Equality Page 16

  CHAPTER XVI.

  AN EXCUSE THAT CONDEMNED.

  "I have read," said Edith, "that there never was a system of oppressionso bad that those who benefited by it did not recognize the moral senseso far as to make some excuse for themselves. Was the old system ofproperty distribution, by which the few held the many in servitudethrough fear of starvation, an exception to this rule? Surely the richcould not have looked the poor in the face unless they had some excuse tooffer, some color of reason to give for the cruel contrast between theirconditions."

  "Thanks for reminding us of that point," said the doctor. "As you say,there never was a system so bad that it did not make an excuse foritself. It would not be strictly fair to the old system to dismiss itwithout considering the excuse made for it, although, on the other hand,it would really be kinder not to mention it, for it was an excuse that,far from excusing, furnished an additional ground of condemnation for thesystem which it undertook to justify."

  "What was the excuse?" asked Edith.

  "It was the claim that, as a matter of justice, every one is entitled tothe effect of his qualities--that is to say, the result of his abilities,the fruit of his efforts. The qualities, abilities, and efforts ofdifferent persons being different, they would naturally acquireadvantages over others in wealth seeking as in other ways; but as thiswas according to Nature, it was urged that it must be right, and nobodyhad any business to complain, unless of the Creator.

  "Now, in the first place, the theory that a person has a right in dealingwith his fellows to take advantage of his superior abilities is nothingother than a slightly more roundabout expression of the doctrine thatmight is right. It was precisely to prevent their doing this that thepoliceman stood on the corner, the judge sat on the bench, and thehangman drew his fees. The whole end and amount of civilization hadindeed been to substitute for the natural law of superior might anartificial equality by force of statute, whereby, in disregard of theirnatural differences, the weak and simple were made equal to the strongand cunning by means of the collective force lent them.

  "But while the nineteenth-century moralists denied as sharply as we domen's right to take advantage of their superiorities in direct dealingsby physical force, they held that they might rightly do so when thedealings were indirect and carried on through the medium of things. Thatis to say, a man might not so much as jostle another while drinking a cupof water lest he should spill it, but he might acquire the spring ofwater on which the community solely depended and make the people pay adollar a drop for water or go without. Or if he filled up the spring soas to deprive the population of water on any terms, he was held to beacting within his right. He might not by force take away a bone from abeggar's dog, but he might corner the grain supply of a nation and reducemillions to starvation.

  "If you touch a man's living you touch him, would seem to be about asplain a truth as could be put in words; but our ancestors had not theleast difficulty in getting around it. 'Of course,' they said, 'you mustnot touch the man; to lay a finger on him would be an assault punishableby law. But his living is quite a different thing. That depends on bread,meat, clothing, land, houses, and other material things, which you havean unlimited right to appropriate and dispose of as you please withoutthe slightest regard to whether anything is left for the rest of theworld.'

  "I think I scarcely need dwell on the entire lack of any moraljustification for the different rule which our ancestors followed indetermining what use you might rightly make of your superior powers indealing with your neighbor directly by physical force and indirectly byeconomic duress. No one can have any more or other right to take awayanother's living by superior economic skill or financial cunning than ifhe used a club, simply because no one has any right to take advantage ofany one else or to deal with him otherwise than justly by any meanswhatever. The end itself being immoral, the means employed could notpossibly make any difference. Moralists at a pinch used to argue that agood end might justify bad means, but none, I think, went so far as toclaim that good means justified a bad end; yet this was precisely whatthe defenders of the old property system did in fact claim when theyargued that it was right for a man to take away the living of others andmake them his servants, if only his triumph resulted from superior talentor more diligent devotion to the acquisition of material things.

  "But indeed the theory that the monopoly of wealth could be justified bysuperior economic ability, even if morally sound, would not at all havefitted the old property system, for of all conceivable plans fordistributing property, none could have more absolutely defied everynotion of desert based on economic effort. None could have been moreutterly wrong if it were true that wealth ought to be distributedaccording to the ability and industry displayed by individuals."

  "All this talk started with the discussion of Julian's fortune. Now tellus, Julian, was your million dollars the result of your economic ability,the fruit of your industry?"

  "Of course not," I replied. "Every cent of it was inherited. As I haveoften told you, I never lifted a finger in a useful way in my life."

  "And were you the only person whose property came to him by descentwithout effort of his own?"

  "On the contrary, title by descent was the basis and backbone of thewhole property system. All land, except in the newest countries, togetherwith the bulk of the more stable kinds of property, was held by thattitle."

  "Precisely so. We hear what Julian says. While the moralists and theclergy solemnly justified the inequalities of wealth and reproved thediscontent of the poor on the ground that those inequalities werejustified by natural differences in ability and diligence, they knew allthe time, and everybody knew who listened to them, that the foundationprinciple of the whole property system was not ability, effort, or desertof any kind whatever, but merely the accident of birth, than which nopossible claim could more completely mock at ethics."

  "But, Julian," exclaimed Edith, "you must surely have had some way ofexcusing yourself to your conscience for retaining in the presence of aneedy world such an excess of good things as you had!"

  "I am afraid," I said, "that you can not easily imagine how callous wasthe cuticle of the nineteenth-century conscience. There may have beensome of my class on the intellectual plane of little Jack Horner inMother Goose, who concluded he must be a good boy because he pulled out aplum, but I did not at least belong to that grade. I never gave muchthought to the subject of my right to an abundance which I had donenothing to earn in the midst of a starving world of toilers, butoccasionally, when I did think of it, I felt like craving pardon of thebeggar who asked alms for being in a position to give to him."

  "It is impossible to get up any sort of a quarrel with Julian," said thedoctor; "but there were others of his class less rational. Cornered as totheir moral claim to their possessions, they fell back on that of theirancestors. They argued that these ancestors, assuming them to have had aright by merit to their possessions, had as an incident of that merit theright to give them to others. Here, of course, they absolutely confusedthe ideas of legal and moral right. The law might indeed give a personpower to transfer a legal title to property in any way that suited thelawmakers, but the meritorious right to the property, resting as it didon personal desert, could not in the nature of moral things betransferred or ascribed to any one else. The cleverest lawyer would neverhave pretended that he could draw up a document that would carry over thesmallest tittle of merit from one person to another, however close thetie of blood.

  "In ancient times it was customary to hold children responsible for thedebts of their fathers and sell them into slavery to make satisfaction.The people of Julian's day found it unjust thus to inflict upon innocentoffspring the penalty of their ancestors' faults. But if these childrendid not deserve the consequences of their ancestors' sloth, no more hadthey any title to the product of their ancestors' industry. Thebarbarians who insisted on both sorts of inheritance were more logicalthan Julian's contemporaries, who, rejecting one sort of inheritance,retained the other.
Will it be said that at least the later theory ofinheritance was more humane, although one-sided? Upon that point youshould have been able to get the opinion of the disinherited masses who,by reason of the monopolizing of the earth and its resources fromgeneration to generation by the possessors of inherited property, wereleft no place to stand on and no way to live except by permission of theinheriting class."

  "Doctor," I said, "I have nothing to offer against all that. We whoinherited our wealth had no moral title to it, and that we knew as wellas everybody else did, although it was not considered polite to refer tothe fact in our presence. But if I am going to stand up here in thepillory as a representative of the inheriting class, there are others whoought to stand beside me. We were not the only ones who had no right toour money. Are you not going to say anything about the money makers, therascals who raked together great fortunes in a few years by wholesalefraud and extortion?"

  "Pardon me, I was just coming to them," said the doctor. "You ladies mustremember," he continued, "that the rich, who in Julian's day possessednearly everything of value in every country, leaving the masses merescraps and crumbs, were of two sorts: those who had inherited theirwealth, and those who, as the saying was, had made it. We have seen howfar the inheriting class were justified in their holdings by theprinciple which the nineteenth century asserted to be the excuse forwealth--namely, that individuals were entitled to the fruit of theirlabors. Let us next inquire how far the same principle justified thepossessions of these others whom Julian refers to, who claimed that theyhad made their money themselves, and showed in proof lives absolutelydevoted from childhood to age without rest or respite to the piling up ofgains. Now, of course, labor in itself, however arduous, does not implymoral desert. It may be a criminal activity. Let us see if these men whoclaimed that they made their money had any better title to it thanJulian's class by the rule put forward as the excuse for unequal wealth,that every one has a right to the product of his labor. The most completestatement of the principle of the right of property, as based on economiceffort, which has come down to us, is this maxim: 'Every man is entitledto his own product, his whole product, and nothing but his product.' Now,this maxim had a double edge, a negative as well as a positive, and thenegative edge is very sharp. If everybody was entitled to his ownproduct, nobody else was entitled to any part of it, and if any one'saccumulation was found to contain any product not strictly his own, hestood condemned as a thief by the law he had invoked. If in the greatfortunes of the stockjobbers, the railroad kings, the bankers, the greatlandlords, and the other moneyed lords who boasted that they had begunlife with a shilling--if in these great fortunes of mushroom rapidity ofgrowth there was anything that was properly the product of the efforts ofany one but the owner, it was not his, and his possession of it condemnedhim as a thief. If he would be justified, he must not be more careful toobtain all that was his own product than to avoid taking anything thatwas not his product. If he insisted upon the pound of flesh awarded himby the letter of the law, he must stick to the letter, observing thewarning of Portia to Shylock:

  Nor cut thou less nor more But just a pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more Or less than a just pound, be it so much As makes light or heavy in the substance, Or the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple; nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair, Thou diest, and thy goods are confiscate.

  How many of the great fortunes heaped up by the self-made men of yourday, Julian, would have stood that test?"

  "It is safe to say," I replied, "that there was not one of the lot whoselawyer would not have advised him to do as Shylock did, and resign hisclaim rather than try to push it at the risk of the penalty. Why, dearme, there never would have been any possibility of making a great fortunein a lifetime if the maker had confined himself to his own product. Thewhole acknowledged art of wealth-making on a large scale consisted indevices for getting possession of other people's product without too openbreach of the law. It was a current and a true saying of the times thatnobody could honestly acquire a million dollars. Everybody knew that itwas only by extortion, speculation, stock gambling, or some other form ofplunder under pretext of law that such a feat could be accomplished. Youyourselves can not condemn the human cormorants who piled up these heapsof ill-gotten gains more bitterly than did the public opinion of theirown time. The execration and contempt of the community followed the greatmoney-getters to their graves, and with the best of reason. I have hadnothing to say in defense of my own class, who inherited our wealth, butactually the people seemed to have more respect for us than for theseothers who claimed to have made their money. For if we inheritors hadconfessedly no moral right to the wealth we had done nothing to produceor acquire, yet we had committed no positive wrong to obtain it."

  "You see," said the doctor, "what a pity it would have been if we hadforgotten to compare the excuse offered by the nineteenth century for theunequal distribution of wealth with the actual facts of thatdistribution. Ethical standards advance from age to age, and it is notalways fair to judge the systems of one age by the moral standards of alater one. But we have seen that the property system of the nineteenthcentury would have gained nothing by way of a milder verdict by appealingfrom the moral standards of the twentieth to those of the nineteenthcentury. It was not necessary, in order to justify its condemnation, toinvoke the modern ethics of wealth which deduce the rights of propertyfrom the rights of man. It was only necessary to apply to theactual realities of the system the ethical plea put forth in itsdefense--namely, that everybody was entitled to the fruit of his ownlabor, and was not entitled to the fruit of anybody's else--to leave notone stone upon another of the whole fabric."

  "But was there, then, absolutely no class under your system," saidEdith's mother, "which even by the standards of your time could claim anethical as well as a legal title to their possessions?"

  "Oh, yes," I replied, "we have been speaking of the rich. You may set itdown as a rule that the rich, the possessors of great wealth, had nomoral right to it as based upon desert, for either their fortunesbelonged to the class of inherited wealth, or else, when accumulated in alifetime, necessarily represented chiefly the product of others, more orless forcibly or fraudulently obtained. There were, however, a greatnumber of modest competencies, which were recognized by public opinion asbeing no more than a fair measure of the service rendered by theirpossessors to the community. Below these there was the vast mass ofwell-nigh wholly penniless toilers, the real people. Here there wasindeed abundance of ethical title to property, for these were theproducers of all; but beyond the shabby clothing they wore, they hadlittle or no property."

  "It would seem," said Edith, "that, speaking generally, the class whichchiefly had the property had little or no right to it, even according tothe ideas of your day, while the masses which had the right had little orno property."

  "Substantially that was the case," I replied. "That is to say, if youtook the aggregate of property held by the merely legal title ofinheritance, and added to it all that had been obtained by means whichpublic opinion held to be speculative, extortionate, fraudulent, orrepresenting results in excess of services rendered, there would belittle property left, and certainly none at all in considerable amounts."

  "From the preaching of the clergy in Julian's time," said the doctor,"you would have thought the corner stone of Christianity was the right ofproperty, and the supreme crime was the wrongful appropriation ofproperty. But if stealing meant only taking that from another to which hehad a sound ethical title, it must have been one of the most difficult ofall crimes to commit for lack of the requisite material. When one tookaway the possessions of the poor it was reasonably certain that he wasstealing, but then they had nothing to take away."

  "The thing that seems to me the most utterly incredible about all thisterrible story," said Edith, "is that a system which was such adisastrous failure in its effects on the general welfare, which, bydisinheriting the great mass of the people, had made them its bi
tterfoes, and which finally even people like Julian, who were itsbeneficiaries, did not attempt to defend as having any ground offairness, could have maintained itself a day."

  "No wonder it seems incomprehensible to you, as now, indeed, it seems tome as I look back," I replied. "But you can not possibly imagine, as Imyself am fast losing the power to do, in my new environment, howbenumbing to the mind was the prestige belonging to the immemorialantiquity of the property system as we knew it and of the rule of therich based on it. No other institution, no other fabric of power everknown to man, could be compared with it as to duration. No differenteconomic order could really be said ever to have been known. There hadbeen changes and fashions in all other human institutions, but no radicalchange in the system of property. The procession of political, social,and religious systems, the royal, imperial, priestly, democratic epochs,and all other great phases of human affairs, had been as passing cloudshadows, mere fashions of a day, compared with the hoary antiquity of therule of the rich. Consider how profound and how widely ramified a root inhuman prejudices such a system must have had, how overwhelming thepresumption must have been with the mass of minds against the possibilityof making an end of an order that had never been known to have abeginning! What need for excuses or defenders had a system so deeplybased in usage and antiquity as this? It is not too much to say that tothe mass of mankind in my day the division of the race into rich andpoor, and the subjection of the latter to the former, seemed almost asmuch a law of Nature as the succession of the seasons--something thatmight not be agreeable, but was certainly unchangeable. And just here, Ican well understand, must have come the hardest as well as, necessarily,the first task of the revolutionary leaders--that is, of overcoming theenormous dead weight of immemorial inherited prejudice against thepossibility of getting rid of abuses which had lasted so long, andopening people's eyes to the fact that the system of wealth distributionwas merely a human institution like others, and that if there is anytruth in human progress, the longer an institution had endured unchanged,the more completely it was likely to have become out of joint with theworld's progress, and the more radical the change must be which, shouldbring it into correspondence with other lines of social evolution."

  "That is quite the modern view of the subject," said the doctor. "I shallbe understood in talking with a representative of the century whichinvented poker if I say that when the revolutionists attacked thefundamental justice of the old property system, its defenders were ableon account of its antiquity to meet them with a tremendous bluff--onewhich it is no wonder should have been for a time almost paralyzing. Butbehind the bluff there was absolutely nothing. The moment public opinioncould be nerved up to the point of calling it, the game was up. Theprinciple of inheritance, the backbone of the whole property system, atthe first challenge of serious criticism abandoned all ethical defenseand shriveled into a mere convention established by law, and asrightfully to be disestablished by it in the name of anything fairer. Asfor the buccaneers, the great money-getters, when the light was onceturned on their methods, the question was not so much of saving theirbooty as their bacon.

  "There is historically a marked difference," the doctor went on, "betweenthe decline and fall of the systems of royal and priestly power and thepassing of the rule of the rich. The former systems were rooted deeply insentiment and romance, and for ages after their overthrow retained astrong hold on the hearts and imaginations of men. Our generous race hasremembered without rancor all the oppressions it has endured save onlythe rule of the rich. The dominion of the money power had always beendevoid of moral basis or dignity, and from the moment its materialsupports were destroyed, it not only perished, but seemed to sink away atonce into a state of putrescence that made the world hurry to bury itforever out of sight and memory."