University of Virginia Library

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION.
THE PLUTOCRAT AND THE PAUPER

“FOR Christ's sake, Cap, give me the price of a sandwich!”

I stopped and surveyed the speaker, not because the request was unusual, but because the applicant for aid had not acquired the beggar's whine. He was a large, powerful man, evidently a mechanic, for every trade leaves its peculiar stamp upon its followers.

“Why should I give you a dime? You are far more able to work than I. A man with half your strength should be ashamed to beg.”

“Work?” he retorted bitterly. “Give me a job—at anything—and see if I do not prove myself a man.”

“But I have nothing for you to do.”

“A dozen men have told me that to-day . You sneer at me because I do not earn the bread I eat, yet decline to give me an opportunity to do so.”

I steered him against a lunch counter and watched him chisel desolation into a silver dollar, then listened to his story—one that I had heard a hundred times within the year. Thrown out of employment by the business depression, he had tramped in search of work until he found himself penniless, starving in the streets of a strange city. He handed me a letter, dated St. Louis, written by his wife. Some of the words were misspelled and the bad chirography was blotted as if by falling tears, but it breathed the spirit of a Roman matron, of a Spartan mother. Both the children were ill. She had obtained a little sewing and provided food and some medicine, but two months' rent was due and the landlord would turn them out unless it was promptly paid. She would do the best she could, and knew that her husband would do the same. Then through the blinding tears came a flash of nether fire. Transformed into respectable English it read:

“Were I a man I would not tramp from city to city begging employment only to be refused. Were I a man I would not see my babies starve while people are piling up millions of money which they can never need. In this country there should be an opportunity for every man to make a living. Were I a man I would make an effort to release myself and my unhappy fellows from this brutal industrial bondage, this chronic pauperism—if it cost my life. I have two sons, whom God knows I do dearly love; but I would consecrate them to the holy cause of human liberty if I knew they would perish on the scaffold. I would rather see them die like dogs than live like slaves.”

He sat a long time silent after returning the letter to his pocket, then said as though speaking to himself:

“I wonder if the rich people ever pause to reflect that there's a million brawny men in my condition to-night—a million men who only lack a leader? I wonder if they

think we'll stand this kind o' thing forever? Don't talk to me about patriotism,” he interrupted, fiercely. “No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach! Why should I care for the preservation of a government of, for and by the plutocrat? Let it go to the devil across lots! D—n a flag beneath which a competent and industrious mechanic cannot make a living. Anarchy? Is anarchy worse than starvation? When conditions become such that a workingman is half the time an ill-fed serf, and the other half a wretched vagabond, he's ready for a change of any kind—by any means. I am supposed to be entitled to `Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.' I have Liberty—to starve—and I can pursue Happiness—or rainbows—to my heart's content. There's absolutely no law prohibiting my using the horns of the moon for a hatrack if I feel so disposed!”
. . .

The optimists who are depending upon the “conservatism” of the American people to maintain intact our political and industrial systems; who proclaim that the present too apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few professional agitators, are of the same myopic brood as those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until the crust over the tartarean fires—steadily eaten away from beneath, steadily hammered upon from above—gave way with a crash like the crack of doom and that fair land was transformed as if by infernal magic into a high-flaming vortex of chaos, engulfing all forms and formulas, threatening the civilization of a world.

“After us the deluge!” cried those court parasites, who, with more understanding than their fellows, read aright the mene, mene, tekel upharsin traced upon the walls of royalty. But the deluge waited not upon their convenience. Like another avatar of Death gendered by Pride in the

womb of Sin, it burst forth to appall the world. But the American multi-millionaires mock at the “deluge”—can in nowise understand how it were possible for the thin crust that holds in thrall the fierce Gehenna fires to give 'way beneath their feet, dance they upon it never so hard.

The American nation is trembling on the verge of an industrial revolution—a revolution that is inevitable; that will come peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must. So ripe are the American workingmen for revolt against the existing order of things; so galled are they by the heavy yoke laid upon them; so desperate have they become that it but needs a strong man to organize and lead them, and our present industrial system—perhaps our political, also—would crumble like an eggshell in the grip of an angry Titan.

Nor is the dissatisfaction confined to the industrial class, the farmer, that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders the great world rests, is in full sympathy with every attack made upon the Cormorant by the Commune. While not ready for a revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the assaults of the proletariat. Yet the American press proclaims that all is well! The “able editor” looks into his leather spectacles—free trade or high tariff brand—and with owl-like gravity announces that if the import tax on putty be increased somewhat, or fiddle-strings be placed on the free list, the American mechanic will have money to throw at the birds—that mortgages and mendicancy will pass like a hideous nightmare, and the farmer gayly bestride his sulky plow attired like unto Solomon in all his glory.
. . .

What is wrong? In God's name, what is right? Here we have the most fertile land upon the globe, the best sup

plied with all things necessary to a prosperous people. Our resources are not half developed; there is no dearth of capital; our working people are the most intelligent, energetic and capable upon which the sun ever shone.

Man for man the world never contained their equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; toiling, saving—at very death-grips with destiny—they are sinking year by year deeper into the Slough of Despond—into that most frightful of all Gehennas, the hell of want!

Nor is this all. While those who toil are but fighting a losing battle wearing out hand and heart and brain for a crust that becomes ever scantier, ever more bitter—there are thousands and tens of thousands who cannot even obtain the poor privilege of tramping in this brutal treadmill, but must stand with folded arms and starve, else beg or steal. All this might be borne—would be endured with heroic fortitude—if such were the lot of all; but while the opportunity to wear out one's strength for a bare existence is becoming ever more a privilege to be grateful for, we are making millionaires by the hundreds. While the many battle desperately for life, the few are piling up fortunes beside which the famed wealth of ancient Lydia's kings were but a beggar's patrimony. The employer is becoming ever more an autocrat, the employee ever more dependent upon his good pleasure for the poor privilege of existing upon the earth.
. . .

To say that the “conservatism” of the American workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but the shackles and the knout. He will not endure it much longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit—when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied him in such plentitude by aspiring politicians and “able editors,” look ye to see something break.
. . .

The problems for our statesmen to solve are, First, how to insure to every person able and willing to work an opportunity to earn an honest livelihood; Second, to effect a more suitable distribution of the wealth created among the factors engaged in its production. All other problems now engaging the attention of publicists sink into insignificance beside these. They are to practical statecraft what the immortality of the soul is to theology. They must be solved; at least, some progress must be made in that direction or force will ere long attempt it. The trouble with such convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil, but do not always compensate it with permanent good. They are a kind of social mania a potu, racking the whole organism, debilitating it— good chiefly as frightful examples of what evil customs lead to.

To diagnose the disease and prescribe a remedy were no easy task. There is infinitely more the matter than a maladjustment of the tariff, inflated railway stocks or a dearth of white dollars. It is a most difficult, a wonderfully intricate problem—one entirely without precedent. The rapid development of America; the still more remarkable advancement in the science of mechanics, conjoined to a political organism not yet fully developed, but half understood, yet marking an epoch in man's social progress; commercial customs of by-gone days surviving in the midst of much that is new—really when you come to think of it you may well wonder that we have got thus far without more than one great convulsion! Clearly it is no place for catholicons.

That a comparatively small class of men are absorbing the wealth of the country as fast as it is produced, leasing to those who create it scarce a bare subsistence, is patent to all; that the vast body of the people, clothed with political power and imbued with the spirit of “equality,” will not permit such conditions to long continue, any thoughtful man will concede. Even in European countries, where the working people have come to regard privileged classes as a matter of course, there are mutterings of a coming storm that will only gather fresh terrors by delay. In Europe the change will probably be wrought by revolution; in America it may be achieved by peaceful evolution if the moneyed aristocracy does not, with its checks and repressions—with its corrupted judiciary, purchased legislators and obsequious press—drive a people, already sorely vexed, to unreasoning madness.
. . .

What shall we do? We must avoid the two extremes—that of the radical reformer and the apostle of laissez faire. We will find a middle course safest and best—will need to proceed with caution, but by no means with cowardice. The politico-economic school that would at once change the existing order of things with as much sang-froid as a miller substitutes steam for water-power forgets that society is not a machine; that it was not made to order like a newspaper editorial, and that to attempt by a radical process to make it other than what it is—to change its genius arbitrarily—were as fatuous as trying to transform a wolf into a watchdog by a chemical process or surgical operation. But while the radical “reformer”—the man who would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism—is one dangerous extreme, we must remember that it is not the

only one. In avoiding Scylla we must not forget Charybdis. If we are to look ever to the past, to make no experiments, to become the bondslaves of precedent, then progress is at an end and society must petrify, retrograde or consume itself in fierce fire whirlwinds.

When the American people emancipate themselves from party-slavery—than which there is none more debasing; when they cease to fight the battles of ambitious place-hunters and begin in true earnest to fight their own, then, and not till then, will the faults of our social organism be rapidly reduced to the minimum. When the common people of this country decline to be divided into two or more hostile camps by “issues” carefully concocted by political harlequins, then will the combined wisdom, purified of partisan prejudice, evolve the best possible national polity.

How many of the hard-working people of this nation who are now assiduously assailing or defending the dogma of protection or free trade or any other of the many “issues” evolved from time to time by professional politicians as a kind of Pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into power—ever carefully considered the question in all its bearings; studied it from a national, sectional or even individual standpoint. Questions upon which Adam Smith and Auguste Compte, Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed, are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention—composed chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums—with less trouble than a colored wench selects a calico gown.

The American people, as P. T. Barnum long ago pointed out, have a weakness for humbugs. They are the natural prey of the charlatan, and in nothing more so than in matters political. Despite their boasted intelligence, they will follow with a trust that partakes of the pathetic

the mountebank who can perform the most sleight-of-hand tricks, the demagogue who can make the most noise. They think, but are too busy or indifferent to think deeply, to reason closely. They “jump at conclusions,” assert their correctness stubbornly and prove the courage of their convictions by their ballots. They demonstrate their “independence” by choosing their political fetich, their confidence in the infallibility of their judgment by worshiping it blindly. Herein lies the chief danger—danger that the American workingman will follow this or that ignus fatuus, hoping thereby to find a shorter northwest passage to impossible spice islands, until poverty has degraded him from a self-respecting sovereign into a volcanic sans culotte; until he loses hope of bettering his condition by whereases, resolutions, trades-unions, acts of Congress, etc., and, like another blind and desperate Samson, lays his brawny hands upon the pillars of the temple and pulls it down about his ears.