as i write, i am, myself oppressed by this nemesis of futility. half a dozen times while i was writing this book i stopped to reason with myself to the effect that it wouldn’t do any good, that the rich will not read it, and that, even if they do, it cannot pierce through the armour of self-conceit, vanity, and arrogance. yet i have persevered, in the hope that perhaps some few will read and understand, and, instead of setting me down as an alarmist and an agitator, will at least consider me honest, and perhaps set to work for themselves to find out the truth about these things.
that grim truth is that we as a class are condemned to death. we have outlived our time. it is not necessary, as it was in the earlier ages of the world’s history, that the mass of the people should be enslaved to give leisure to an upper class in the pursuit of luxuries, of refinement, of the factors that go to the making of civilization. instead of being the roof and crown of things, the wealthy class in america to-day has sunk to the level of the parasite. the time has come when the producing classes are about to bring it to judgment. in fact, to-day we stand indicted before the court of civilization. we are charged openly with being parasites; and the mass of evidence against us is so overwhelming that there is no doubt whatever about the verdict of history, if indeed it must come to a verdict.
idleness is doomed as a vocation. of that i am perfectly certain. even in the social world it is becoming unfashionable. not so very long ago, in the fashionable world of new york, it was considered bad taste, in fact, it was a decided breach of etiquette, to inquire amongst the men of your acquaintance what anybody did for a living. within the past five years there has been a very decided change in this respect, and i constantly hear that very question asked, without rebuke, in the most fashionable clubs of the city.
a man whom i know pretty well, himself a member of the highest social order, but a man of indefatigable energy, recently put very neatly this fact that many of the quondam idle class are now engaging themselves in useful pursuits. on the street one day he met a young man, a confirmed idler of long standing. he exchanged the time of day with him, and was told that he was about to go to europe to join in the social season of london. he congratulated him and said he thought it was a good thing to do.
a few nights later, talking to me about him, he said:
“i feel sorry for charlie. he seems so lonely. he can’t find any one to play with him!”
in a measure, that is true. the confirmed idler of the social world is slowly coming to be despised instead of envied. he still infests a few of the up-town clubs, but even here he is more and more relegated to the bottom of the social list. it is harder and harder every social year to fill up the ranks for social entertainment. a dinner or an early reception can be managed223 very well, for the young men who work will go to such functions, perhaps as freely as they ever went. it is far different with the late dance or the late reception.
if you could go down into wall street and call the roll of the bond houses, it would astound you to discover how many young men of the highest social class are working very hard right at the bottom of the ladder of industry learning the financial business. a friend of mine, a fairly well-to-do man of a small city in the middle west, sent his son to me a year or so ago with a letter asking me to introduce him in wall street with a view to his learning the bond business. he had chosen that as his vocation in life, and he had taken a special course in college as a preparation for it. i sent him, with personal letters, to half a dozen friends of mine, partners in various houses. i told him simply to look around, at first, and to talk freely and frankly to these gentlemen about the chances for a young man in that line of business.
he came back to me in the course of a week, considerably crestfallen. he had looked forward to earning his living in an honourable way. he found the conditions in this labour market most deplorable from his point of view. according to his story, every one of these big bond houses announced itself able to get all the apprentice labour that it needed at from five dollars to ten dollars a week. his report interested me so much that i went around myself to some of my friends to learn the causes of this strange condition.
in the case of one bond house i discovered that it had one very skilful and very high225 paid man selling bonds at retail throughout the city. working under him were three young men learning the bond business. i knew them all, personally, socially. they belonged to one of the best of the younger sets. two of them went out a good deal, and the third had a reputation as something of a student. one of them i knew to be the happy possessor of four automobiles and a small stable of horses. both the others owned automobiles, and belonged to some of the most expensive, as well as the best, of the up-town clubs.
one of these young men—and none of them was so very young at that—received the salary of fifteen dollars a week. the other two were getting ten dollars apiece. all three were college men. my friend in this bond house told me that two of them were making good; but the third has the “ten o’clock in the morning habit,” and will not last very long. of course, none of them can begin to live on the money he receives for his work. i do not think that any one of them could pay his tailor and haberdashery bill with his salary, and even the bond house clerk has to eat, you know.
further investigation showed me that there is a perfect flood of these young men turned loose each year upon the financial districts of this country, not only here, but in chicago, boston, philadelphia, and st. louis. they go to work for trivial salaries, because they care little or nothing about the amount that they receive. they are not working for wages, but they are working for emancipation. they do not want to be idlers, because they know that in these days idleness is doomed. they pick out wall street, particularly, i think, the bond department of wall street, because that is recognized as a world of real work that is fitted to the tastes and abilities of a well-educated but not too rigorously trained young man.
these young men are by no means effete dilletanti. they are strong, vigorous young men, and they plunge into what they know to be a competitive field with a full knowledge that they are not likely to go very far unless they earn their way. for in these same offices, and working in the field in hot competition with them, there is still an army of young men from the provinces, so to speak, who actually do live upon the proceeds of their work. it gave a real personal joy to discover that, in several of the banking houses which i looked into, the poor young man who starts228 out into the world in competition with these scions of the wealthy aristocracy is paid a better salary at the beginning than is his moneyed competitor, and has at least an equal chance for advancement. indeed it is recognized that the wealthy young man has a marked advantage through his personal acquaintance with men of money, and more is expected of him in return from his training than is expected of the self-supporting clerk. as a rule, however, the real workers are given outlying districts of the country to canvass, while the aristocracy of the profession does its work in the city.
i sketch this phenomenon in some detail, because i think it is a very significant thing in its bearing upon the subject of this book. perhaps more than any other one outlet it is an avenue leading toward honourable229 labour, suited to the capacity and the taste of our wealthy young men. that the market is crowded to-day, and has been crowded for five years past, more than it ever was crowded before in the history of the financial profession, speaks far more eloquently than i can speak of the change of sentiment amongst the wealthy.
in the harvard club, of a saturday afternoon in winter, you will find groups of young men sitting around and talking, just as you would have found them fifteen years ago. there is one marked difference. fifteen years ago they would have been talking about social events, the sports, and various other trivial things that went in those days to make up the sum and substance of a fashionable young man’s career. nowadays many of these groups are earnestly discussing finance, not in its relation230 to their own private fortunes or misfortunes in the stock market, but in its broader aspect. you hear such phrases as “gold supply,” “premium bond,” “over-production of securities,” “diversion of money from the legitimate market,” “intrinsic value,” “investment outlook,” etc. they are, in fact, talking shop; and i do not think i have ever met any other class of men more addicted to the habit than these novitiates of the financial game.
even their sisters, nurtured in luxury, and taught, as they still unhappily are, that elegant idleness is the proper portion of the sex, are beginning to rebel. they are seeking knowledge eagerly, sometimes in places and under circumstances that promise not the best of results. more particularly during the past five or ten years there has been the really extraordinary231 propaganda amongst the women of the younger set in our great cities looking toward the strengthening of the body and the building up of a vigorous and buoyant health that would have been considered actually vulgar in the generation that preceded them. health, in fact, in many of the younger sets, has become almost a religion, a sort of fetich. they study hygiene, biology, and the mystery of life. perhaps they are coming to know too much at too early an age, but in excuse let it be said that it is far better to know too much than to know too little.
on the other hand, i have already written of the tendency of the fashionable young women of the day toward charity and reform. they follow fads madly, working as hard and using up as much nerve force in this pursuit as any young woman of the232 middle class gives to her household work, or even to her bread-winning activities. i could name a dozen young women of the finest families in new york who within the past twelve months have actually thrown themselves into this sort of function with such fiery ardour and zeal that they have either totally neglected their social activities or broken down completely under the strain of double labour. such instances are more numerous year by year. i do not know that i fully approve it, but i set it down here for the judgment of the world.
so, on the one hand, the ranks of the doomed class are being swiftly depleted by what i must call rank out and out desertion. the idle rich, particularly the younger set, are depleted year by year by squadrons of young men and women who233 go over to the army of workers. i do not know that there is any one single sign in the world in which i live that gives me greater hope than this. the dishonour of inactivity, sloth, and idleness is coming to be widely recognized in the very best classes of society. old prejudices are breaking down under the demands of the younger men for something to do. even labour with the hands is not beneath them. as i pause to think, i could name at least half a dozen young men of my own set who within the past two or three years have gone into the railroad business, carried chains with engineering gangs in the field, or done other real manual labour. to-day the son of one of the oldest and noblest families in new york is superintending the laying of sewers in a new england town under a municipal contract.
if actual desertion is thinning the ranks of the idle rich, there is another and even greater cause which will tend in the future, as it is tending to-day, to limit the number of this class. it lies much deeper than the mere phenomenon of desertion. it is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the removal of the means of making gigantic fortunes through the exploitation of men.
i do not intend to dwell upon this phase of the passing of the idle rich to any great extent, because its effects are necessarily slow. indeed, they will not be felt for many years to come. yet i would point out one or two phases of this question that seem to me to be intensely interesting and vastly important. in the first place, the opportunities for the making of gigantic fortunes are being limited more and more by the world-embracing activities of those who already possess gigantic wealth.
let any man discover in the mountains of mexico, in the forbidding ridges of alaska, or on the plains of the yukon, great new deposits of iron, or coal, or oil, and immediately, almost before the news of such discovery has reached the world at large, a dozen secret agents rush to investigate. they represent the pearsons, of london; the guggenheims or morgans, of new york; the rockefellers or the rothschilds, of new york or germany. they are the first in the field; they preëmpt, for fortunes already far beyond competition, the opportunity of making a tremendous fortune out of the new discovery.
think of the raw materials of commerce—sugar, meat, oil, iron, coal, copper, cotton, wheat, corn, lumber—is it not absolutely true that in the manufacture and exploitation of this tremendous mass of the raw material of wealth the possibility of amassing enormous fortunes is almost hopelessly limited by the activities and the world-girdling power of capitalist groups already far beyond the reach of competition?
the free land of america is gone. all these great staples that have been in generations past the vehicles in which men have been carried upon the road to lordly fortunes are already in the hands of a few hundred families. this fact, sinister as it undoubtedly is in its broader aspect upon the economic conditions of the country, must certainly tend to eliminate more and more the possibility for the creation of additional gigantic industrial fortunes in this country. in so far as this is true it is a very important item indeed among the forces that tend toward the elimination of the idle rich.
more than this, as i have pointed out already in a phrase, the growing knowledge on the part of the people of the ways and means by which they have been exploited for the creation of wealth will surely prevent any further long-continued growth of this same process. men are being sent up to congress year by year sworn to break up and destroy the coördinate political machine that has made possible the growth of the power of the trusts. earnest fighters like la follette may well be watched, for though no little of his work and his talk is based on fallacy, yet in this at least he represents the temper of the whole united states, that he is a bitter and an ardent enemy of the concentration of wealth. the agitation over the guggenheim claims in alaska, the bursts of popular acclaim over land-fraud prosecutions in the west, the sardonic joy of the people over the retrieving of enormous coal land areas stolen by railroads, the warm enthusiasm of the west for government reclamation, conservation, and preëmption—these are signs of the times all pointing in the one direction.
they do not mark the end of the idle rich, to-day existent. they do point unmistakably toward the prevention of a new crop of great american fortunes won through exploitation of government property and popular rights. if you couple with them the ever-growing movement toward socialism, and the hundred and one private propaganda along strange and often faulty economic lines, you cannot help but feel as i feel, that even if there were a revolution, in a hundred years, when the present great fortunes of america are subdivided, split up, and scattered among a thousand heirs, the wealth of america will certainly not be held ninety-five per cent. in the hands of five per cent. of the people and five per cent. in the hands of the rest of the people. and it is self-evident that since the gathering together of wealth in the hands of the few gave us the idle rich, the natural scattering of that wealth into more and more hands as the years go on must tend in the other direction.
the days of the idle rich in america are as a tale that is told. to-morrow in this land there will be one of two things, either an evolution or a revolution.
... the class i represent will again be merged into and assimilated by the body of the nation.... we shall reënact in this land some of the most terrible tragedies of history.
