both punish- 
 ment and ignominy. Unlike their low- 
 browed cousins, they occupy the cabin 
 rather than the steerage of society. Relent- 
 less pursuit hems in the criminals, narrows 
 their range of success, denies them in- 
 fluence. The criminaloids, on the other 
 hand, encounter but feeble opposition, and, 
 since their practices are often more lucra- 
 tive than the authentic crimes, they dis- 
 tance their more scrupulous rivals in 
 
 ' Like asteroid, crystalloid, anthropoid, etc. " Criminaloid " 
 is Latin- Greek, to be sure, but so is " sociology." 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 49 
 
 business and politics and reap an uncom- 
 mon worldly prosperity. 
 
 Of greater moment is the fact that the) 
 criminaloids lower the tone of the commu- [ 
 nity. The criminal slinks in the shadow, V 
 menacing our purses but not our ideals; , 
 the criminaloid, however, does not belong J 
 to the half world. Fortified by his con- 
 nections with "legitimate business," "the 
 regular party organization," perhaps with 
 orthodoxy and the l>on ton, he may even be- 
 stride his community like a Colossus. In 
 his sight and in their own sight the old-style, 
 square-dealing sort are as grasshoppers. 
 Do we not hail him as "a man who does 
 ~things7' make him director of our banks and 
 railroads, trustee of our hospitals and libra- 
 ries ? When Prince Henry visits us, do we 
 not put him on the reception committee? 
 He has far more initial weight in the com- 
 munity than has the clergyman, editor, or 
 prosecutor who arraigns him. From his ex- 
 ample and his excuses spreads an influence 
 
50 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 that tarnishes the ideals of ingenuous youth 
 on the threshold of active life. To put the 
 soul of this pagan through a Bertillon 
 system and set forth its marks of easy iden- 
 tification is, therefore, a sanitary measure 
 demanded in the interest of public health. 
 
 THE KEY TO THE CRIMINALOID IS NOT 
 EVIL IMPULSE BUT MORAL INSENSIBILITY 
 
 The director who speculates in the se- 
 curities of his corporation, the banker 
 w^ho lends his depositors' money to himself 
 under divers corporate aliases, the railroad 
 official w^ho grants a secret rebate for his 
 private graft, the builder v^^ho hires vv^alk- 
 ing delegates to harass his rivals w^ith cause- 
 less strikes, the labor leader v^ho instigates 
 a strike in order to be paid for calling it 
 off, the publisher who bribes his text-books 
 into the schools, these reveal in their faces 
 nothing of wolf or vulture. Nature has not 
 foredoomed them to evil by a double dose 
 of lust, cruelty, malice, greed, or jealousy. 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 51 
 
 They are not degenerates tormented by | 
 monstrous cravings. They want nothing J 
 more than we all want, — money, power, v 
 consideration, — in a word, success; but 
 they are in a hurry and they are not par- 
 ticular as to the means. 
 
 The crim inaloid prefers to _preyon the' 
 anon ymous public . He is touchy abouT 
 the individual victim, and, if faced down, 
 will even make him reparation out of the 
 plunder gathered at longer range. Too 
 squeamish and too prudent to practice 
 treachery, brutality, and violence himself, 
 he takes care to wor k through middlemen . 
 Conscious of the antipodal difference be- 
 tween doing wrong and getting it done, he 
 places out his dirty work. With a string 
 of intermediaries between himself and the 
 toughs who slug voters at the polls, or the 
 gang of navvies who break other navvies' 
 heads with shovels on behalf of his electric 
 line, he is able to keep his hands sweet and 
 his boots clean. Thus he becomes a con- 
 
52 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 sumer of custom-made crime, a client of 
 criminals, oftener a maker of criminals by 
 persuading or requiring his subordinates 
 to break law. Of course he must have 
 " responsible " agents as valves to check the 
 return flow of guilt from such proceed- 
 ings. He shows them the goal, provides 
 the money, insists on " results," but vehe- 
 mently declines to know the foul methods 
 by which alone his understrappers can get 
 these "results." Not to bribe, but to em- 
 ploy and finance the briber ; not to lie, but 
 to admit to your editorial columns " pay- 
 ing matter ; " not to commit perjury, but 
 to hire men to homestead and make over 
 to you claims they have sworn were en- 
 tered in good faith and without collusion ; 
 not to cheat, but to promise a " rake-off" 
 to a mysterious go-between in case your 
 just assessment is cut down; not to rob on 
 the highway, but to make the carrier pay 
 you a rebate on your rival's shipments; not 
 to shed innocent blood, but to bribe in- 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 53 
 
 spectors to overlook your neglect to install 
 safety appliances : such are the ways of the 
 criminaloid. He is a buyer rather than a| 
 practitioner of sin, and his middlemen sparei 
 him unpleasant details. --' 
 
 Secure in his quilted armor of lawyer- 
 spun sophistries, the criminaloid promul- 
 gates an ethics which the public hails as 
 a disinterested contribution to the philo- 
 sophy of conduct. He invokes a pseudo- 
 Darwinism to sanction the revival of 
 outlawed and by-gone tactics of struggle. 
 Ideals of fellowship and peace are " unsci- 
 entific." To win the game with the aid of 
 a sleeveful of aces proves one's fitness to sur- 
 vive. A sack of spoil is Nature's patent of 
 nobility. A fortune is a personal attribute, 
 as truly creditable as a straight back or a 
 symmetrical face. Poverty, like the mis- 
 shapen ear of the degenerate, proves infe- 
 riority. The wholesale fleecer of trusting, 
 workaday people is a " Napoleon," a " su- 
 perman." Labor defending its daily bread 
 
54 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 must, of course, obey the law ; but " busi- 
 ness," especially the " big proposition," may- 
 free itself of such trammels in the name 
 of a "higher law." The censurers of the 
 criminaloid are " pin-headed disturbers " 
 who would imitate him if they had the 
 chance or the brains. 
 
 THE CRIMINALOID IS NOT ANTI-SOCIAL 
 BY NATURE 
 
 Nation-wide is the zone of devastation 
 of the adulterator, the rebater, the commer- 
 cial free-booter, the fraud promoter, the 
 humbug healer, the law-defying monopo- 
 list. State-wide is the burnt district of the 
 corrupt legislator, the corporation-owned 
 judge, the venal inspector, the bought bank 
 examiner, the mercenary editor. But draw 
 near the sinner and he whitens. If his fel- 
 low men are wronged clear to his doorstep 
 he is criminal, not criminaloid. For the 
 latter loses his sinister look, even takes on a 
 benign aspect, as you come close. Within 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 55 
 
 his home town, his ward, his circle, he is 
 perhaps a good man, if judged by the sim- 
 ple old-time tests. Very likely he keeps his 
 marriage vows, pays his debts, " mixes " 
 well, stands by his friends, and has a con- 
 tracted kind of public spirit. He is ready 
 enough to rescue imperiled babies, protect 
 maidens, or help poor widows. He is un- 
 evenly moral : oak in the family and clan 
 virtues, but basswood in commercial and 
 civic ethics. In some relations he is more 
 sympathetic and generous than his critics ; 
 and he resents with genuine feeling the 
 scorn of men who happen to have special- 
 ized in other virtues than those that appeal 
 to him. Perhaps his point of honor is to 
 give bribes but not to take them ; perhaps 
 it is to " stay bought" or not to sell out to 
 both sides at once. 
 
 The type is exemplified by the St. Louis 
 boodler, who, after accepting $25,000 to 
 vote against a certain franchise, was offered 
 a larger sum to vote for it. He did so, but 
 
7 
 
 56 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 returned the first bribe. He was asked on 
 the witness-stand why he had returned it. 
 " Because it was n't mine ! " he exclaimed, 
 flushing with anger. " I had n't earned it." 
 
 Seeing that the conventional sins are 
 mostly close-range inflictions, whereas the 
 long-range sins, being recent in type, have 
 not yet been branded, the criminaloid 
 receives from his community the credit 
 of the close-in good he does, but not the 
 shame of the remote evil he works. 
 
 Sometimes it is time instead of space that 
 divides him from his victims. It is to- 
 morrow's morrow that will sufl?er from the 
 patent soothing-syrup, the factory toil of 
 infants, the grabbing of public lands, the 
 butchery of forests, and the smuggling in 
 of coolies. In such a case the short-sighted 
 many exonerate him ; only the far-sighted 
 few mark him for what he is. Or itjnay 
 be a social interval that leaves him.his illu- 
 sion of innocence. Like Robin Hood, the 
 criminaloid spares his own sort and finds 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 57 
 
 his quarry on another social plane. The 
 labor grafter, the political " striker," and 
 the blackmailing society editor prey up- 
 ward ; the franchise grabber, the fiduciary 
 thief, and the frenzied financier prey down- 
 ward. In either case the sinner moves in 
 an atmosphere of friendly approval and can 
 still any smart of conscience with the balm 
 of good fellowship and adulation. 
 ^- It is above all the political criminaloid,// 
 who is sociah We are assured that the 
 king of the St. Louis boodlers is " a good 
 fellow, — by nature, at first, then by pro-- 
 fession." " Everywhere big Ed went, there 
 went a smile also and encouragement for 
 your weakness, no matter what it was." 
 The head of the Minneapolis ring was " a 
 good fellow — a genial, generous repro- 
 bate," " the best-loved man in the com- 
 munity," "especially good to the poor." 
 " Stars-and-Stripes Sam " was the nickname 
 of a notorious looter of Philadelphia, who 
 amassed influence by making " a practice 
 
58 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 of going to lodges, associations, brother- 
 hoods, Sunday-schools, and all sort of pub- 
 lic and private meetings, joining some, but 
 making at all speeches patriotic and sen- 
 timental." The corrupt boss of another 
 plundered city is reported to be " a charm- 
 ing character," possessing " goodness of 
 heart and personal charm," and loved for 
 his " genial, hearty kindness." He shrank 
 from robbing anybody; he was equal, how- 
 ever, to robbing everybody. Of this type 
 was Tweed, who had a "good heart," do- 
 nated $50,000 to the poor of New York, 
 and was sincerely loved by his clan. 
 
 It is now clear why hot controversy 
 rages about the unmasked criminaloid. His 
 home town, political clan, or social class 
 insists that he is a good man maligned, 
 that his detractors are purblind or jealous. 
 The criminaloid is really a borderer be- 
 tween the camps of good and evil, and this 
 is why he is so interesting. To run him to 
 earth and brand him, as long ago pirate and 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 59 
 
 traitor were branded, is the crying need 
 of our time. For this Anak among male- 
 factors, working unchecked in the rich 
 field of sinister opportunities opened up by 
 latter-day conditions, is society's most dan- 
 gerous foe, more redoubtable by far than 
 the plain criminal, because he sports the 
 livery of virtue and operates on a Titanic 
 scale. Every year that sees him pursue in 
 insolent triumph his nefarious career raises 
 up a host of imitators and hurries society 
 tovrard moral bankruptcy. 
 
 THE CRIMINALOID PRACTICES A PRO- I 
 TECTIVE MIMICRY OF THE GOOD 
 
 Because so many good men are pious, 
 the criminaloid covets a high seat in the 
 synagogue as a valuable private asset. Ac- 
 cordingly he is often to be found in the 
 assemblies of the faithful, zealously exhort- 
 ing and bearing witness. Onward thought 
 he must leave to honest men ; his line is 
 strict orthodoxy. The upright may fall 
 
6o THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 slack in devout observances, but he cannot 
 afford to neglect his church connectionT 
 He needs it in Jiis business. Such simula- 
 tion is easier because the godly are slow to 
 drive out the open-handed sinner w^ho es- 
 chew^s the conventional sins. Many depre- 
 cate prying into the methods of any brother 
 " having money or goods ostensibly his own 
 or under a title not disapproved by the 
 proper tribunals." They have, indeed, much 
 w^arrant for insisting that the saving of souls 
 rather than the salvation of society is the 
 true mission of the church. 
 
 The old Hebrew^ prophets, to be sure, 
 were intensely alive to the anti-social aspect 
 of sin. They clamor against " making the 
 ephah small and the shekel great," falsify- 
 ing the balances, " treading upon the poor." 
 "Sensational," almost "demagogic," is 
 their outcry against those who " turn aside 
 the stranger in his right," " take a bribe," 
 "judge not the cause of the fatherless," 
 " oppress the hireling in his wages," " take 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 6i 
 
 increase," "withhold the pledge," " turn 
 aside the poor in the gate from their right," 
 " take away the righteousness of the right- 
 eous from him." No doubt, their stubborn 
 insistence that God wants " mercy and not 
 sacrifice," despises feast days, delights not 
 in burnt offerings, will not hear the melody 
 of viols, but desires judgment to " run down 
 as waters, and righteousness as a mighty 
 stream," struck their contemporaries as ex- 
 treme. Over against their antiquated out- 
 look may be set the "larger view " that our 
 concern should be for the sinner rather than 
 the sinned-against. He is in peril of hell 
 fire, whereas the latter risks nothing more 
 serious than loss, misery, and death. After 
 all, sin's overshadowing effect is the pol- 
 lution of the sinner's soul ; and so it may 
 be more Christian not to scourge forth the 
 traffickers from the Temple, but to leave 
 them undisturbed where good seed may 
 perchance fall upon their flinty souls. -. 
 
 Likewise the criminaloid counterfeits 
 
62 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 the good citizen. He takes care to meet 
 all the conventional tests, — flag worship, 
 old-soldier sentiment, observance of all 
 the national holidays, perfervid patriotism, 
 party regularity and support. Full w^ell he 
 knows that the giving of a fountain or a 
 park, the establishing of a college chair on 
 the Neolithic drama or the elegiac poetry 
 of the Chaldeans, will more than outweigh 
 the dodging of taxes, the grabbingof streets, 
 and the corrupting of city councils. Let 
 him have his way about charters and fran- 
 chises, and he zealously supports that "good 
 government " which consists in sweeping 
 the streets, holding down the " lid," and 
 keeping taxes low. Nor will he fail in that 
 scrupulous correctness of private and do- 
 mestic life which confers respectability. 
 In politics, to be sure, it is often necessary 
 to play the " good fellow ; " but in business 
 and finance a studious conformity to the 
 convenances is of the highest importance. 
 The criminaloid must perforce seem sober 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 63 
 
 and chaste, "a good husband and a kind fa- 
 ther." If in this respect he offend, his hour 
 of need will find him without support, and 
 some callow reporter or district attorney 
 will bowl him over like any vulgar criminal. 
 The criminaloid therefore puts on the 
 whole armor of the good. He stands hav- 
 ing his loins girt about with religiosity and 
 having on the breastplate of respectability. 
 His feet are shod with ostentatious phil- 
 anthropy, his head is encased in the helmet 
 of spread-eagle patriotism. Holding in his 
 left hand the buckler of worldly success 
 and in his right the sword of " influence," 
 he is "able to withstand in the evil day, 
 and having done all, to stand." 
 
 THE CRIMINALOID PLAYS THE SUPPORT 
 OF HIS LOCAL OR SPECIAL GROUP) 
 AGAINST, THE LARGER SOCIETY I 
 
 The plain criminal can do himself no 
 good by appealing to his " Mollies," " Lar- 
 rikins," or "Mafiosi," for they have no 
 
64 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 social standing. The criminaloid, however, 
 identifies himself with some legitimate 
 group, and when arraigned he calls upon 
 his group to protect its own'. The poli- 
 tically influential Western land thieves stir 
 up the slurnbering local feeling against the 
 "impertinent meddlers" of the forestry 
 service and the land office. Safe behind 
 the judicial dictum that " bribery is merely 
 a conventional crime," the boodlers de- 
 nounce their indicter as "blackening the 
 fair fame " of his state, and cry " Stand up 
 for the grand old commonwealth of Ne- 
 maha ! " The city boss harps artfully on 
 the chord of local spirit and summons his 
 bailiwick to rebuke the up-state reformers 
 who would unhorse him. The law-break- 
 ing saloon-keeper rallies merchants with 
 the cry that enforcement of the liquor laws 
 " hurts business." The labor grafter repre- 
 sents his exposure as a capitalist plot and 
 calls upon all Truss Riveters to " stand pat " 
 and "vindicate" him with a reelection. 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 65 
 
 When a pious buccaneer is brought to bay, 
 the Reverend Simon Magus thus sounds 
 the denominational bugle : *' Brother Ba- 
 rabbas is a loyal Newliglk and a gener- 
 ous supporter of the Newlight Church. 
 This vicious attack upon him is therefore 
 a covert thrust at the Newlight body and 
 ought to be resented by all the brethren." 
 High finance, springing to the help of self- 
 confessed thieves, meets an avenging pub- 
 lic in this wise : " The Integrity Trust not 
 only seeks vs^ith diabolical skill a reputation 
 to blast, but, once blasted, it sinks into it 
 wolfish fangs and gloats over the result of 
 its fiendish act;" and adds, "This is not 
 the true American spirit." 
 
 Here twangs the ultimate chord ! For 
 in criminaloid philosophy it is " un-Amer- 
 ican" to wrench patronage from the hands 
 of spoilsmen, " un-American " to deal Fed- 
 eral justice to rascals of state eminence, 
 "un-American" to pry into "private ar- 
 rangements " between shipper and carrier. 
 
66 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 " un-American " to fry the truth out of re- 
 luctant magnates, 
 ., The claims of the wider community 
 I have no foe so formidable as the sacred 
 ' criminaloid. He is the champion of the 
 tribal order as against the civil order. By 
 constantly stirring up on his own behalf 
 some sort of clannishness — local, sec- 
 tional, partisan, sectarian, or professional 
 clannishness — he rekindles dying jealous- 
 ies and checks the rise of the civic spirit. 
 It is in line with this clannishness that he 
 wants citizens to act together on a personal 
 I basis. ^He does not know what it is to 
 ' rally around a principle. Fellow partisans 
 are " friends." To scratch or to bolt is to 
 " go back on your friends." The criminal- 
 oid understands sympathy and antipathy 
 as springs of conduct, but justice strikes 
 him as hardly human. The law is a club to 
 rescue your friends from and to smite your 
 enemies with, but it has no claim of its own. 
 He expects his victims to " come back " 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 67 
 
 at him if they can, but he cannot see why 
 everything may not be " arranged," " set- 
 tled out of court." Those inflexible prose- 
 cutors who hew to the line and cannot be 
 "squared" impress him as fanatical and 
 unearthly, as monsters who find their plea- 
 sure in making trouble for others. For to 
 his barbarian eyes society is all a matter 
 of " stand in." 
 
 So long as the public conscience is tor- 
 pid, the criminaloid has no sense of turpi- 
 tude. In the dusk and the silence the magic 
 of clan opinion converts his misdeeds into 
 something rich and strange. For the clan 
 lexicon tells him that a bribe is a " retain- 
 ing fee," a railroad pass is a " courtesy," 
 probing is " scandal-mongering," the in- 
 vestigator is an "officious busybody," a 
 protest is a "howl," critics are "foul har- 
 pies of slander," public opinion is " unrea- 
 soning clamor," regulation is " meddling," 
 any inconvenient law is a " blue " law. As 
 rebate-giver he is sustained by the assurance 
 
68 THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 that " in Rome you must do as the Romans 
 do." As disburser of corruption funds he 
 learns that he is but " asserting the higher 
 law which great enterprises have the right 
 to command." Blessed phrases these! 
 What a lint for dressing wounds to self- 
 respect ! Often the reminiscent criminal- 
 oid, upon comparing his misdeeds with 
 what his clansmen stood ready to justify 
 him in doing, is fain to exclaim with Lord 
 Clive, " By God, sir, at this moment I stand 
 amazed at my own moderation ! " When 
 the revealing flash comes and the storm 
 breaks, his difficulty in getting the public's 
 point of view is really pathetic. Indeed, 
 he may persist to the end in regarding him- 
 self as a martyr to "politics," or "yellow 
 journalism," or the " unctuous rectitude " 
 of personal foes, or " class envy " in the 
 guise of a moral wave. 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 69 
 
 THE CRIMINALOID FLOURISHES UNTIL i 
 THE GROWTH OF MORALITY OVER- 
 TAKES THE GROWTH OF OPPORTUNITY 
 TO PREY _ 
 
 It is of little use to bring law abreast of 
 the time if morality lags. In a swiftly 
 changing society the law inevitably tarries 
 behind need, but public opinion tarries be- 
 hind need even more. Where, as with us, 
 the statute has little force of its own, the 
 backwardness of public opinion nullifies 
 the work of the legislator. Every added 
 relation among men makes new chances 
 for the sons of Belial. Wider interdepend- 
 encies breed new treacheries. Fresh op- 
 portunities for illicit gain are continually 
 appearing, and these are eagerly seized by 
 the unscrupulous. The years between the 
 advent of these new sins and the general 
 recognition of their heinousness are few or 
 many according to the alertness of the 
 social mind. By the time they have been 
 
JO THE CRIMINALOID 
 
 branded, the onward movement of society 
 has created a fresh lot of opportunities, 
 which are, in their turn, exploited with 
 impunity. It is in this gap that the crim- 
 inaloid disports himself. The narrowing 
 of this gap depends chiefly on the faithful- 
 ness of the vedettes that guard the march of 
 humanity. If the editor, writer, educator, 
 clergyman, or public man is zealous to 
 reconnoitre and instant to cry aloud the 
 dangers that present tljemselves in our 
 tumultuous social a4vance, a regulative 
 opinion quickly forms and the new sins 
 soon become odious. 
 
 Now, it is the concern of the criminal- 
 oids to delay this growth of conscience 
 by silencing the alert vedettes. To intimi- 
 date the moulders of opinion so as to con- 
 fine the editor to the "news," the preacher 
 to the "simple Gospel," the public man to 
 the " party issues," the judge to his prece- 
 dents, the teacher to his text-books, and 
 the writer to the classic themes — such are 
 
THE CRIMINALOID 71 
 
 the tactics of the criminaloids. Let them 
 but have their way, and the prophet's mes- 
 sage, the sage's lesson, the scholar's quest, 
 and the poet's dream would be sacrificed to 
 the God of Things as They Were. 
 
IV 
 THE GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
THE GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 The American people finds itself to-day 
 in the position of a man with dulled knife 
 and broken cudgel in the midst of an 
 ever-growing circle of wolves. The old 
 regulative system is falling to pieces. Few 
 of the strong and ambitious have any longer 
 the fear of God before their eyes. Hell is 
 looked upon as a bogy for children. The 
 Gospel ideals are thought unscientific. As 
 for the courts, they seem to have nothing 
 but blank cartridges for the bigger beasts 
 of prey. Upon the practicers of new sins ' 
 there is no longer a curb unless it be publicj 
 censure. So the question of the hour is. 
 Can there be fashioned out of popular senti- /) 
 ment some sort of buckler for society ? Can 
 our loathing 6f rascals be wrought up into 
 a kind of unembodied government, able to 
 restrain the men that derisively snap their 
 fingers at the agents of the law ? 
 
76 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 That the public scorn really bites into 
 wrong-doers of the modern type may be 
 read in the fate of the insurance gang. 
 If, as some assert, American society were 
 already split into classes, each with its 
 standards and its opinions, these robbers 
 would have taken asylum with their own 
 class, and from the thick of their " crowd" 
 would have waved a gay and mocking 
 hand at the wrathful public. Haughty Ro- 
 man patricians, Spanish hidalgos, French 
 seigneurs, or British noblemen would have 
 done so, heeding the curses of the com- 
 monalty no more than the chattering of 
 daws. But the insurance thieves were 
 self-made Americans, country-bred, genial, 
 sensitive, uncarapaced by pride of caste. 
 Their sense of superiority was, after all, 
 a short and feeble stalk that soon wilted. 
 They did care what people thought of 
 them, and so to the grave or to exile they 
 fled from the vitriol spray of censure. If 
 only we can bring it to bear, the respect 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 'j-j 
 
 or scorn of the many is still an immense 
 asset of society in its struggle with sin- 
 ners. 
 
 The community need feel no qualm 
 when lashing the sinner. We are bidden 
 to forgive our enemies, but not the ene- 
 mies of our society, our posterity. For 
 society to "resist not evil" would be folly, 
 because for most of us society's attitude 
 fixes the guiding ideas of right and wrong. 
 Any outrage we can practice with im- 
 punity comes finally to be looked upon as 
 a matter of course. To the aggressor the 
 non-resisting community practically says, 
 " Trample me, please. Thanks ! " Thus it 
 becomes a partner in his misdeeds. The 
 public that turns the other cheek tempts 
 a man to fresh sinning. It makes itself an 
 accomplice in the undoing of a soul. It is 
 the indulgent parent spoiling the child, 
 f It is therefore our sacred duty, not lazily j 
 ; to condone, but vigorously to pursue and 
 'castigate the sinner. It is sad but true ; 
 
78 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 that the community is prompter to correct 
 the wife-beater than the rebater or the 
 dummy director. Such indifference to the 
 soul's health of eminent citizens is deplor- 
 able. 
 
 There is fair hope that out of public 
 opinion a means of rational defense may 
 be developed, provided only w^e renounce 
 certain false notions which now hinder 
 the proper grilling of sinners. 
 
 THE FALLACY THAT SINNERS SHOULD BE 
 CHASTISED ONLY BY THEIR BETTERS 
 
 Sometimes the hounded sinner reminds 
 us through his spokesman that " He moves 
 in a higher world into which we may 
 not enter." Oftener he counters by saying, 
 — if his sinning is very lucrative it will be 
 said for him, — " In my place, you, too, 
 would have bribed the inspector, or doc- 
 tored the goods, or exacted the rebate." 
 " He that is without sin among you, let 
 him first cast a stone." In this vein an 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 79 
 
 apologist sneers, "Those who are chat- 
 tering about predatory wealth would not 
 refuse to take over corporation stock even 
 
 in the R properties." The truth is, 
 
 however, the censor need not take the at- 
 titude of " I am holier than thou." What 
 if the critics are no better than they should 
 be? Sinners are scourged, not to pro- 
 claim their moral inferiority, but to brace 
 people to resist temptation. May not a 
 weak man, untempted, prop a stronger 
 man who is under temptation ? Oppor- 
 tunity puts one's baser self in the saddle ; 
 whereas the comment of the disinterested 
 spectator utters his better self. If the baser 
 self of the tempted man could not profit 
 by the rebuke of a public made up of men 
 no better than he is, many of us would 
 fall into the ditch. 
 
 Slow, indeed, would be moral uplift, if 
 the public allowed itself to be silenced by 
 the tu quoque of the malefactor. Of course 
 it would be inspiring to be charmed on 
 
8o GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 from height to height by the voices of seers 
 and the example of heroes. But Isaiahs 
 and Savonarolas are rare ; and certain prac- 
 tices must be outlawed at once if we are 
 not to rot down together. Inmeetingnew 
 forms of sin, we have nothing to rely on 
 but the common conscience ; that is, the 
 deliverance of the best selves of most of us. 
 It is the neutrals, not the belligerents, that 
 humanize warfare. It is the onlookers, not 
 the champions, that uphold the rules of 
 the ring. Not because they are better men, 
 but because they are in a less trying posi- 
 tion. So it will be not the quickened con- 
 sciences of the principals, but the hisses 
 of the crowd on the bleachers, that will 
 protect shipper from railroad, lift the 
 plane of business competition, restrain 
 the oppression of workingmen, and stop 
 the feeding of human seed-corn to swine. 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 8i 
 
 THE ERROR THAT SOCIETY S CASTIGATION 
 OF THE SINNER IS MERELY THE ASSER- 
 TION OF THE SELF-INTEREST OF THE 
 
 MANY 
 
 Back Bay stockholders are assured that 
 Iowa's maximum rate law is a shameless 
 cheapening of railroad services by the 
 banded customers of the road, and ought 
 to be defied. Gas magnates snap their fingers 
 at municipal regulations on the pretext that 
 such ordinances express only the self-inter- 
 est of gas consumers-^Employers flout fac- 
 tory laws on the ground that the legislature 
 stood in awe of " the labor vote." In some 
 circles the feeling is growing up that obedi- 
 ence is the part of a dastard. The money- 
 maker begins to insist that the inconvenient 
 law embodies nothing but the will of the 
 stronger or bigger class bent on oppressing 
 the weaker or fewer, and claims the right 
 to break such a law if he can. Now, this 
 is moral gangrene, so deadly that no one 
 
82 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 with the infection ought to have place or 
 influence in society. 
 
 The truth is, law is shot through and 
 , through with conscience. The uprising 
 against rebating, or monopoly, or fiduciary 
 sin, registers, not the self-interest of the 
 many, but the general sense of right. To 
 be sure, an agitation against company stores, 
 or the two-faced practices of directors, may 
 start as the "We won't stand it" of a vic- 
 timized class; but when it solicits general 
 support it takes the form " These things 
 are wrong," and it can triumph only when 
 it chimes with the common conscience. 
 In the case of child labor, night work for 
 women, crimping and peonage, the oppo- 
 sition springs up among onlookers rather 
 than among victims, and is chivalric from 
 the beginning. The fact is, the driving 
 force of the great sunward movement now 
 on is moral indignation. Not one of the 
 attempts to shackle the newer stripe of 
 depredators lends itself to interpretation in 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 83 
 
 terms of self-interest. In every instance the 
 slogan has been, not " Protect yourselves," 
 but " Put down iniquity ! " 
 
 The special-interest man ignores the 
 moral energy that inspires the uprising 
 against latter-day sin. He scoffs at a law 
 on the ground that it was enacted by a 
 bare majority of " hayseed " legislators, 
 ignorant of legal philosophy and the fitness 
 of things. He does not care to notice that 
 this close vote records an overwhelming 
 public sentiment, the outcome of a long, 
 disinterested agitation. Or he complains 
 that the statute is " precipitate," and pleads 
 for "conservatism." 
 
 " Conservatism ! " piled on top of inertia 
 and the strangle-hold of sinister interests, 
 in a tumultuously changing society, where 
 an evil condition may be rapidly worsen- 
 ing while we speechify and procrastinate ! 
 Here is a growing evil, — so much blood 
 of brakemen on cars and rails. Give heed, 
 ye legislators ! No impression. The legis- 
 
84 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 lator removes his cigar long enough to 
 sneer, " hot air," " mawkish sentimental- 
 ity," " they take the risks." So, on with 
 the slaughter ! Let the wheels redden 
 until the totals are formidable. " Now 
 will you act ? " No, " interference " would 
 " undermine individual responsibility," or 
 be " unconstitutional." So let the mangled 
 pile up, until, like the cuirassiers in the 
 ravine at Waterloo, their bodies fill to the 
 brink the chasm of selfish incredulity. So 
 is it with the uprooting of child labor. 
 Once the pocket-book interest has twined 
 itself about the evil, the wreckage of child 
 life has to be mountainous, ghastly, and 
 sickening, before the public can be stirred 
 to the point of breaking the grasp of the 
 employers on the throat of the legislature. 
 The same obstacles delay the advent of 
 mine inspection, tenement-house reform, 
 the abolition of grade crossings, the en- 
 forced fencing of dangerous machinery. 
 Thanks to the inertia of large bodies and 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 85 
 
 the power of special interests, the relief 
 inevitably comes ten to twenty years later 
 than it should. To add, now, conscious 
 " conservatism," is like setting the brake 
 on an overloaded wagon being hauled up 
 the bare western slope of a sandy hill on 
 a July afternoon ! 
 
 THE DELUSION THAT THE NONCONFORM-"?-. 
 1ST IS THE REAL PERIL TO SOCIETY 
 
 It is human nature to resent difference, 
 and the time was when people could afford 
 to go asunder on the width of a hat brim 
 or the form of baptism. But such stress 
 on the non-essential is sheer folly, now that 
 the times summon us to close ranks and 
 war down the Newer Unrighteousness. 
 
 Rublic opinion as lord of conduct is not 
 old, — less than a century, in fact. It could 
 not arrive untUth^ weakening of caste, class, 
 and local barriers allowed the " public " tq^ 
 form. Even to-day, the American public is^ 
 too incoherent to make a good policeman. 
 
86 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 Besides the antipathy between whites and 
 blacks, there is the friction between natives 
 and immigrants, the feeling between Chris- 
 tians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, 
 the inter-denominational jealousies, the 
 mistrust of the churchless, the gulf between 
 Philistia and Bohemia, the chasm between 
 alley and avenue. Although its class bar- 
 riers are lower, American society is more 
 deeply cleft by race and nationality than 
 is western Europe. Inter-confessional fric- 
 tion is greater here than in the all-Catholic 
 or all-Protestant societies. Thus it is that 
 in seeking to focus the indignation of the 
 law-abiding, we are hampered by a lot of 
 hold-over antipathies. " First things first." 
 To-day the distinction between righteous 
 and sinners is the main things for upon a 
 lively consciousness of that distinction rests 
 the hope of transmitting our institutions 
 undecayed, of preserving our democratic 
 ideals, of avoiding stratification and class 
 rancor. Yet most people act as if some- 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 87 
 
 thing else were the main thing. They see 
 conduct in the false perspective of a Chinese 
 drawing, where a glance tells you that the 
 man approaching in the middle distance 
 will surely overtop the house in the fore- 
 ground ! Just as in the South the senseless 
 agitation of the race question is delivering 
 that section into the hands of the railroad 
 corporations ; just as in the Far West Mor- 
 monism is a red herring to drag across the 
 trail of some iniquity when the public is 
 hot on the scent,- just as " Catholicism in 
 the schools" raises a dust behind which 
 franchise grabbers can operate ; so the divi- 
 sions and cross-purposes of decent people C 
 give the sinner his chance to get away. J 
 It is the honest man who falls into , 
 heresy. But the latter-day sijiner is sleek, ' 
 orthodox, and unoffending. 'He conforms 
 in everything save conduct. No one can 
 outdo him in lip homage to the law and the 
 prophets. It is the law-abiding who are 
 scandalized by one another's nonconform- 
 
88 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 ity. They split on beliefs and practices be- 
 cause they care for such things. But men 
 who take the cash register for their com- 
 pass are nobly tolerant. This is why, in 
 these times that try men's fortunes, sinners 
 rush to one another's aid, excuse and sup- 
 port one another under fire. The monopo- 
 lists, small and great, local and national, 
 grope their way to one another, strike 
 hands, and as " captains of industry " pre- 
 sent to their critics an unbroken front. The 
 security jugglers, from the county-seat 
 town to Wall Street, fee\ .that as " authors 
 of prosperity " an injury to one is the con- 
 cern of all. Adulterators and commercial 
 crooks rally as " enterprising business men." 
 The puppets of the Interests, from the town 
 council to Congress, stand together as 
 " statesmen." On the other hand, the pub- 
 lic they plunder, like Martha " troubled 
 about many things," divides on race, creed, 
 or style, pelts the nonconformist more than 
 the sinner, and lays on a little finger where 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 89 
 
 it ought to wield a fist. Thus the wolves 
 hunt in packs, while the watchdogs snap 
 at one another ! 
 
 At a moment when the supremacy of 
 law trembles in the balance, when our lead- 
 ing railroad magnate complains that it is 
 not easy to carry on a railroad business, " if 
 you always have to turn to the legal depart- 
 ment and find whether you may or may 
 not," how bootless seem agitations to put 
 "God" into the Constitution, to enforce 
 strict Sabbath observance, to break up secret 
 societies, or to banish negroes to the Jim 
 Crow car ! These fatuous crusades against 
 Gorky and Madame Andrieva, against 
 "Mrs. Warren's Profession," against "an- 
 archist " immigrants, against the Mor- 
 mons, against undraped statuary, or the 
 " un-American " labor union, or the for- 
 eigner's Sunday beer, recall to mind the 
 monks of Constantinople, wrangling over 
 the nature of the Trinity while the Turks 
 were forcing the gates ! 
 
90 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 In a national war, the common peril 
 hushes petty discords and attunes differing 
 men to harmonious efforts. But to-day is war- 
 time. Our assailants are none the less formi- 
 dable because they grew up among us and 
 walk the same streets. While the wizards 
 of smokeless powder and submarine boat 
 have been making us secure against alien 
 foes, we have grown into an organic society 
 in which the welfare of all is at the mercy 
 of each. The supreme task of the hour is to 
 get together and build a rampart of moral 
 standard, statute, inspection, and publicity, 
 to check the onslaught of internal enemies. 
 
 THE FALSE DOCTRINE THAT THE REPRES- 
 SION OF THE VICIOUS IS MORE IMPORT- 
 ANT THAN THE REPRESSION OF SINNERS 
 
 By vice we mean practices that harm 
 one's self; by sin we mean conduct that 
 harms another. They spring from differ- 
 ent roots and call for different treatment. 
 Sin grows largely out of the relations into 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 91 
 
 which men enter, and hence social develop- 
 ment, by constantly opening new doors to 
 wrong-doing, calls into being new species 
 of sin. Rude law recognizes three kinds of 
 stealing, developed law ten kinds, the law of 
 to-day seventeen kinds. By the time it is 
 abreast of our present needs, it will discrim- 
 inate perhaps thirty kinds. The same is true 
 of other types of wrong-doing. Vice, on tliS-__„™ 
 other hand, beings p ersonal, is less, affected 
 by social change. New forms, like the 
 cocaine habit or bridge gambling, are in- 
 vented, not developed by social growth. 
 
 As a disease of the social body, vice differs 
 as much from sin as scrofula from locomotor 
 ataxia. Vice encounters barriers fixed by 
 nature ; in the end its wage is death. Sin, 
 o n the othe r hand, flourishes if society does 
 not make haste to check it. The unopposed 
 sinner makes his way upward towards sun- 
 shine, whereas the unchecked vicious man 
 gravitates toward night.'' The spectacle of 
 vice, sleek, honored, and envied, is not pos- 
 
92 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 sible, for a practice that works out this way 
 is not vice. But the sight of the unpunished 
 and unrepentant sinner, successful and hon- 
 ored, shocks the righteous, disheartens the 
 weak, and demoralizes the young, who 
 ought to cherish, for a few years at least, 
 the ennobling illusion that the right always 
 triumphs. 
 
 Like a ship with a foul bottom, a nation 
 heavily weighted with lewd, drunken, and 
 gaming members cannot keep up with its 
 rivals, and hence the warfare against vice 
 must go on. But efforts should be centred 
 on the young, training and fortifying them 
 to resist the lure of the perilous paths. It is 
 for them we banish or regulate the vice 
 shops, bar obscene literature, and watch the 
 stage. Not so with adults. The effort we 
 expend on persons who go astray with their 
 eyes open is mostly wasted. Usually they 
 cannot be saved, nor are they worth saving. 
 Certainly let vice be made odious. But 
 when the public exerts itself to stamp out 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 93 
 
 drinking and the social evil, it slackens its 
 war on sin, and, moreover, it simply fore- 
 stalls natural process. Nature limits at last 
 the spread of vice, and the sooner those of 
 congenitally weak will and base impulses 
 eliminate themselves, the better for the 
 race. The go-cart for children by all means, 
 but for adults the stern command, " Stand 
 alone, or if thou canst not stand alone, then 
 fall! " With respect to hell, there is some- 
 thing to be said for the open door. Self- 
 interest, too, is quietly crowding the vicious 
 to the wall. In the end the hard drinkers 
 will be barred from all desirable employ- ; 
 ments. 
 
 Sin, on the contrary, is not self-limiting. MO 
 If a ring is to be put in the snout of the 
 greedy strong, only organized society can 
 do it. In every new helpful relation the 
 germ of sin lurks, and will create there a 
 pus centre if social antisepsis be lacking. 
 Then how tragic a figure is the victim of 
 sin ! To perish of diseased meat to make a 
 
94 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 packer's dividend is sadder than to perish 
 through one's own thirst for whiskey. The 
 invalid bled by the medical fakirs is more to 
 be pitied than the "sucker " fleeced in the 
 pool-room. For the man who is the prey 
 of the evil inclinations of others surely has 
 a better claim on us than the man who is 
 the prey of his own evil inclinations. 
 
 Men rather than women are the natural 
 foes of wrong. Men burn at the spectacle of 
 injustice, women at the sight of suffering. 
 " White," " decent," " fair play," "square 
 deal," voice masculine conscience. Men 
 feel instinctively that the pith of society is 
 orderly struggle, competition tempered by 
 rules of forbearance. The impulse of sim- 
 ple-minded men to put down " foul play " 
 and " dirty work " is a precious safeguard 
 of social order. But the impulses of simple- 
 minded women are not so trustworthy. 
 When they smother red-handed bandits 
 with flowers they are anti-social; when 
 they launch into random vice crusades they 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 95 
 
 are often little better than pseudo-social. 
 Now, the rise of great organizations for 
 focusing the sentiments of millions of 
 women has lately brought about a certain 
 effemination of opinion. In the main, this 
 has been salutary, for it has redressed many 
 wrongs against women and children, and 
 exalted the " home " point of view. Yet it 
 has taught us to hail as "a great moral 
 triumph " the spectacle of a corporation- 
 owned legislature obsequiously aiming the 
 terrors of the law at the grown man who 
 gives another man a cigarette paper ! In the 
 end, values are so topsy-turvied that a 
 branch of a famous women's organization 
 deems it fitting to ask the President of the 
 United States, " Did you receive sixty bot- 
 tles of beer from the Brewers' Association, 
 and did you or your representatives send 
 the brewers a letter of thanks on White 
 House stationery for the same package, and 
 what became of the sixty bottles of beer ? " 
 The loss of moral leadership by the 
 
96 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 clergy is often deplored ; but what else is to 
 be expected, when so many clergymen ap- 
 peal to the feminine rather than to the mas- 
 culine conscience ? To-day the virile, who 
 see in graft and monopoly and foul politics 
 worse enemies than beer, Sunday baseball, 
 and the army canteen, scofFwhen the pastor 
 of the indicted boss of San Francisco pleads, 
 " He never was known to smoke or take 
 a drink. He never was seen in front of a 
 saloon bar." In political battles, the sinister 
 interests easily rally the religious people by 
 standing for a " lid on" policy. This throw- 
 ing over of the vice interests by the corpora- 
 tion interests is the secret of the " good 
 government" that is the boast of latter-day 
 commercial oligarchy. In the struggle of a 
 city to free itself from corporation bond- 
 age, is not the psychologic moment always 
 punctuated by a hectoring deputation of 
 clergymen to summon Mr. Mayor to en- 
 force to the letter the Sunday closing ordi- 
 nance, followed by a blast from the pulpits 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 97 
 
 when the mayor declines to play the traction 
 company's little game? Not long ago a 
 reform mayor was discredited because, 
 emerging late from his office, he descended 
 into a basement lunch room, and ate at the 
 same counter with street- walkers and night- 
 birds. The pastors of the strait-laced mag- 
 nates who had never stooped to anything 
 worse than stealing a street were scandal- 
 ized at the mayor's elbow-touch with dis- 
 reputables, and appealed with success to the 
 ossified Puritanism of their flock. _ 
 
 Our moral pace-setters strike at bad per- 
 sonal habits, but act as if there was some- 
 thing sacred about money-making ; and, 
 seeing that the master iniquities of our time are 
 connected with money-making, they do not 
 get into the big fight at all. The child- 
 drivers, monopoly-builders, and crooked 
 financiers have no fear of men whose 
 thought is run in the moulds of their grand- 
 fathers. Go to the tainted-money colleges, 
 and you will learn that Drink, not Graft, 
 
 ^ 
 
98 GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 is the nation's bane. Visit the religious 
 societies for young men, and you will find 
 personal correctness exalted above the so- 
 cial welfare. 
 
 The standards the old Puritans battled 
 for are now established. Organized oppo- 
 sition to them has ceased, and the tide of 
 battle has rolled away to a new quarter. 
 .'[Satan's main onset to-day is on the side of 
 ' sin, rather than on the side of vice. There- 
 fore the strategy of the situation summons 
 society to draft off more of its forces to the 
 aid of the " social Puritans." Are the ac- 
 credited leaders of moral sentiment good 
 generals in so heavily shelling the trenches 
 of vice ? Are they not slow in recognizing 
 the key positions in the Holy War of to- 
 day? 
 
 Let him who doubts where the battle 
 rages mark how fares the assailant of sin. 
 To-day there is little risk in letting fly at 
 the red light. What an easy mark is the 
 " tenderloin " ! Rare is the clergyman, 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS 99 
 
 teacher, or editor who can be unseated by 
 banded saloon-keepers, gamblers, and ma- 
 dames. Their every " knock " is a boost. 
 If you want a David-and-Goliath fight, 
 you must attack the powers that prey, not 
 on the vices of the lax, but on the necessi- 
 ties of the decent. The deferred-dividend 
 graft, the "yellow dog " fund, the private- 
 car iniquity, the Higher Thimblerig, far 
 from turning tail and slinking away beaten 
 like the vice- caterers, confront us rampant, 
 fire-belching, sabre-toothed, and razor- 
 clawed. They are able to gag critics, hobble 
 investigators, hood the press, and muzzle 
 the law. Drunk with power, in office and 
 club, in church and school, in legislature 
 and court, they boldly make their stand, 
 ruining the innocent, shredding the repu- 
 tations of the righteous, destroying the ca- 
 reers and opportunities of their assailants, 
 dragging down pastor and scholar, publicist 
 and business man, from livelihood and in- 
 fluence, unhorsing alike faithful public ser- 
 
loo GRILLING OF SINNERS 
 
 vant, civic champion, and knight-errant 
 of conscience, and all the while gathering 
 into loathsome captivity the souls of multi- 
 tudes of young men. Here is a fight w^here 
 blov7S are rained, and armor dinted, and 
 wounds suffered, and laurels won. If a 
 sworn champion of the right will prove 
 he is a man and not a dummy, let him go 
 up against these ! 
 
 Because society develops, comes into 
 new situations, runs into strange perils, finds 
 old foes with new faces and enemies mas- 
 querading as friends, it is folly to train its 
 guns ever on the same spot. Yesterday's 
 "battle-cries of conscience cannot thrill us, 
 and so the battle-cries of to-day may have 
 little meaning for our children's children. 
 They, perhaps, will be worrying about the 
 marriage of the tainted, or the two-child 
 system. Every age has to reconnoitre its 
 foes and mark where they are massing. 
 Like a rudderless steamer on a river of sav- 
 age Africa, society, caught in the current 
 
GRILLING OF SINNERS loi 
 
 of evolution, dips, lurches, drifts, swings, 
 exposing now port, now starboard, to the 
 missiles of fresh enemies that present 
 themselves in strange guise at every turn of 
 the stream. 
 
V 
 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 Those who contend that men are grow-~\ 
 ing better, and those who insist that mat- I 
 ters are growing worse, may both be righty 
 " Look at the amelioration in the lot of 
 women, of children, of blacks, of convicts, 
 of defectives," flute the apologists. " Never 
 were punishments more humane, manners 
 milder, amusements cleaner, gifts larger, 
 the rights of the weak better protected, 
 the lower creatures more considered." 
 "But mark the ruthlessness of industry, 
 the ferocity of business, the friction of 
 classes, the stench of politics," rasp the 
 critics. "Never in our time were chil- 
 dren so exploited, workers so driven, con- 
 sumers so poisoned, passengers so mangled, 
 investors so fleeced, public servants so 
 tempted." The key to the paradox is thaTl ^ 
 while men are improving in their personal [ ' 
 
 / 
 
 oS 
 
io6 SINNING BY SYNDICATE- 
 
 ] relations, the control of industry and busi- 
 ness is becoming impersonal. 
 
 Take the face-to-face element out of a 
 relation, and any lurking devil in it comes 
 to the surface. In the old South there was 
 a world of difference to the slaves between 
 the kind master and the hard master. But 
 these differences tended to disappear as the 
 plantations grew big and the slaves came 
 under the immediate control of over- 
 seers. The Irish found tenancy tolerable 
 under a good landlord ; but with absentee- 
 ism and the management of the estate by 
 the agent, all that was oppressive in land- 
 lordism came out. It is noteworthy that 
 the strife between employer and employee 
 was never so bitter as it has become since 
 corporations came to be the great employ- 
 ers. So, also, the tension between the rail- 
 roads and the people has grown with the 
 merging of lines locally owned into huge 
 systems controlled by remote investors in 
 the East or in Europe. 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 107 
 
 There is nothing like distance to disin- 
 fect dividends. Therefore the moral char- 
 acter of the stockholders makes very little 
 difference in the conduct of the affairs of 
 the corporation. Christian or heathen, na- 
 tive or alien, blue blood or plebeian, rich 
 or poor, they all sanction much the same 
 thing, and that is, the policy that promises 
 the biggest dividends in the long run. To 
 the directors their virtual mandate is, "Get 
 results ! " The directors pass this mandate 
 to the officers. The officers pass it along 
 to the heads of departments, and these send 
 it on down the line. Take one gas com- 
 pany formed by saints and another formed 
 by sinners. The directors of the tw^o com- 
 panies vrill be more alike than the stock- 
 holders, the officers will be still more alike, 
 and the men who come into contact with 
 the legislature or the city council, or the 
 gas consumers, will not differ by a shade. 
 The saintly stockholders not only do not 
 know what is going on, but so long as the 
 
c 
 
 1 08 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 dividends are comfortable they reseiit hav- 
 ing inconvenient know^ledge thrust upon 
 them. 
 7! The corporation, to be sure, has certain 
 good points. The corporate ovv^ner — of 
 course we are not speaking of one-man 
 corporations, or of those w^hose officers fol- 
 low^ their ov^n sw^eet will — isjipt warped 
 by race antipathy or religious prejudice 
 or caste pride. Unlike the individual busi- 
 ness man, its course is never shaped by 
 political ambitions or social aspirations or 
 the personal feuds of its wife. It does not 
 exact personal subservience, does not in- 
 dulge itself in petty tyranny, is not held 
 back from negotiation with its employees 
 by aristocratic haughtiness. It does not feel 
 anger or hold a grudge. If it ruins any 
 one, it does so not from malice, but sim- 
 ply because he stands in the way; Let him 
 meekly creep into the ditch, and it honks 
 by unnoticing. The business man may be 
 swerved by vindictiveness or by generosity. 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 109 
 
 by passion or by conscience, but the genu- 
 ine corporation responds to but one mo- 
 tive. Toward gain it gravitates with the 
 ruthlessness of a lava stream. 
 
 Nevertheless, if the corporate owner is' 
 free from the weaknesses of the individual,! f^ 
 it escapes also his wholesome limitations 
 It feels not the restraints that conscience 
 and public sentiment lay on the business 
 man. It fears the law no more, and pub- 
 lic indignation far less, than does the 
 individual. You can hiss the bad man, 
 egg him, lampoon him, caricature him, 
 ostracize him and his. Not so with the 
 bad corporation. The corporation, more- j 
 over, is not in dread of hell fire. You can- j ^ 
 not Christianize it. You may convert its 
 stockholders, animate them with patriot- 
 ism or public spirit or love of social ser- 
 vice; but this will have little or no effect on 
 the tenor of their corporation. In short, , 
 it is an entity that transmits the greed 
 of investors, but not their conscience; I 
 

 no SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 that returns them profits, but not unpopu-/ 
 larity. / 
 
 In view of the psychology of the cor- 
 poration, the fact that in a lifetime it has 
 risen to the captaincy of more than half 
 the active w^ealth of this country cannot be 
 w^ithout a bearing on our moral situation. 
 A current manual describes 6700 com- 
 panies (not including banking and insur- 
 ance companies) w^ith a capitalization of 
 thirty-six billions of dollars, and an actual 
 property estimated to be w^orth twenty- 
 seven billions or sixty per cent of all the 
 wealth of the United States outside of farm 
 values and of city values in residences and 
 in private businesses.^ Surely the miscon- 
 duct of this giant race of artificial persons 
 deserves consideration by itself. ^- 
 
 MORE THAN OTHER SINNING, CORPORATE 
 SINNING ALIENATES SOCIAL CLASSES 
 
 Thanks to the magic of limited liabil- 
 ity, every year finds a greater distance 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE iii 
 
 between the corporate business and its ab-^ / 
 sentee owners. fjEvery year sees these own- 
 ers more numerous, more scattered, more 
 dominated by the big insiders. Every 
 year sees savings banks, trust compa- 
 nies, and insurance companies coming be- 
 tween the corporate management and th^ 
 millions who furnish the money, thereby /I 
 making it harder for their conscience toll ^ 
 reach and humanize that managementJ-' 
 Moreover, the Big Men's practice of wa- 
 tering a paying stock and unloading the 
 infusion upon the investing public is mar- 
 velously potent in banishing humanity 
 and decency from the corporation's treat- 
 ment of its labor, its patrons, or the public 
 authorities. To doubt if stockwatering 
 tightens the squeeze is to doubt if the i>ona 
 fide investor, restless on the bare bench 
 of a paltry three per cent per annum, will 
 yammer harder for more dividends than 
 one lounging luxuriously on the velvet of 
 twelve per cent. The device of capitaliz- 
 
112 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 ing and marketing the last turn of the cor- 
 poration screw has a diabolic power to con- 
 vert the retired preacher or professor (who 
 has exchanged his life's savings for aque- 
 ous securities at par) into an oppressor of 
 Tennessee miners, or Georgia operatives, 
 or Kansas farmers, as relentless as an ab- 
 sentee Highland laird or a spendthrift 
 Russian nobleman. 
 
 These developments tend to bring to 
 , the headship of certain big businesses — 
 ( especially public-service enterprises — men 
 I akin to the steward on a feudal estate 
 ^ or the agent of an Irish landlord. With 
 growing remoteness and anonymity of 
 ownership, the railroad, gas, or traction 
 manager who aims to develop his proper- 
 ties, to prosper through the prosperity of 
 the community instead of at its expense, 
 to respect local sentiment, the rights of 
 others, and the law of the land, is dropped. 
 Quietly, but relentlessly, the popular man 
 of local antecedents and attachments, who 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 113 
 
 calls his men "Bill" or "Jim," is dis- 
 carded for the imported man with " nerve," 
 who "does things," who "gets results " — 
 no matter how. The owners fete and 
 cheer the "efficient" railroad president 
 who has increased the net earnings "520 
 per cent in eight years," heedless that he 
 lets the trestles rot till cars full of sleeping 
 passengers drop through them, overworks 
 his men till people are hurled to destruc- 
 tion in daily smash-ups, and denies sidings 
 for the swelling traffic till his trainmen 
 pay Death a heavier toll than soldiers in 
 the field. . 
 
 Now, the stockholders for whom all N 
 these iniquitous things are done do not 
 consciously stand for them. They do not 
 will that children should be worn out, 
 workmen maimed, consumers defrauded, 
 the ballot polluted, or public men de- 
 bauched. They seem to demand such 
 conduct only because they fail to realize 
 what they are doing when they exact the 
 
114 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 utmost penny. However harmless their 
 intentions, their clamor for fat dividends 
 inevitably throws the management of 
 quasi-public — and some other — busi- 
 nesses into the hands of the domineering- 
 arrogant or the suave-unscrupulous type. 
 The manager represents just one side of 
 the shareholders, namely, their avarice. 
 In other respects he is no more typical of 
 them than the company doctor is typical 
 of physicians or the corporation attorney 
 is typical of lawyers. 
 
 The million or million and a half own- 
 ers of corporation stock in this country 
 are not as a rule law-despising, unpatri- 
 otic, or hard-hearted. They are inoffensive 
 American citizens who probably love their 
 country and their fellow men as much as 
 the brakemen or miners or farmers under 
 the corporation harrow. But their amiable 
 traits are not likely to reflect themselves 
 in the officers and managers of their pro- 
 perties. What, then, is more natural than 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 115 
 
 that those in contact with these agents 
 should take them as representative, should 
 estimate the owners by them, and should 
 accordingly foresee an irrepressible con- 
 flict between a lawless, anti-social capi- 
 talist class and the masses ? Thus springs 
 up the delusion of progress by class war, 
 and the mischievous policy of appealing 
 solely to the class interests of workers in- 
 stead of chiefly to that sense of right and 
 justice which is found at every level and 
 in every quarter of society, and which is 
 the only power that can settle things so that 
 they stay settled. For you cannot sharpen 
 class consciousness without whetting class 
 hatred and loosening social bonds. The 
 only hatred that is wholesome and social 
 and propulsive is the hatred of the right- 
 eous for the willfully unrighteous. A re- 
 form that follows this line does not breed 
 a reaction. 
 
 Aggressive corporation men put in a 
 wro ng ligh t not only capitalists, but their 
 
ii6 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 opponents as well. In excusing the trou- 
 bles their arrogance provokes, they pass 
 along to owners biased versions which, by- 
 misrepresenting the claims of patrons and 
 laborers, root capitalists generally in the 
 notion that the masses are uppish and 
 heady, and inspire in them a " last ditch " 
 sentiment as foolish as it is dangerous. 
 Now, the corporation cannot mend it- 
 i self. More and more it is impersonal and 
 * non-moral. More and more the far-away 
 manager is rated as a profit conveyer, and 
 the conduit with the bigger flow is always 
 preferred. It has become a machine, and 
 Mammon is its master. Reform, there- 
 fore, will not come from the inside. Those 
 who supply the capital cannot mould it to 
 their better will. But they can change its^ 
 spirit if they will join with their fellow ( 
 citizens in restraining the corporation by 
 public opinion and by statute. If the reac- 
 tion of organized society upon the Grad- 
 grind type of manager is so severe that he 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 117 
 
 cannot make so much money for his stock- 
 holders as a more reasonable and repre- 
 sentative type, he will give way to the 
 better man, and one cause of the needless 
 alienation of classes will be removed. 
 
 IN RESENTING CORPORATE SINS WE MUST ' 
 FOLLOW THE MAXIM, " BLAME NOT THE \ 
 TOOL, BUT THE HAND THAT MOVES THE j 
 TOOL 
 
 The savage beats the stone he has stum- 
 bled over without inquiring who left the 
 stone in his way. Early law punishes brutes 
 for the harm they do, and the domestic 
 animal that hurts a human being is deodand. 
 Law now looks farther back, but the pub- 
 lic in its short-sightedness is like a stricken 
 animal biting at the arrow in its "flank 
 instead of charging on the hunter. - 
 
 In view of the pressure they are under, 
 what folly to mob the spade men who set 
 telephone poles where they have no right 
 to be, rather than the manager in a down- 
 
ii8 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 town office who gives these men their 
 orders ! Why execrate the dozing oper- 
 ator or the forgetful engineer, rather than 
 the superiors who exact the long hours 
 that incapacitate for duty ?[^ Why lynch 
 the motorman for running over the baby, 
 when he is on a schedule that obliges him 
 to violate the municipal speed ordinance 
 or lose his job PjWhen powder firms or 
 armor-plate companies are caught giving, 
 aid to the enemies of their country by 
 furnishing bad plates or poor powder, what 
 childishness to be satisfied when the em- 
 ployees who plugged the blow-holes or 
 " switched the samples " are dismissed with 
 a great show of virtuous indignation, while 
 the instigators go unpunished ! 
 
 There is no work so dirty or dangerous 
 but that it will attract volunteers pleading 
 wife and babes to support. An economic 
 constraint, more or less harsh, binds the 
 ordinary underlings of a corporation and 
 obliges us, in quest of the one to blame or 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 119 
 
 punish, to turn to " the men higher up." 
 Nor is it easy to find the right place to 
 stop. Whom shall we blame when orders 
 for automatic signals put in by superin- 
 tendents of railroads on which heart-rend- 
 ing collisions have occurred, have been 
 turned down by the Wall Street owners ? 
 The company claim-adjuster who, by play- 
 ing on the ignorance, fears, and necessities 
 of the injured, "bluffs" them out of their 
 lawful indemnity, insists with truth that, 
 if he did not cheat the victims, another 
 man with fewer qualms would be given his 
 place. The attorney who fights all claims, 
 just as well as unjust, to the court of last 
 resort in order to intimidate claimants, 
 pleads that his corporation will wear them 
 out anyway, and he might as well hold the 
 job as some one else. 
 
 Ought we, indeed, to flay the legislator 
 who, under pain of losing the renomina- 
 tion, votes as he is told on corporation 
 matters, or the bureau chief who winks 
 
I20 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 at crooked land entries because he feels 
 at the back of his neck the chill of the 
 "Uxe ? He is no hero, to be sure, who eats 
 ;dirt in order to keep his berth; but if he 
 refuses he will become a martyr, and it is 
 doubtful if we have the right to require 
 martyrdom of anybody. The society that 
 allows its enemies to run the party con- 
 ventions, or lets unclean hands wield the 
 official axe, has only itself to blame for 
 what follows. 
 
 In all such cases the blame meted out 
 should correspond to the degree of actual 
 — not formal — freedom enjoyed by the 
 agent. Society may call upon a man to 
 renounce his champagne and truffles for 
 the right's sake sooner than his cake and 
 jam ; to quarrel with his cake and jam 
 sooner than with his bread and butter ; to 
 sacrifice his own bread and butter sooner 
 than the bread and butter of his children. 
 In general, as we ascend from the track- 
 layers who grab a street over night to the 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE i2i 
 
 foreman of the gang, to the superintend- 
 ent, to the general manager, account- 
 abiUty broadens and the tale of stripes 
 should increase. Still, even the man high 
 up may act under duress. For example, in 
 a certain city a cotton mill wanted a new 
 street opened and larger water mains laid. 
 The city council tabled the request, but 
 an inquiry showed that $15,000 would 
 "fix" the council. The manager, who 
 " did n't believe in doing business that 
 way," held out for over a year. Meantime 
 the mill suffered financially. The directors 
 became restive, investigated, and found that 
 a manager with a Scotch conscience was 
 standing between them and their profits. 
 They dismissed him for a more " practi- 
 cal" man. 
 
 In the corporation the men who give 
 orders, but do not take them, are the 
 directors. They enjoy economic freedom. 
 If their scruples cost them a reelection, 
 their livelihood is not jeopardized. In 
 
I 
 
 122 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 the will of these men lies the fountain- 
 head of righteousness or iniquity in the 
 policies of the corporation. Here is the 
 moral laboratory where the lust of an ad- 
 ditional quarter of a per cent of dividend, 
 on the part of men already comfortable 
 in goods, is mysteriously transmuted into 
 deeds of wrong and lawlessness by remote, 
 obscure employees in terror of losing their 
 livelihood. 
 
 THE ANONYMITY OF THE CORPORATION 
 CAN BE MET ONLY BY FIXING ON DI- 
 RECTORS THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR 
 CORPORATE SINNING 
 
 In enforcing the rules of the game 
 the chief problem is how to restrain cor- 
 porations. The threat to withdraw the 
 charter alarms no one, for corporations 
 know they are here to stay. Fine the 
 law-breaking officers, and the board of 
 directors by indemnifying them encour- 
 ages them to do it again. Fine the cor- 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 123 
 
 poration, and, if its sinning is lucrative, 
 it heeds the fine no more than a flea-bite. 
 Never will the brake of the law grip 
 these slippery wheels until prison doors 
 yawn for the convicted ofiicers of lawless 
 corporations. Even then you cannot fasten 
 upon the officers legal responsibility for 
 much of the iniquity they instigate. For 
 example, to deceive the state insurance 
 commissioners the president of a culpable 
 insurance company directs the actuary to 
 make up a report of such and such a char- 
 acter. He hands it to the treasurer and the 
 auditor who, as required by law, swear that 
 " to the best of their knowledge and be- 
 lief " it is true. The high officials who 
 screen their mismanagement with this 
 false report have not been obliged to 
 perjure themselves by swearing to it. The 
 law has no hold upon them. 
 
 Again, a rich corporation desires legis- 
 lation favorable to its own interests. The 
 president engages an eminent attorney to 
 
124 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 draft a bill to that effect. He then takes 
 it to a great law firm versed in practice 
 of a legislative character. " I want you 
 gentlemen to use all proper and legiti- 
 mate means to secure the passage of this 
 measure. Send the bill to me." The firm 
 gets the measure introduced and then 
 engages the service of a great lobbyist. 
 The lobbyist seeks to influence men who 
 are under obligations to him for finan- 
 cial aid in getting elected. If some 
 needed legislators stand out demanding 
 money, he engages the services of small 
 lobbyists, or sends an intermediary with 
 a bribe. Thus the chief offenders protect 
 themselves by working through accom- 
 plices, in many cases so remote from them 
 that they are not even aware of the ac- 
 complices' existence. 
 
 Until the courts recast their defini-*^ 
 tions of legal evidence and legal responsi- ( 
 bility, much of the control of corporations 
 must devolve upon some agent free from 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 125 
 
 the pedantries and Byzantism of the law. 
 Public opinion, however, is impotent so 
 long as it allows itself to be kept guessing 
 which shell the pea is under, whether the 
 accountability is with the foreman, or the 
 local manager, or the general manager, 
 or the president, or the directors. How 
 easily the general wrath is lost in this 
 maze ! Public indignation meets a cuirass 
 of divided responsibility that scatters a 
 shock which would have stretched ini- 
 quity prone. Till the law lifted its mailed 
 fist, how futile were the agitations against 
 grade crossings, link couplers, and fender- 
 less cars ! Instead of playing hide-and- I 
 seek in the intricacies of the corporate \ 
 structure, public opinion should strike right^ 
 for the top. Let it mark the tactics of the 
 Philadelphia mothers who, after vain ap- 
 peal to underlings to put in a gate at a rail- 
 road crossing their children must make on 
 the way to school, stormed the office of the 
 president of the road. 
 
126 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 I The directors of a company ought to 
 be individually accountable for every case 
 of misconduct of which the company re- 
 ceives the benefit, for every preventable 
 deficiency or abuse that regularly goes on 
 t in the course of the business. Hold them 
 blameless if they prove the inefficiency or 
 disobedience of underlings, but not if they 
 plead ignorance. Consider the salutary 
 side-effects of such severity. When an 
 avalanche of w^rath hangs over the head 
 of the director of a sinning corporation, 
 no one w^ill accept a directorship w^ho is 
 not prepared to give a good deal of time 
 and serious attention to its business. Strict 
 accountability w^ill send flying the figure- 
 head directors w^ho, w^hen the misdeeds 
 of their proteges come to light, protest 
 they "didn't know^." It will bar bucca- 
 neering insiders from using a group of 
 eminent dummies as unwitting decoys 
 for the confiding investor or policy-holder. 
 It will break up the game of operating a 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 127 
 
 brigand public-service company (owned 
 by some distant " syndicate ") from behind 
 a board of respectable local " directors " 
 without a shred of power. 
 
 Let it be understood that a man's repu- 
 tation may be blasted by scandal within 
 his corporation and we shall not see men 
 directors on a score or two of boards. In 
 New York City one man is found to be 
 director of forty-five railroads, another of 
 forty-two, others of thirty-seven, thirty- 
 five, twenty-eight, twenty-two roads. Fif- 
 teen men are in sixteen or more railroads, 
 thirty-four are directors of from ten to 
 fifteen roads. Forty-eight are directors 
 of seven roads or more. Those on the 
 boards of from two to six roads are 
 almost innumerable. Seventy-six men 
 holding among them about sixteen hun- 
 dred directorships are said, on high au- 
 thority, to control fully one hundred of 
 the greatest railroad, industrial, and bank- 
 ing corporations, with a capital equal to 
 
128 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 one fifth of the national wealth! Now, 
 stricter accountability would greatly en- 
 large this directing personnel and perhaps 
 rid it of some of that plutocratic arrogance 
 which is inseparable from filling boards 
 of directors with Wall Street bankers and 
 speculators and a few men of enormous 
 wealth. By enlisting more men with an 
 interest in the technical side of the busi-s 
 ness, or in the community it serves, the ! 
 evils of financial directorates would be 
 mitigated. 
 
 In one state, newspapers have been re- 
 quired to print in every issue the name 
 and place of business of the publisher or 
 proprietor in order that the responsibility 
 of the paper may be certain. It ought 
 likewise to be customary to print along 
 with the news of the exposure of cor- 
 poration misconduct the names of the 
 directors, in order that the public indigna- 
 tion may not explode without result, but 
 find rather a proper target ; for just indig- 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 129 
 
 nation is altogether too precious a thing 
 to be wasted. 
 
 Make it vain for a director to plead/ 
 that he opposed the wrong sanctioned b)\ 
 the majority of his colleagues. If he will! 
 keep his skirts clear, let him resign the! 
 moment he is not ready to stand for every] 
 policy of his board. In the board of dij ) 
 rectors, as in the cabinet of parliamentary 
 countries, the principle of joint responsi-| ) 
 bility should hold. It ought to be as inev-- 
 itable for the entire board of directors of 
 a railroad company caught systematically 
 stealing mineral lands or oppressing coal 
 operators along its line, to resign, as now 
 it is a matter of course for college trustees 
 to resign when they have been caught 
 unloading bad securities on to the college 
 funds. 
 
 The trust practice of cross-checking, 
 setting off plant against plant, and one 
 department in a plant against correspond- 
 ing departments in all the other plants. 
 
130 SINNING BY SYNDICATE 
 
 while keying up technical efficiency, 
 drives the superintendents and foremen 
 under this staccato rivalry to bear hard 
 on labor. The public conscience will not 
 tolerate such ruthless exercise of corpo- 
 rate might, especially when the workers 
 are women, or children, or unskilled. Let 
 directors become habituated to full re- 
 sponsibility, and a reputable man will 
 decline to stand for the treatment of labor 
 under modern systems of cost account- 
 ing, unless he is protected by a " labor 
 commissioner" or "welfare manager" re- 
 sponsible directly to a committee of the 
 directors. It would be the duty of such an 
 officer to limit the pressure of foremen on 
 the workers, and to standardize at the level 
 of the moral sentiment of the time such 
 matters as hours, night-work, pay for over- 
 time, safety provisions, accident indem- 
 nity, the conditions surrounding women 
 and children, and the treatment of com- 
 pany customers or tenants. 
 
SINNING BY SYNDICATE 131 
 
 Corporations are necessary, yet, through |/ 
 nobody's fault, they tend to become soul-|j 
 less and lawless, ^y all means let themi 
 reap where they have sown. But why let 
 them declare dividends not only on their 
 capital, but also on their power to starve 
 out labor, to wear out litigants, to beat 
 down small competitors, to master the 
 market, to evade taxes, to get the free use 
 of public property? Nothing but the j 
 curb of organized society can confine J 
 them to their own grist and keep them 
 from grinding into dividends the stamina 
 of children, the health of women, the 
 lives of men, the purity of the ballot, the 
 honor of public servants, and the suprem- 
 acy of the laws. 
 
VI 
 
 THE RULES OF THE GAME 
 
THE RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 In the time when the family lived wholly 
 off the produce of its own farm, questions 
 of the distribution of wealth and of wel- 
 fare could scarcely arise. But now that 
 every man pours his product into some 
 market, it enters in a way into social wealth 
 and passes out of his control. What he 
 shall have to show for it depends on fac- 
 tors which, as John Stuart Mill showed, 
 are man-made rather than natural. He is 
 obliged to enter a game, and to a degree 
 his share of the Desirable depends on his 
 success in that game. What hazards the 
 game shall involve is largely within the 
 will of organized society. Some temper- 
 aments want the risks great, the prizes 
 big even if they must be few. Other tem- 
 peraments want risk eliminated and some- 
 thing guaranteed for all. So long as both 
 temperaments are present in society, it is 
 
136 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 safe to say that the game will be kept in- 
 teresting by preserving something of risk, 
 rThe establishment of the rules of the game 
 'lies within the province of society; and, 
 seeing that the good or ill fortune of the 
 player depends not only on his skill and 
 means, but also on the rules of the game 
 and how they are respected, it is worth 
 while to consider the bearing on the so- 
 cial welfare of the various policies society 
 may pursue. 
 
 I THE NON-ENFORCEMENT OF THE RULES OF 
 THE GAME RUPTURES AT LAST THE 
 SOCIAL PEACE 
 
 According to Plato, when Socrates, on 
 the morning of his last day, is urged by 
 his friends to escape from prison, the 
 philosopher refuses because in imagina- 
 tion he hears the Laws of Athens saying 
 to him : " What do you mean by trying 
 to escape but to destroy us, the Laws, and 
 the whole city so far as in you lies? Do 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 137 
 
 you think that a state can exist and not 
 be overthrown in which the decisions of 
 law are of no force and are disregarded 
 and set at naught by private individuals ?" 
 
 All failure to enforce law is bad, but in 
 certain classes of law slackness is not so 
 mischievous as it is in others. There is a 
 group of laws aiming to restrain men from 
 preying on the vices of their fellows and 
 thereby weakening the physical and the 
 moral fibre of the population. If saloon, 
 dive, gambling den, betting ring, or pool- 
 room bribe themselves free of these laws, 
 they not only continue their work of ruin, 
 but incidently the police is corrupted and, 
 in a measure, all law is weakened. 
 
 Again, if the administration of justice 
 becomes so feeble that the police cannot 
 catch, nor the courts hang, the red slayer, 
 the laws for the protection of persons be- 
 come cobwebs and men resort freely to 
 the personal redress of real or fancied 
 wrongs. Murders and homicides would 
 
138 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 hardly be several times as frequent now 
 as they were in 1880, but for the fact 
 that in this country for years only one 
 slayer out of seventy has been brought to 
 the gallows. The harvest is bloodshed, 
 lynching mobs, and race friction. 
 
 There is, however, another type of law- 
 impotence which loosens the masonry 
 of the state itself, and hence menaces the 
 sober and orderly people who are beyond 
 the reach of the lawlessness of "water- 
 front," or "levee," or "tenderloin," or 
 " Little Italy," This is failure to enforce 
 the laws governing the conduct of groups 
 or classes in their economic struggle, in a 
 word, failure to uphold the rules of the 
 game. 
 
 i If the laws guarding the interests of 
 one class are enforced, while the counter- 
 balancing statutes protecting another class 
 lie dormant, or if a law is enforced down- 
 ward but not upward, or if Justice wields 
 a sword on the poor but a lath on the 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 139 
 
 rich and influential, the cheated class 
 fiercely resolves to capture the state and 
 to govern ruthlessly in its own interests. 
 But, imbued with this vengeful spirit, 
 government soon becomes the engine 
 rather than the arbiter of conflicting inter- 
 ests, and the state sense perishes in the flame 
 of class hate. This is why it may be more 
 imperative to cut out alike Pinkertons 
 and sluggers, to put down impartially 
 corporation law-breaking and mob vio- 
 lence, than to enforce the ordinances for 
 the " red light " district. 
 
 Suffering the big player to violate the 
 rules of the game is doubly dangerous at 
 the present stage. In twenty years two 
 developments — the disappearance of free 
 land in the rain belt, and the triumph of 
 the big concern over the little — have 
 narrowed the circle of opportunity for 
 workingmen to achieve independence, and 
 therefore tend powerfully to consolidate 
 wage-earners into a conscious class. It does 
 
I40 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 not yet appear whether this will make im- 
 possible that government by public opinion 
 which has contributed so much to the 
 good temper and steadiness of American 
 society. 
 
 But there would remain government 
 as compromise, and even on this lower 
 plane the state may successfully guard the 
 primary social interests. Not so, however, 
 if hard-won political victory becomes a 
 mockery because prosecutors are timid, or 
 judges deferential, or executives suave, be- 
 fore the lusty law-breaker who is lord of 
 the Desirable. "Jug-handled" adminis- 
 tration of the laws kills the spirit of give- 
 and-take, hardens the hearts of the out- 
 lawed class, and sets their jaws in the grim 
 resolve to grasp the reins of power with a 
 relentless hand and to retain them, if need 
 be, by force. 
 
 The hustler's practice of " Get there — 
 anyhow ! " is warm sand for the hatching 
 of cockatrice's eggs. In Pennsylvania the 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 141 
 
 law-abiding disposition was so weakened 
 by the Standard Oil Company's example 
 that a man who tapped a pipe-line and 
 stole Standard oil for two years was found 
 innocent by jurors who had heard him 
 plead guilty. In California the Southern 
 Pacific Railroad Company brought law 
 into such contempt that the train robbers, 
 Evans and Sontag, were befriended by 
 nearly the whole local population. In cer- 
 tain Rocky Mountain states mine operators 
 and miners have both well-nigh lost the 
 state sense, and reach for a judgeship or a 
 sheriffalty as unhesitatingly as in a fight 
 one would reach for a crowbar. Thus 
 breach of law begets counter-breach. 
 "Slush funds" and chicane soon breed 
 mobs and terrorism, which in turn engen- 
 der deportations, kidnappings, and brutal 
 trampling upon the constitutional rights of 
 citizens and communities. Brickbat, " acid 
 egg," dynamite, and torch are in a way 
 companion to "plum tree," "driftwood," 
 
142 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 gangster's gavel, and "bull pen." Nor 
 is it easy to revive the olive tree, once 
 the bramble has come up. It will take 
 years of even-handed enforcement of law 
 to restore to government in Colorado its 
 lost prestige. A decade of Solon and Rha- 
 damanthus cannot inspire the law-abiding 
 spirit that one year of weak government 
 or slack opinion can destroy. Hence the 
 question of how the game is played may 
 be more serious than the question of who 
 wins. A selfish interest that fights in the 
 open for the repeal of good laws is not to 
 I be censured in the same breath with an 
 j interest which seeks to chloroform these 
 \ same laws by packing a commission, or 
 i "squaring" an inspector, or owning a 
 ^■^ judge. 
 
 To be sure, clash of interest arises as we 
 leave behind the simple, homogeneous so- 
 ciety of the early day ; but it is not written 
 that every such conflict shall invade politics 
 and make the state its football. Knights 
 
 A 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 143 
 
 jousting in the mediaeval tourney did not 
 expect the keeper of the lists to enter the 
 fray. An athletic team with the instinct of 
 sportsmanship does not count on winning 
 through the partiality of the umpire. 
 Likewise farmers and middlemen, land- 
 lords and tenants, producers and consumers, 
 manufacturers and mill-hands, single-line 
 merchants and department stores, jostled 
 together by circumstance, may fight with 
 lawful weapons without laying hand to 
 government. So long, indeed, as civic feel- 
 ing is deep, the great majority of citizens 
 shrink from using the state for the further- 
 ance of their special group interests, and 
 will not unite on such lines save to ward off 
 the aggressions of some less scrupulous 
 group. 
 
 The state inspires this reverence because 
 it is felt to express our best selves. If hap-_ 
 pily constituted, il(f''emt)odies our reason, 
 fair-mindedness, and humaneness, not our 
 passion, greed, and narrowness. This is why 
 
144 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 tax-payers will have their government 
 build more solidly than they build them- 
 selves ; w^hy they w^ill sanction in govern- 
 ment sacrifices for a remoter posterity than 
 they w^ill sacrifice for individually ; vi^hy 
 they vv^ill not have their officers show in 
 the punishment of criminals the vindictive- 
 ness, or in the treatment of dependents the 
 parsimoniousness, they may feel in their 
 own hearts. 
 
 Now, so long as battling groups feel that 
 the law utters the best selves of their fellow 
 citizens, they respect it, they hesitate to use 
 it as an engine of their purposes. Moreover, 
 they are content with the "square deal," 
 because their dread of having the cards 
 stacked against them prevails over the de- 
 sire to stack them against others. But if 
 government is weak or partial in upholding 
 the rules of the struggle, or makes rules 
 that favor one side as against the other, it 
 forfeits this immunity. The arena of com- 
 bat is shifted to politics. Impious hands are 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 145 
 
 laid on the ark of the covenant. Into the 
 law is injected now the gree'd of this class, 
 now the vengefulness of that. As govern- 
 ment thus degenerates, more and more 
 expressing the common greed, hatred, and 
 small-mindedness, instead of the common 
 reason and conscience, it loses its power to 
 command willing obedience, to conciliate 
 jarring classes. This path leads to class war, 
 and beyond that " the man on horseback." 
 
 TAMPERING WITH THE RULES OF THE | 
 GAME FINALLY BRINGS THE GAME IT-j 
 SELF INTO DISCREDIT 
 
 Rules may be changed in the interest 
 either of those about to enter the game, or 
 of those actually in the game. The foot- 
 ball code may be revised in order to benefit 
 the sport, or in order to favor certain teams 
 that happen to possess a star punter. So is 
 it with changes in the laws. To be sure, 
 they are made by men already in the game, 
 — farmers, bankers, iron-moulders, etc., — 
 
146 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 but these men in their policies may be 
 thinking of themselves or thinking of their 
 posterity. A man knows not what his sons 
 will become and where their special in- 
 terests will lie. So far, therefore, as they 
 are concerned for their children, farmers, 
 bankers, and iron-moulders can agree, and 
 the changes they can agree on will be such 
 as will make the social game fairer for all. 
 Their laws will be righteous, and those who 
 are hit by them cannot pose as victims of 
 "class legislation." But when farmers or 
 bankers or iron-moulders legislate for them- 
 selves as a class and to the damage of others, 
 they pull the game askew and spoil it. 
 
 On considering how often in the last 
 quarter century tariff-protected businesses, 
 the railroads, the public utility corpora- 
 tions, telegraph, telephone, express, lumr 
 ber, coal, oil, insurance, and the various 
 trusts have captured and operated the ma- 
 chinery of government, one savors a fine 
 irony in calling ours a r6gime of " indi- 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 147 
 
 vidualism." Is it, then, a part of the game 
 founded on private property and free enter- 
 prise to grant exclusive perpetual franchises, 
 to exempt surplus values from taxation, to 
 make the corporation charter a contract, to 
 exalt corporations into citizens with a right 
 to the enjoyment of interstate comity, to 
 legitimate the holding company, to enjoin 
 strikers from the exercise of fundamental 
 rights, to debar a policy-holder from suing 
 the management of an insurance company 
 for an accounting, injunction, or receiver- 
 ship, save with the consent of the attorney- 
 general of the state ? Indeed, it would be 
 easy to name commonwealths that exem- 
 plify nothing but the covert domination of 
 Big Business. But it is impossible that men 
 should long acquiesce in a regime of sheer 
 capitalism. There is sure to form a body 
 of tangent opinion denying everything that 
 capitalism affirms and affirming everything 
 that capitalism denies. The Nemesis of 
 treating private property, freedom of en- 
 
148 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 terprise, and corporate undertaking as in- 
 struments of private gain rather than of 
 public welfare, is the root-and-branch man 
 who urges us to escape the Unendurable by- 
 taking refuge in the Impossible. 
 
 The revolutionary socialist charges to 
 " the competitive system " ills four fifths 
 of vv^hich arise from monopoly. He saddles 
 individualism w^ith the sins of a commer- 
 cialized politics, and sees the polluter of 
 politics in capital rather than in Big Busi- 
 ness. The abysmal inequalities of wealth 
 he deems a natural development under 
 " private ownership of the instruments of 
 production," rather than an outgrowth of 
 privilege. In swollen fortunes he sees the 
 vestibule not to plutocracy, but to social 
 revolution. Policies which protect the in- 
 dependent concerns and the petty proper- 
 ties he finds " reactionary." He stigmatizes 
 as " bourgeois " the endeavor to save the 
 little investors from the maw of the preda- 
 tory financier, and dreams of a coming soci- 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 149 
 
 ety moulded to the heart's desire of wage- 
 earners. Although, while rents and mono- 
 poly profits rise, the earnings of capital are 
 falling, he proclaims the right of labor to 
 the whole produce, and the wrongfulness 
 of any return to the owner of capital. For 
 a tested workable regime he offers a vague, 
 ill-considered scheme built largely out of 
 antitheses to the actual and sharply at va- 
 riance with human nature on its present 
 plane. Infatuated with his chimera, he 
 lifts no finger to reach the near-by good, 
 while his wild proposals excite apprehen- 
 sions which hinder the progress of genuine 
 constructive work. 
 
 The truth is, on the plane of our inher- 
 ited institutions government might be so 
 administered in the publit-welfare spirit, 
 that three fourths of the, subversive sen- 
 timent existing would vanish. But the 
 policy of" Score while you're in ! " plays 
 into the hands of the radicals who tell the 
 workingman "there is no halfway house 
 
150 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 between capitalism and collectivism." "Our 
 innings ! " cries Big Business exultantly, 
 and with fifty-year franchise laws, iniqui- 
 tous tariff schedules, excessive rail way- mail 
 charges, grabbing of public mineral lands, 
 corrupt sale of canals and gas plants, fake 
 meat inspection, Niagara grabs, and the 
 cynical denial of protection to labor, it 
 plunges ahead, inviting the day when the 
 cry will ring out, " To your tents, O 
 Israel 1 " Every tampering with the simple 
 logical rules of the game on the theory 
 that if you take care of business business 
 will take care of the general welfare, or if 
 you take care of the capitalist the capitalist 
 will take care of the workingman, adds to 
 those who think the game itself so hope- 
 lessly bad that there is no use in trying to 
 make it fair. 
 
 In the sphere of opinion nothing so 
 favors the root-and-branch men as the 
 ascendency of commercial standards of 
 success. Certainly you may rate the business 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 151 
 
 man by the money he has been able to make 
 under the rules of his game. But the sages 
 of all time agree that the writer, thinker, 
 scholar, clergyman, jurist, officer, admin- 
 istrator, and statesman must not be mere 
 profit seekers, nor may their social stand- 
 ing depend on their financial rating. The 
 intrusion of Mammon's standards into such 
 callings makes socialists of thousands who 
 do not really believe that the exchange of 
 money for labor is " exploitation." 
 
 Those who put their faith in a transfig- 
 ured individualism should make haste to 
 clean the hull of the old ship for the coming 
 great battle with the opponents of private 
 capital and individual initiative. Certainly 
 many of the villainies and oppressions that 
 befoul it are no more a part of individualism 
 than are the barnacles and trailing weed a 
 part of the vessel. Moreover, if they are to 
 put up a good fight for the ship, it behooves 
 them to rid it of the buccaneers, wreckers, 
 and shanghaiers that now impudently claim 
 
152 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 the shelter of its flag, and by their sinister 
 presence compromise the efforts of its legi- 
 timate defenders. 
 
 THE CONSPICUOUSLY SUCCESSFUL VIOLATER 
 OF THE RULES OF THE GAME ROBS US 
 OF THAT WHICH IS MORE PRECIOUS 
 THAN GOLD 
 
 The enterprises that have succeeded by 
 trampling on the laws have done worse 
 than extort money from us. After all, the 
 monopolist as such hurts us no more than a 
 drouth, a May frost, the boll weevil, or the 
 chinch bug ; and these are not calamities of 
 the first rank, for, though they lessen our 
 comfort, they do not leave us less civilized. 
 But as successful law-breaker, the monopo- 
 list takes from us more than money : he 
 takes away our ideals, leaving us more ape 
 and less man. For twenty years the writer 
 has watched the effect upon college young 
 men of the conspicuous triumph of the first 
 great commercial pirate — the oil trust — 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 153 
 
 over able competitors, common carriers, oil 
 producers, public prosecutors, attorneys- 
 general, courts, legislatures, newspapers, 
 and leaders of opinion. Many left college 
 for the battle of life with the conviction 
 that the ideals of success held up by their 
 instructors were unpractical. " The preach- 
 ers and professors and commencement 
 speakers are old fogies," says one. "This 
 isn't the kind of world they think it is. 
 They are fussy old maids, not strong men." 
 "With all these fine principles," says an- 
 other, "you'd be a dead one from the start. 
 You'd never get into the game at all." 
 " Money 's the thing ! With money you 're 
 It, no matter who kicks," says a third. " I 'm 
 going to climb into the band-wagon, not 
 hoot at it as it goes by." So, for several 
 college generations, one could mark in the 
 ebb of generous ideals and the mounting 
 of a precocious cynicism the working of 
 the virus. If such was the impression of 
 triumphant lawlessness upon young men 
 
154 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 whose horizon had been widened by aca- 
 demic culture, what must it have been 
 upon the multitudes of callow youth that 
 from the school-boy desk go ill-furnished 
 forth into active life ? The founder of the 
 oil trust may give us back our money, but 
 not if he send among us a hundred Wesleys 
 can he give us back the lost ideals. 
 
 UNLESS RULES BE ENFORCED, THE MORAL 
 PLANE WILL NOT BE LIFTED SIMPLY 
 BY ADDING TO THE NUMBER OF RIGHT- 
 EOUS MEN 
 
 Many spiritual leaders imagine that the 
 Kingdom of Heaven comes simply by re- 
 generating souls, that as man after man 
 turns his face upward society is duly up- 
 lifted. It would follow that the quiet work 
 on individuals does not need to be supple- 
 mented by the recourse to law or public 
 opinion, and that the Puritan's endeavor to 
 establish righteousness is superfluous. 
 
 This may have been true before com- 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 155 
 
 petition became lord of life, but now that 
 the few lead off while the rest must follow 
 suit, much depends on giving the lead to 
 the good man rather than the bad man. 
 You may add to the number of good men, 
 but, without enforced rules, it will be im- 
 possible for them to stay in the higher 
 posts and callings. For the social trend 
 denies most men a free hand. More and 
 more the chief vocations come under the 
 baton of competition, so that one may not 
 maintain one's self in them at all unless one 
 feels at liberty to do as his rivals are per- 
 mitted to do. Those in the same line must 
 move in lock step, and the pace is set by 
 the meanest man who is allowed to con- 
 tinue in the business. The department stor^ 
 that pays its girls living wages and closes 
 at six can hardly live in the same town with 
 one that pays four dollars a week and closes 
 at nine. If the price of glass jars is fixed 
 by the manufacturer who overdrives little 
 boys, every competitor must, unless he pos- 
 
1^ 
 
 156 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 sesses some offsetting advantage, conform 
 to this practice. Leave the business he may, 
 change it he cannot. If one dealer in foods 
 successfully adulterates, his fellows must 
 follovs^ suit or else seek their patrons among 
 the few who prefer a brand because it is 
 dear. As for the dispenser of pure drugs, 
 there is no place for him until the law steps 
 in to standardize quality. The one shipper 
 who extorts an illegal rate obliges all other 
 < shippers in his line to break the law or be 
 snuffed out. So long as there are able attor- 
 neys willing to handle the corporation work 
 just as it comes, clean or dirty, the lawyer 
 who insists on picking and choosing must 
 mildew in the basement of his profession. 
 If the lavish use of money is countenanced 
 in politics, no poor man can win without 
 truckling to the contributors of campaign 
 funds. 
 1' It is chiefly the directive groups in the 
 '\ social scale that are thus swayed by the 
 i twentieth man. The privates in the indus- 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 157 
 
 trial army do not move in lock step, for 
 they keep step with their officer ; their per- 
 formance is standardized for them by those 
 who give out the work. Farmers are inde- 
 pendent, and on the soil a man may still 
 live up to his ideals. In the learned pro- 
 fessions there are tricks, to be sure, but the 
 quack cannot set the pace. But in business, 
 finance, and politics it is more and more 
 the case that all who maintain themselves 
 therein must stand on about the same foot- 
 ing. Without pressure from outside, the 
 moral level of practice will be low, and the 
 good man will have to stagnate or get out. 
 The rule of money in politics means 
 " Wear the collar or quit." The control of 
 the press by financial interests is a placard, 
 " Stubborn truth-tellers not wanted." The 
 reckless rivalry among life insurance com- 
 panies advertises, " No room for the con- 
 servative manager." If it becomes common 
 for dealers to give " commissions " to ser- 
 vants or purchasing agents, the sign might 
 
158 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 as well be hung out, " No one who will 
 not bribe need apply." 
 
 How vain, then, to expect to better con- 
 ditions simply by adding to the number of 
 good men ! The converts would be obliged 
 to join the multitudes who have their work 
 cut out for them. They might, of course, 
 hew coal or lay bricks or drive oxen. But 
 business, finance, and politics and journal- 
 ism — so potent in the allotment of wealth 
 and of welfare, so authoritative in impress- 
 ing standards on the rising generation — 
 would become no whit better. There are 
 already enough granite men to man the 
 high posts ; but, till the ways be cleared for 
 them, they accumulate on the lower levels 
 where, having no free hand, they feel no 
 moral responsibility. By themselves they 
 can get no foothold at the strategic points 
 where conditions are made, where the weal 
 or woe of thousands is determined. With- 
 out aid they cannot maintain themselves 
 in these competitive fields. It is, therefore. 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 159 
 
 the first duty of society to establish the right^^ K5 
 eous by lifting the plane of competition. 
 
 Pure food laws mean an open door for 
 honest men in the purveying business. An 
 efficient state insurance department means 
 a chance for the " old-fashioned" manager. 
 A stricter ethical code for the legal profes- 
 sion would enable certain briefless lawyers 
 to forge to the front. Child-labor restric- 
 tion is a godsend to the humane manufac- 
 turer. Outlawing the sweaters' dens may 
 throw the ready-made clothing trade into 
 the hands of reputable men. Already in 
 banking we see a business, once the happy 
 hunting ground of swindlers, which, by 
 regulation, has come to be a field for honor- 
 able men. 
 
 It is easy to see what fifty years of public 
 condemnation of liquor-selling has done in 
 driving good men out of it. It is easy to 
 foresee what a lively public appreciation 
 and support of truth- telling newspapers, of 
 plain-spoken preachers, of fearless scholars. 
 
i6o RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 of civic-minded lawyers, of conscientious 
 merchants, of humane manufacturers, of 
 upright officials, of zealous prosecutors, 
 would do to populate these walks with good 
 men. 
 
 How useless is character without oppor- 
 tunity can be read in our recent political 
 history. In growing numbers during the 
 late eighties and the nineties, party ma- 
 chines, lackey to the greedy interests, 
 strove to retire from politics men of high 
 ideals and independent spirit. If, during 
 his trial term, the popular district attor- 
 ney, mayor, legislator, or congressman 
 spurned the collar, at the end a hidden 
 trap-door fell, and he dropped to ob- 
 livion. If the ringsters could not scheme 
 or slander or gavel him down in the 
 nominating convention, they knifed him 
 at the polls. Oiled by corporation money 
 the machines did their work well, and 
 the resulting survival of the pliable added 
 steadily to the putty faces in public life. 
 
RULES OF THE GAME i6i 
 
 Wiseacres laid the conspicuous decline in 
 public men to general moral decay or to 
 the superior attractions of the business 
 career, blind to the like falling off in the 
 character of the business men of the pe- 
 riod, and unaware that the bulk of the 
 American people are as rich as ever in 
 red corpuscles. That the spinal sort found 
 politics full of blocked stairways, while 
 the gutta-percha manikins of the bosses 
 and the Big Men of the Interests were 
 carried smoothly upward in the party 
 elevator, brought about, at last, that mor- 
 tifying end-of-the-century situation when, 
 over perhaps a third of the country, the 
 upper floors of the political fabric showed 
 a dwindling contingent of bold and public- 
 spirited men. From the upward rush of 
 sterling characters in the five years since 
 the grip of the "organization" began to 
 be loosened and the political stairways 
 cleared, judge what we lost during the 
 decades when we let so many consciences 
 
1 62 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 knock vainly at the barred portals of public 
 life! 
 
 Some, alive to the pace-setting power 
 of the twentieth man, stigmatize compe- 
 tition as deteriorating and cry out that it 
 is idle to expect improvement until the 
 competitive system is abolished. This 
 would be pouring out the baby with the 
 bath. Competition may pursue an upward 
 path or a downward path. When makers 
 adulterate or lyingly advertise, or overdrive 
 their help, or replace men with children, 
 they follow the downward path. When 
 they eliminate waste, improve their pro- 
 cesses, utilize by-products, install better 
 machines, they follow the upward path. 
 Collective industry would avoid the down- 
 ward path, but it might not follow the 
 upward path. The true policy is to fence 
 off the downward paths and leave com- 
 petition free to spur rivals into the upward 
 path. 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 163 
 
 THE RESISTANCE TO THE ENFORCEMENT / 
 OF RIGHTEOUS RULES CONSTANTLY IN- J 
 CREASES ' — 
 
 Restraint breeds a resistance correspond-'"! 
 ing to the loss it imposes. When we goU 
 to short-chain the interests which prey 
 on men's vices, they snap at us like jack- 
 als. Collective ownership of public utili- 
 ties may quiet the special interests that 
 now rage in the halter of regulation, but 
 by the time their anti-civic career is 
 ended another range of enterprises will be 
 springing against the leash. We declare 
 pipe-lines common carriers with the duty 
 to file tariffs, and we get refusal, subter- 
 fuges, freak tariffs, and onerous require- 
 ments that bar independents from using 
 the lines. If our children will not be 
 called upon to fix gas prices and street car 
 fares in the teeth of concentrated private 
 interest, they will have their hands full in 
 regulating railroad, telegraph, express, in- 
 
1 64 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 surance, pipe-line, and news-service rates ; 
 wharf, dock, storage, and cotton-baling 
 charges ; the prices of oil, anthracite coal, 
 ice, and school books ; and in prescribing 
 the conditions of manufacture and sale 
 of articles all the way from dressed beef 
 to corporation securities. 
 i Every year the points of contact — and 
 I of friction — between government and pri- 
 |vate interests have multiplied. In the days 
 of well-water, candles, sorghum, and flat 
 boats, there were no water, gas, sugar, or 
 railroad interests to vex politics. Home- 
 grown food did not call for the inspector. 
 Till the factory came there was no need 
 to bar children from toil or to enforce the 
 guarding of dangerous machinery. A gen- 
 eration ago the little razor-back gas and 
 horse-car companies had no call to mix 
 in politics; but the advent of water-gas 
 and the trolley, coupled with urban growth, 
 gave them the lard of monopoly profit to 
 defend, and made the public-service cor- 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 165 
 
 porations the arch-corrupters of city coun- 
 cils. Once the railroads competed, but 
 their consolidators have driven the de- 
 spairing shipper to look to government for 
 protection. On all sides w^e see businesses I 
 that, feeling less and less the automatic curb I 
 of competition, v^ill soon need the snaffle | 
 of public regulation. 
 
 As the smoke lifts w^e can mark just y yho 
 are resisti ng law and corrupting govern- 
 menfe, In the^cities the fight is^hiefly with 
 the vice -cater ers and the public-servicsiior- 
 porations. The former want a " wide open" i 
 town. The latter want unhampered enjoy- 1 1 
 ment of their monopoly power. They are ' 
 law-defying until they own the source of 
 law and can get perpetual grants on easy 
 terms with a free hand as to prices and fares 
 and exemption of their franchise values 
 from taxation. Battling along with these 
 big interests are bankers scheming for de- 
 posits of city funds, rookery landlords in 
 terror of the health-officer, business men 
 
1 66 RULES OF THE GAME 
 
 intent on grabbing an alley or a water- 
 front, and contractors eager to "job" pub- 
 lic works. 
 
 The state government labors heavily like 
 a steamboat working through the sudd on 
 the Upper Nile. The railroads want to 
 avert rate regulation and to own the state 
 board of equalization. The gas and street- 
 railway companies want " ripper " legis- 
 lation, the authorization of fifty-year fran- 
 chises, and immunity from taxation of 
 franchises or limitation of stock-watering. 
 Manufacturers want the unrestricted use 
 of child labor. Mining companies dread 
 short-hour legislation. Publishers want 
 their text-books foisted upon the schools. 
 The baking-powder trust wants rival 
 powders outlawed. The oil trust wants 
 to turn safety inspection against the inde- 
 pendents. A horde of harpies have the 
 knife out for pure-food bills. Brewers, 
 distillers, elevator combines, pet banks, 
 rotten insurance companies — all have a 
 
RULES OF THE GAME 167 
 
 motive for undermining government by 
 the people. 
 
 Thus time adds to the number of inter- 
 ests intent to break or to skew the rules of 
 the game. The phalanx lengthens of those 
 v^ho want government to be of india rubber 
 and not of iron. Of course this resistance 
 produces results. Under a pressure of ten 
 talents men collapse who were adamant 
 under the pressure a single talent can exert. 
 In view of the temptations we send them 
 against, we ought not to marvel that so 
 many public servants bend or break. It is 
 not to be expected that government can 
 withstand the growing strain without many 
 structural improvements. In any case, it is 
 certaln~that to tTie upholding of the rules 
 of the game society must' devote an increas- 
 ing share of its thought and conscience. 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U • S • A 
 
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