SCENE: The vicinity of 115th Street and Broadway, New York City, on a warm, lowery May night. Time, 11.15.
Approach along Broadway from 116th Street George Paul Syphers, Professor of Chemistry; Forbes Mitchell, Professor of Philosophy; Abner Barrett, Professor of Physics. Syphers is medium in height, slim, fiery, black-whiskered, barbered to perfection. He is loquacious and demonstrative. Mitchell is attenuated, humped, gray. He is quite old. Barrett is fifty, blonde, bald, heavy, silent.
SYPHERS
(As they reach the corner.) Well, I turn off here. That was an interesting discussion we had, eh? The fact is, Mitchell, as I told you the other day, I have passed out of my old materialistic point of view to a certain extent—not entirely—but now I see more order in things than I once did—a necessary if mechanistic order. It seems more or less inescapable to me, doesn’t it to you?
MITCHELL
(Doubtfully.) Well, yes, I might say—only—of course——
BARRETT
(Dogmatically.) I do not see how any one can doubt law. Everything obeys law of one kind and another.
SYPHERS
Quite so! Quite so! Law, of course. Everything obeys a law or laws of one kind and another. Nevertheless, there are so many confusing contradictions. Laws seem to conflict at times, don’t you think, even in chemical and sidereal space. You don’t deny that, do you?
BARRETT
Still, more knowledge might prove them to be anything but contradictory.
SYPHERS
Well, I admit that, too. Only I was merely suggesting that I see more definite order than I once did. A few years ago I could see nothing but disorder, chaos, the inexplicable clashing of forces. Of late I am not so sure. This matter of orthogenesis now; it appeals to me very much as demonstrating an intellectual if not a spiritual order, some great controlling force somewhere. I seem to see a definite tendency to order in things. Life has certainly built itself up through the ages in a very intelligent way indeed, don’t you think?
BARRETT
(Loftily.) Ye-es, of course, only there have been many errors and conflicts there too—sudden stoppage of plans in various directions.
MITCHELL
True, as I was about to point out.
SYPHERS
(Almost unconscious of interruption.) I admit that. I admit that. What I am getting at is this: all life, as we know it, is based on the cell—cell origination, cell multiplication, cell arrangement. That is an old story. Now here is something which is my own idea—it’s a mere theory, of course—that the whole thing may have been originated, somehow, somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically directed from somewhere, being thrown on a screen, as it were, like a moving-picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell-built-up pictures, like the movies, only we are telegraphed or telautographed from somewhere else, like those dot pictures that are now made electrically, built up dot by dot, millions of them coming rapidly by wireless or wire and being thrown on a screen of some kind—ether, the elements—you know what I mean. You have seen the telautograph pictures I mean, of course?
BARRETT
Yes, of course. Very ingenious. Very ingenious. But how do you prove the origination of the cell in the fashion that you want?
MITCHELL
(Aside.) A rather slow movie, I should say, considering the length of time it has taken to build it up.
SYPHERS
Well, in this way—it has its drawbacks, of course; you remember the experiments of that Irish scientist Burke, don’t you? He generated what he called a radiobe—a single cell in a plasm culture which he had hermetically sealed and which he kept under the influence of radium. I do not recall the exact facts of the case at the moment, and I do not believe that his deductions have since been accepted, but that is neither here nor there. That idea of his illustrates mine very well. If we could prove that one cell, one radiobe, had been or could be originated or generated by an outside influence of this kind—radium, if you wish, in a plasm of that kind—we would have to admit that the whole thing might be built up in some such fashion. Why, you could base a new philosophy on that, Mitchell. One radiobe generated in a plasm culture under radium or something else, some autogenetic force manifesting itself through a thing like radium, and there you are. After that you would have to grant the possibility of millions and billions of cells coming in that fashion, whole nations constructed of cells, as they have been.
MITCHELL
BARRETT
There was some hitch in that experiment, however. The chain wasn’t quite complete.
SYPHERS
I know—I know. I grant you that. All I’m insisting on is that if one cell, one radiobe, say, can be generated by a synthesis of energy, why not millions? And if millions, why not billions, the whole human family, in short, since we are a synthesis of cells—this whole visible scene in all its details? I know it sounds wild, but (to Mitchell) I have heard you yourself say that you thought it might be possible that we were all a part of some invisible psychic body, force body, in the mechanism of which we function in some way, just as the cells do in ours.
MITCHELL
(Much flattered.) Yes, I have said as much.
SYPHERS
Well, then, why may not my theory be true?
BARRETT
May? May? Of course it may. But how are you going to prove it? I myself have suggested that Mitchell’s larger psychic body, as he calls it, may be nothing more than a fetus, a secondary creature being built in the womb of a still larger organism, but what of it? All of us, everything that we see here, may be nothing more than parts of organs that are being constructed in some huge womb. This so-called higher psychic body may not even be complete yet, not ready to be born in its realm. But how do we know? There’s nothing to prove it.
SYPHERS
Just the same, if I had a few hundred thousand dollars I would enlarge my laboratory and pursue this subject. I believe that something may be discovered. I believe that I could prove it in the course of time. Why, snow crystals, tree and flower forms, everything, gives us a hint, sometimes instantaneously. Why do snow crystals assume almost instantaneously and out of nothing their beautiful forms? The controlling impulse is certainly artistic, isn’t it, and outside of anything we know? (He notes that he is pressing the matter too far and boring his two friends.) Well, good night. Glad to see you two at the meeting to-night. It was interesting, wasn’t it?
BARRETT
Very. (To himself.) He’s a terrible bore.
MITCHELL
Delightful. (To himself.) I’m glad he’s done. (They bow and depart.)
SYPHERS
Dolts! Fogies! That’s always the way, dull and cautious.
BARRETT
(As they walk up the street.) An ingenious theory, but dangerously speculative. He ought to read Stromeyer on “Impulse.”
MITCHELL
I often wonder about his work and just how sound he is.
(SYPHERS reaches his own door and goes up the steps, unlocks it and mounts the inside stairs to his room. He lights the gas in a chamber which is half library and half bedroom.)
SYPHERS
(Seating himself and gazing about dreamily.) A great idea. I’m sure of it. Along this line is coming a scientific revolution. If I had enough radium and stromium, why—but they cost so much. (He yawns.) Life is really a dream. We are all an emanation, a shadow, a moving picture cast on a screen of ether. I’m sure of it. (He gazes about, yawns again, and begins to undress.)
A TELEGRAPH INSTRUMENT
(At 110th Street Station.) Tick—tick-tick—— tick-tick-tick—tick-tick—— tick—tick-tick-tick-tick-tick——
TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
There goes that blamed machine again (begins to write.) “Professor George Paul Syphers, 621 West 115th Street, New York City. Your uncle, Edward Fillmore, died at eleven to-night. By the terms of his will you are the sole heir to the bulk of his fortune, three hundred thousand dollars. Come at once. A. J. Larywind, Counsellor,” (Aside.) I wish someone would leave me three thousand cents. (To a waiting messenger.) Here, Patsy. Take this up to 115th Street.
PATSY LAFERTY
(Cock-eyed, overgrown, contentious.) Sure, it’s just de night to keep busy. It’s goin’ to rain, an’ it’s me late watch. Oh, well, dere’s nuttin’ like bein’ poor an’ honest. (He seizes a black cotton umbrella almost as large as himself and goes out.)
SYPHERS
(Crawling into his bed.) The curious thing is: why should any dominant force outside this seeming life wish to create it—the smallness, the pettiness, the suffering? I must write a book about that. Here I am—(he suddenly bethinks him of opening a window and gets out. Looking out). It’s going to rain, I do believe. (He returns and stretches himself to rest.) There, it’s thundering already.
PATSY LAFERTY
(Trudging solemnly up Broadway.) It’s funny, dese mokes wot git messages at one in de mornin’. I’ll lay a even bet I don’t git nuttin’, neider. If you’d come wit a million dollars after twelve o’clock dere’s guys wot’d git sore.
SYPHERS
(Dozing, but still continuing his speculations hazily.) I must try to find the psychic impulse which originates and directs the cell. That is the great thing. We’re all shadows, I say, shadows—adumbrations—impalpable nothings—rumors—dreams. (He turns on his side.) If our ills become too great we might be able to wake up or drive them away by thinking of this. It may be that that’s what we do when we die—wake up. But that’s Christian Science, isn’t it? Bah! (He snores slightly.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(Arriving at the door and closing his umbrella.) A fine night, dis. An’ he won’t be in. Dat’s my luck. (He rings the bell.)
SYPHERS
(Beginning to dream.) Radiobes! Radiobes! Flying radiobes as big as houses—monsters—(He stirs. As he does so the ringing of the bell, the rising wind and the thunder and lightning, which rapidly become violent, identify themselves in some weird way with his thoughts. He is on a large plain now over which a battle is being fought. The flashes of lightning and bellows of thunder gradually identify themselves in his mind with some impending disaster, vague and yet oppressive. He begins to cerebrate in an imaginative, illogical way. A sense of something ominous pervades him, a feeling of great change. Then the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns begins and armed figures running and fighting appear in the distance.)
SYPHERS
(Who once saw military service.) War! And fighting men! (It begins to rain.) That is a machine gun. Now I am in real danger. How did I come here, anyhow? (He moves a hand, thinking he is hurrying to cover.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(Standing at the door, ringing the bell and shifting from one foot to the other.) Wot a swell night! Wot a swell night! Now it’s startin’ to pour an’ I’ll have to stand here aw’ile, I guess. Holy Cripes, dem drops is as big as marbles! (He pushes the bell again.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Hearing the whirr of the buzzer in his dreams and taking it for the rush of artillery and men.) Ah, the horror of war! What was I thinking?—ah, yes! If one had some method of waking up. (He mingles the dream notions of his waking philosophy with the figures of his dream.) Then there would be no more war, no horrors. It is entirely possible, now that we know this existence of ours is a dream. I may be dreaming now—who knows? If so, I could wake up and all my ills would vanish—or would they? (As the thunder and lightning increase.) How horrible this is! (The dream sky lights up as if with red fire.)
PATSY LAFERTY
T-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r! T-r-r-r-r-r! Wot’s de matter wit dis bell? W’y don’t de guy answer?
THE PROFESSOR
(Dreaming and looking about him in apprehension.) War! War! How terrible! How did I come here? How does there happen to be war? Those are fighting men over there! They are killing each other! Horrors! But the great thing is to escape. That fire is dreadful. It means death. (He struggles to put himself in motion and grunts in his sleep.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(Ringing again.) Well, dis is some sleeper, all right. Or else dere ain’t nobody home. I’ll kick, I will. (He kicks.) Come to! I ain’t supposed to stand here all night. (Kicks and knocks are without result.)
SYPHERS
(Still dreaming heavily.) And here comes a file of soldiers—I hear them tramping—a great company. Merciful heavens, they see me! (He begins to run. As he does so the file of dream soldiers begin to run also.)
THE FILE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
THE PROFESSOR
(Breaking into a heavy sweat.) Great God! I haven’t a place to hide! Oh, Lord, what shall I do? (He turns, and in his dream he imagines a deserted stone hut set in a grove of thick tall trees, which seems to offer shelter. He runs towards the hut.) As I live, here is a stone hut among thick trees! I’ll hide in it. Perhaps they won’t see me. (He dashes wildly in, slamming a heavy door behind him.)
A SCORE OF DREAM SOLDIERS
(Hurrying after him and knocking with their musket butts on the door.) Knock! Knock! Knock!
PATSY LAFERTY
(At the door.) Knock! Knock! Knock! Gee, wot a night! Dese raindrops look like spits. An’ dat lightning! Dat last one looked like a telegraph pole standin’ straight in de air!
SYPHERS
(Cowering in a corner.) Oh, Lord! My life is worth nothing! Here I lie hiding in an empty stone hut, and those men at the door want my life. What is life? A dream! A dream!—but, oh, such a precious dream! I would not want to disappear—not yet! No, no! I would not want to wake up. I don’t want to die—not yet. Not yet! (As he lies there cowering, all the coruscations and thunder of a great battle afflict him; cannon, machine guns, human cries, commands. He cowers lower, and yet in spite of the thickness of the walls which seem to protect him he can see through them to the surrounding trees to where the dream soldiers await him—tall men in red coats and towering shakos—and beyond them again to the battlefield, red with flame and gore. As he stares, the men in the shakos glare at him.)
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(Pointing at him and speaking to another.) We’ll easily get him out of there. Can’t you see him lying there, close by the wall? (To the other soldiers.) Bring a battering ram. (A soldier starts off.) No, bring a cannon. We’ll blow him out. (A second soldier goes.) He thinks we can’t get him, but we can. (Other soldiers draw near. They move in the curious, indefinite way common to figures in dreams. Nothing is clear, and yet there is a sense of impending disaster. The Professor studies the nature of his predicament with a sense of horror.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Lying on the floor, close to the wall.) Ah, if I could only escape! I was thinking a while ago that life was a shadow of something else, an adumbration, a thing built up point by point like the dots of a telautographed picture. Now if that were so I could get out of here. It would be a dream. I could wake. I could cry “Avaunt!” I could stir and it would all disappear and become as nothing. But here! Here—(he pauses and stares. A company of dream soldiers on horseback gallop up and swing a cannon into position.)
THE CAPTAIN OF THE DREAM SOLDIERS
(Dramatically.) Position! (They unhook the horses and man the guns.) Load! (A shell is put in.) Fire! (It belches flame and smoke. A great hole is torn in the wall of the hut.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(At the door.) Gee, dat las’ crack was a bold! If he kin sleep troo dat he soitenly won’t hear me—or maybe he ain’t home. Well, I might as well stand here. I can’t go back in dis. (He decides to make himself comfortable in the doorway.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Imagining he is crying.) Help! Help! Oh, save me! Save me! (He realizes that he emits no sound, and groans.)
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
Once, more, men! Another shell here! (Another is put in.) Fire!
THE CANNON
Poof! Boom! (Another great hole is torn in the wall.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(As a second electric crash occurs.) I don’t know wedder I’d better stay here. I don’t wanna get killed. (He walks about uneasily.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Heavily and desperately.) I am lost! I know it. Oh, if my idea were only true! What if all this turmoil and agony were a figment of the mind merely, a cell or dot picture? Here I am in this hut; these soldiers are about to destroy me. If I could just cry “Avaunt!” “Disappear!”—or if I could know that I am not real, and disappear myself. I wonder if I might not try it? (He jumps to his feet.)
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING
Click—Sssssss!
A CLAP OF REAL THUNDER
Boom——!
THE PROFESSOR
(To the dream soldiers, defiantly.) I defy you! Do your worst! You’re not real! I’m not real! This whole thing is a dream! I’m a dream, or I’m dreaming! I defy you!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
(Drawing near with a rifle.) Is that so? You defy me, do you? I’ll show you whether I’m real or not. (He takes deliberate aim.)
SECOND DREAM SOLDIER
Yes, kill him. That’s the way!
THE PROFESSOR
(Lifting his hand.) Wait a moment! Don’t! I—I’m not sure!
FIRST DREAM SOLDIER
But I will, just the same. You say I’m not real? I’ll show you whether I am or not! (He fires.) How does that feel?
THE PROFESSOR
(Who has twisted himself about until he has one hand under him in a most painful position.) Oh, God, I’m shot! And now I’ll die! This whole scene, real or not real, will pass away and I will never know—or will I? And yet once I was a man, and it was good to be alive. Oh! Oh! Oh! (He weeps and sinks down. A powerful clap of thunder half arouses him. The knocking of Patsy Laferty becomes dimly audible, a cross between the clatter of musketry and a knock. He stares at the soldiers, some of whom seem already to be growing thin and wavering.) Dying! Alas! I’m dying! Never will I see this wonderful world any more! (He partially wakes.) Or will I? What’s this—I’m not dying, after all! They’re not real! I’m only dreaming. How astonishing! (To the dream soldiers, defiantly.) You’re not real, after all. You’re mere shadows, thin air. I’m dying, but you’re not real. This house isn’t real. It couldn’t have holes in it if it were, or at least I couldn’t have seen through it in the first place if it hadn’t. You’re shadows, tissues of nothing, a mere fancy of the brain. Oh, wonderful!
FIRST DREAM OFFICER
(Standing by the cannon.) Are we? Well, you’re a fool! Wait! You may be waking into another state, but you’ll be dead to this one. But we won’t. Ha! Ha! We’ll still be here, alive. (To the second dream soldier.) He thinks he’s not real. He thinks we’re not real. He thinks he’s not going to die, but wake up into something else! Ha! Ha! (They look at each other in a strange, fading, unreal way.) When he passes out of this won’t he be dead to this, though?
THE PROFESSOR
(Amazedly.) What is this? Am I dying, or waking up? Which is it? Are there various worlds, one within another? Are those soldiers really real? Great heavens! How strange! I am waking up, and yet this world in which I am is real enough. I died there. I certainly did, or I am dying there. (The house begins to dissolve like smoke; the trees can be seen through the bodies of the soldiers.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(At the door.) I’ll give dis guy one more spin an’ den I’ll quit. I ain’t gonna stand here all night, rain or no rain. Clump! Clump! Clump! (He kicks with his heel at the same time that he rings.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Bounding out of bed.) Oh, blessed heaven! What is that? I’m not dead, after all! I am really alive! It was a dream, all of it. How glad I am to be awake! (He reaches for his trousers.) But those soldiers! They argued with me about it! They did! They made fun of me! Isn’t that amazing! This dream is a call to me to seek out this mystery. If ever I get money enough to do it that is certainly what I will do. I shall devote all my life to solving this mystery. If only I could find somebody who would endow a laboratory for this purpose. (He pauses and stares, as the bell whirrs.) Yes, yes! I’m coming! (He bustles downstairs, turning up the light as he goes.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(Irritably, as the door is opened.) Syphers?
THE PROFESSOR
Yes
PATSY LAFERTY
Tellygram. Sign here. (He produces about a half inch of pencil and holds up a signature blank. The Professor signs. Absentmindedly he tears open the message, but while doing so turns and closes the door. Patsy Laferty stares at it disconsolately.)
THE PROFESSOR
(Reading.) A miracle! $300,000! Just what I need for that laboratory! It’s a sign! The dream is a portent, a call! My poor dear, good uncle! What moved him to leave me that? Now I know the dream was an omen. And yet—(thinking of a certain maiden he has been courting.)—should I really do that? Three hundred thousand are three hundred thousand, and where would I ever get that much again? (He hesitates mentally.) We could live beautifully on that. I’m not so sure. Perhaps I could get some one else to furnish that money. (He starts upstairs.) But that poor boy! I forgot to give him a penny, and it’s storming. (Returns and reopens the door, looks up and down the street, and comes back.) Dear, dear, dear! I should have given him a dime, anyhow—bringing such a fortunate message. But I must think about this laboratory, though, and this money. I must not act too hastily or inadvisedly. Three hundred thousand are three hundred thousand, and—— (He goes upstairs again solemnly.)
PATSY LAFERTY
(One block south, staring at the sidewalk.) Wot did I say? Wot did I say? Dey never comes across wit nuttin’ after twelve—nuttin’. Not if you handed dem a million.
THE AMERICAN FINANCIER
THE long line of American financiers, beginning with Stephen Girard (1750-1831), and extending via Astor, the Vanderbilts, Goulds, J. P. Morgan and F. W. Woolworth to Henry Ford of the present time, suggests nothing so much as a procession of thrifty and, in the main, cat-like animals weaving a devious way amid intricacies of law and public opinion and theories as to morals, duty, charity and the like, until finally one is led to conclude that, by and large, the financial type is the coldest, the most selfish, and the most useful of all living phenomena. Plainly it is a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of some end which Nature has in view. Often humorless, shark-like, avid, yet among the greatest constructive forces imaginable; absolutely opposed to democracy in practice, yet as useful an implement for its accomplishment as for autocracy; either ignorant or contemptuous of ethical niceties as related to thine and mine, yet a stickler for all that concerns mine; moral and immoral sexually—both types abound; narrow to all but an infinitesimal line in nearly all that relates to the humanities as applied to individuals; wise and generous in the matter of large, even universal benefactions, yet guilty of the meanest subterfuge where their own interests are concerned; and seeking always to perpetuate their own fame. In other words, typical men and women of an avid pagan world (vide Hetty Green, Russell Sage), yet surrounded by religious and ethical abstrusities for which they care little and of which they understand less.
Such might be called the pathology of the genus financier, not only in America, but everywhere.
In regard to our American specimens it is more or less anachronistic to speak of them as purely American in character, although, in a way, they are. The organizing and financial type of mind—American, European or any other—is really little different from that of all preceding countries and ages. Yet financial manipulation, in the extended modern sense, is comparatively new. It dates from the industrial revolution in England in the eighteenth century. There was a time when the organizing type of mind, comparable to our modern examples, was engaged in other things: money-lending and exchange principally. The machinery for finance in the modern sense was lacking. You might have found a J. P. Morgan, a J. D. Rockefeller, or a Russell Sage as Keeper of the Exchequer and Supervisor of the Grain Stores of, say, Egypt or Assyria, or Adviser to the King, whether he ruled in Babylon, Persia or elsewhere. One cannot help thinking what an excellent type of Keeper of the Exchequer, Vizier or High Priest our own John D. Rockefeller would have made. The robes! The sanctity!
As we come forward in history to the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of that mental darkness known as the Middle Ages, when all intelligence, financial and other, seems to have been completely swept away, we find the purely financial and organizing type but slowly developing. Joseph (he of the coat of many colors), fabled Crœsus, who ruled in Asia Minor, and Lepidus and Mæcenas, friends of triumvirs, emperors and poets, are excellent examples of the ancient financial type. Their like is not to be found until after the revival of banking and trade in the fifteenth century. And if you look back you will see that to-day, in another way, we have been repeating in Wall Street (or were until a few years ago), the type of man who occasionally sat as Emperor over all the Romans. If you are inclined to doubt this you might, if the opportunity offered, examine the collection of portrait busts of Roman Emperors of the highly executive and financial type (Hadrian, Trajanus, Titus, Caracalla and the rest) in the Vatican, the Musee del la Terme and the British Museum. Hadrian, for instance, was as much like the late Commodore Vanderbilt, side whiskers and all, as one man might be to another; and Trajanus greatly resembled the late Mark Hanna, whose name somehow suggests that of a Roman. Any one of ten or fifteen portrait busts of ancient Roman Emperors might almost be mistaken for Armour, Morgan, Gould, Sage, Crocker, Stanford, Hearst. For example, compare Russell Sage to Julius Cæsar; or Wm. H. Vanderbilt to Augustus Cæsar. Indeed, if you were to examine some of the major operations of the successful Roman Emperors you would find that their power to maintain their positions with the Prætorian Guard and the Patrician Class (which was really the Roman world, so far as they were concerned) was largely financial and organizing in the same peculiar spirit in which we find those qualities operating to-day.
It is not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, Flanders and north Germany that one encounters financial types very like those with which we have been very recently dealing. Italy of the Renaissance found a most interesting specimen of this type of mind in Cosimo I. of the Medici—“Pater Patriæ,” as he was called—who was little more than a very active Vanderbilt I. of his day. The family first conducted a successful pill business, then Cosimo engaged in the banking business. Being a financier he secured control of nearly all the financial channels of Italy, France, Greece, a portion of Egypt, and the Lowlands. It is charged that he brought about the death of one or two enemies in Florence, not because he disliked them, but because he thought they were dangerous to his interests, and once he came very near to being gibbeted himself. He was a patron of the arts, not so much because he was emotionally and poetically enthusiastic about art as because, as at present, it was a distinguished thing to be. The trick of currying favor via art patronage is old. His descendants, having less of his force and more of the refinement which invariably follows wealth, did more for art and less for trade, and so while we see the Medici family identified with the most brilliant period of Italian art we also see it slowly sinking into financial and political insignificance. That it finally degenerated and passed out is no reflection on the significance of Cosimo, his primary import. Although the coldest and most financial of them all, he was also the best.
This was equally true of Louis XIV of France and Frederick the Great of Germany, organizing and financial types both, although monarchs by birth.
England has had its full share of the type in the officers and directors of its famous East India Company (Warren Hastings, for one) and their efforts to monopolize and exploit the Indian Empire, as well as in the very excellent Rothschild, who flourished at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and who stood behind a tree to view the battle in order that he might decide for himself which side was going to win and so get to London and the stock-market first. There he spread the report that England had lost so that the already trembling stocks of the nation might tumble and he be able to buy them for a song. When he had gathered in all the shares he could carry he gave out the correct news of the victory and reaped his harvest. Dishonest? As you choose to look at such things. But when has high finance been honest, or let us say, considerate of the interests of others? The financial history of this particular individual is so selfishly single-minded as to be almost ridiculous, suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints and the like are invented.
In America, the history of our financiers is so full of thievery and selfishness as to appear comic were it not for the mass misery which so many of their deeds involved. Stephen Girard, for instance, stole his employers’ ship at the outbreak of the American Revolution (pretending it had been sunk, of course), and with the proceeds opened a wine and cider business in Philadelphia. John Jacob Astor drugged the Indians with fire-water and bought their furs for a song, as well as bribed Government agents to permit him so to do. J. P. Morgan senior at the outbreak of the Civil War sold the Government five hundred of its own condemned rifles for twenty-two dollars each, after having but the moment before bought them from the Government for three dollars and fifty cents each, and that with money borrowed on the strength of the proposed contract. (History of the Great American Fortunes, Myers, Vol. II., page 172.) Cornelius Vanderbilt blackmailed the United States Steamship Company, plying between New York and California, in the amount of nearly $500,000 a year by threatening to operate a rival line. (Ibid. Vol. II., pp. 120-121.) Jay Gould robbed the various States through which his railroad ran and drove some of his rivals to suicide. Russell Sage robbed the city of Troy of a railroad and bribed the Minnesota and other State Legislatures. (Ibid. Vol II., pp. 12-16.) The record is too long to be more than mentioned here; those interested should read Myers’ remarkable work, in which the crimes as well as genius of our long line of money kings are described in full.
That the world has always been troubled with the huge financial innovator and the self-seeker is of course a commonplace; the objection to him has been, as a rule, that he has too few human traits. Like the astronomer, the mathematician, the philosopher and the historian, his thoughts are more or less remote from the concerns of the ordinary individual, although his dealings are with him. To do anything which is to be of benefit to the individual it requires the mind that sees the individual en masse rather than in particular. Indeed, the thing that has always confronted the individual of ability since the beginning, aside from his own inner driving emotions, ambitions and needs, is this same organized need of the mass as represented in constitutions, governments, declarations, which in order to advantage himself he must flatter, satisfy or exploit—but which he must meet in some way or fail. And only when the organized sense of the mass becomes sufficiently intelligent for it to act in concert is it possible to sweep away or even curb the individual. For the individual and the mass are interdependent facts, and the one cannot escape the other, try as each may.
But never, apparently, previous to the French Revolution, which was a revolt against centralized and hereditary constructive craft and ingenuity, had it occurred to the world, or rather the mass, to rout these individuals and make pariahs of them, although the world in recent days has developed an especial aptitude for it, one must admit. England, which is not so much a democracy as an ordered hierarchy of powers, largely financial in character, has never felt called upon to drive these gentlemen from their positions or quarrel with them for the often singular and fantastic manner in which they have achieved their success, or the indifference they may have displayed toward the millions below them. The gentlemen at the top may or may not have intentionally done anything for the peasants at the bottom in the past, but until very recent days they have not been asked to relinquish their control of the machinery. Yet now the world presents another angle to this proposition: the organizer and financier is being suspected and harried everywhere. Only in America, the home of anti-financial legislation, the multi-millionaire is apparently becoming safer than ever and more powerful. Yet to the economist, the historian, the student of politics, it is already a truism that economic reforms are not and never have been permanent; also that no one, however self-interested, ever succeeds wholly in working for himself. He must do something for the mass if he is to do anything for himself. It is a condition of life, not a theory.
The trouble in America, in so far as this type of mind is or was concerned, is or was this: that when it appeared it came rather speedily and roughly into contact with the pen-written notion or ideal embodied in our American Declaration that all men are born free and equal, and that they are possessed of certain inalienable rights, among which of course are those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And these latter were not supposed to be interfered with by financiers or organizers seeking power. Yet the race has always been, and will so remain, of course, to the swift, the battle to the strong; chemical and physical laws not being easily upset by fiats of government. Time and chance still continue to operate as before, sometimes to destroy the strong, sometimes to destroy the weak. The best that can be said for the theories laid down in the American Declaration is that they do more credit to the hearts of those who penned them than to their heads. Yet that these sentiments so expressed should have moved to bring about a conflict between the American individual and the American mass might well have been foreseen, although curiously it has not yet done so. Other countries without any Declaration are far more alive to their inalienable (so-called) rights than is America, if one may judge by recent developments in Russia and elsewhere. All good things may be and, no doubt, are gifts, but they are not conferred by governments, any more than death and disaster can be prevented by governments. Sometimes innate strength and fortuitous circumstances help some of us, yet this merely illustrates once more the truism that nature “plays favorites” and that many are vastly better equipped than others.
A great voice, for instance, is a gift, and cannot be acquired at any school or for any price; the beauty of a woman, however modest or staggering, is a gift and cannot be purchased or even manufactured (amazing as that may seem in the face of all the drug companies), although ugliness, apparently, can almost be wished on a person, so lavish is life with its disfavors. The ability to paint a great picture, to design a great building, to lead an army, to organize a government, to construct a philosophy, to dream a religion, is a gift and cannot be added to any one by taking thought, however quickly it may be taken away. Neither can the possessors of these be reduced to the level of those who have nothing to offer, no ideas, no dreams. Christ said one really significant thing, “Who by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?” If He had followed the logic of that statement He would never have delivered the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes and would not now be so popular, but apparently He was genius enough to be illogical.
What has confronted the American organizing genius, now known as a captain of industry, a multi-millionaire, a financier and the like, has been—aside from a mass need for this, that and the other and his desire to supply it in order that he might improve his own condition, strengthen his own individuality, etc.—this same pen-written theory about all men being free and equal. Free they might be to begin with, one might hear him saying to himself—to a very limited extent, anyhow—but equal to himself, however much they might be equal one to another, never. It became his business, therefore, as he soon found and as he afterwards phrased it, to “drive a horse and wagon through the Constitution,” or indeed any other law that might be devised to stop him and his dreams. I do not believe that any financial genius, American or other, anywhere or at any time, ever stopped to consider that there was such a thing as law or a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution when he began; or, if he did, it was as something to be evaded or overcome. To the aggressive organizing mind life is and always has been a free and practically uncharted sea. It finds itself blazing with an impulse to get some one new thing done; it conceives some great scheme, is inspired with some great enthusiasm for something; and thereafter all else is as nothing. Being strong and magnetic and enthusiastic, it rushes in where it is generally assumed angels fear to tread and seizes upon all which it deems may aid it in its dreams. The average man is of as little significance to such a temperament as a stalk of grain to a reaper. Any ideal other than its own is likely to be looked upon as an impediment. But always, of course, there exists the tramping mass of lesser individuals who have been going to school and church and there learning (in America at least) all the religious and copy-book maxims, which argue that the world was made for the individual and that he was born free and equal, each as good as any other and each called upon to aid the other; and these begrudge, and always have and always will, these great giants their power. They often fight them and sometimes beat them.
But they are not to be wholly undone by them at any time, anywhere. Like the Lilliputians, the mass as often succeeds in binding Gulliver with their threads as Gulliver succeeds in tearing through their petty stays. The twain are ever being born side by side in nature; the giant and the pygmy, the shark and the bluefish, the whale and the minnow. “Look,” cry the minnows to their fellows, “this whale imagines he is better, wiser, greater, than we! He moves in larger ways, disturbs our great sea, taking his choice of the realms and pleasures of life. Why should this be? Are we not as good as he? And yet he does all these things which we cannot; he breaks the law which governs the average minnow, whereas we cannot. Therefore he must be evil. We will seize and bind him and so end his privileges, if not him.” Immediately and always, at this point, there arises an intermediate figure or group, the sophisticated “advocates of the people,” “tribunes of the people,” individuals less powerful than the giants, though shrewder than the pygmies, their employers, many of whom are sincere enough in their conviction of unselfishness; others self-seekers and charlatans purely, yet each and every one crying that he will deliver the mass from its bondage, and actually attempting, or pretending, to adjust the impossible demands of the people with the almost impossible individualism of the egoist. But, honest or dishonest as they may be, the mass is never made quite free; the financiers or individuals are never wholly curbed. Both merely proceed to develop new issues and new battlefields.
Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should not sweep away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be somebody in however small a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in a machine or bees in a bee-hive. At best, we are little more than that; even our greatest individuals, individual as they may seem. They, too, are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to forefend against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them. But one thing is sure: the individual in the course of the development of his dreams and ambitions does scheme out and construct or bring into organic operation functions which are valuable to mass prosperity, and on that score there is scarcely any fault to be found with him.
The thing that might seriously concern a thinking American would be whether the American financial type, as contrasted with those of other lands and times, is more or less admirable. Greece had Crœsus; Rome, Lepidus, Hadrian; Italy, Lorenzo, the money-gathering Popes; France, Louis XIV, the Baron de Hirsch; England, the first Rothschild, the late Cecil Rhodes, Harmsworth, Strathcona; Japan, Shibusawa.
While it may be admitted that the organizing types developed in America have not had any too great charm or virtue (Astor I., Vanderbilt I., Gould, Sage, Harriman, Morgan), still they appear to compare favorably with most ancients and moderns. If they have done less for the arts, as many seem to think, socially, or at least economically, they have done as much if not more than their predecessors. Astor I. may have begrudged a washerwoman fifty cents, dunned his tenants for rent, debauched the Indians, but he opened up the most remote portions of America and laid the way for roads and railroads. The first Vanderbilt was no doubt a brutal, cruel and savage man, but he had the vision which made a transcontinental railroad possible. His greed and vanity made it possible. As much might be said for Gould, Russell Sage and Harriman, though the picture of Sage keeping apples in his desk to avoid buying lunches for his friends or well-wishers and using his old plug hats for umbrella stands in order to get a little more wear out of them could not be of much interest to the mass except in a Dickensian sense. Unless one accepts the subtleties of Nature as one finds them, sees in all an inexplicable and yet biologic or universally constructive plan, and in these riant and lawless individuals a scheme of hers to achieve something quickly, there is nothing very admirable or even explicable about the dark goings to and fro of such types as the late J. P. Morgan, H. H. Rogers, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, or any of a score of other large fortune-builders so recently in control of stupendous matters here and elsewhere. They are not explicable save as motivating forces in the hands or will of higher powers—good, bad or indifferent. Seen at close range they are more suggestive of sharks and we of sniveling bluefish, and it is plainly to our best interests either to keep out of their way or unite firmly to oppose them in whatever way we can, unless we choose to be promptly eaten.
Yet are they any worse than their prototypes anywhere? The worst that can be said for the American is that as yet no one of him has been able to rival Lorenzo the Magnificent or Louis XIV to gather and use in any marked way, supposing there has been anything of importance to use, the significant artistic personalities and materials (American or general) of his time after the fashion, say, of a Lorenzo, a Hadrian or a Can Grande. Perhaps he has had few opportunities, no Michelangelos to countenance or foster, no Raphaels or Leonardos to attach to his court or entourage. Again it may be urged that he has never been in any position to organize or dictate, being by no means in any free or superior position in a democracy such as this. The best he has been able to do apparently is to buy, although of course the power to patronize nobly and generously has to a certain extent been within his range. Still, a stranger to our rich and powerful land might (I do not say he would) be struck by the abject poverty of a Poe or a Whitman, scarcely knowing which way to turn for means, as contrasted with the enormous affluence of so many financial geniuses. Why, one such might ask, should either a writer or poet of the transcendent merit of either of these have lacked a financial sponsor? And why, the same inquiring mind might ask, was there no Mæcenas to befriend the late George Inness, Harris Merton Lyon, or MacDowell, the musician? But in other ways—via libraries, gifts to art museums, schools and universities—he would have to admit that the American multi-millionaire has done quite as well as the others; only, in so far as I can see, he has in the main lacked the insight to connect his gifts with an impulse toward the truest art values and realms of mental freedom and refinement. Too often, as in the case of our universities, his gifts have been far too subtly identified, aside from purely technical progress, with mental retrogression, or at least the perpetuation of religious and moralistic dogma not compatible with the truest mental development. At the same time the retort might be that it has never been a part of the organizing ability of any money genius anywhere to plan for true mental progress. It may not be necessary. Life may be taking care of that “on its own,” as the phrase runs.
However that may be, one cannot help thinking how interesting it would have been if in New York or elsewhere any one of the above-mentioned men had in his day troubled to gather about him in some private court a representative group of intellectual and artistic personalities, for the sole purpose of testifying to his interest in that side of life, if nothing more. After all, the living individual is worth something, and any one of our financiers might have done what no American of wealth, as far as I know, has as yet done: invested some of his boundless wealth in personality. Or he might have endowed a wholly independent magazine or newspaper or theatre, of which there is at present not one, or a school of special learning free from dogmatic interference, or a publishing house, or a university which should have been a true university and not one devoted to the economic or social or religious theories or moods of any particular period. The strangest lack or flaw in the American organizing financial temperament, in so far as I can see, is or has been, hitherto, its inability to see either character or significance in anything save movements which tend to further the most material financial aims: railroads, butcher-companies, electricity, gas, typewriter and other purely mechanical or material organizations. Yet possibly, up to the present time, the land has only needed things of this kind. And perhaps the next generation will make amends. Who knows? Thus far there has been little if any tendency to invest in anything save such art or art forms as have been heralded by time.
To this day, ancient Asiatic, Egyptian and European art forms continue to pour in on us in a brilliant phantasmagoric stream, until we threaten, or did, to drain the world of its treasures. Our private mansions groan with the antiquated skill of Asia and other continents, but of these other matters, or the cultivation or preservation of a single living personality, not a word. It is possible to go forth and raise any reasonable or even unreasonable sum for any number of useless or surplus charitable organizations or hospitals or churches, whereas if it were a question of cash for a truly civilizing movement of some kind, or a personality, the obstacles would prove well nigh insurmountable. Some of the trashiest homes I have ever had the misery of beholding have been those of men of tremendous wealth and alleged refinement, stuffed to overflowing with bogus furniture and art. Yet, when all is said and done, are they to blame? Are they not specialized machines sent here for a purpose? And should one expect more? Verily we have our reward in their practical achievements.... Yet, also, when one looks at them one cannot help remembering that Walt Whitman lived in a back street in Camden and depended upon a friendly admirer to bring him a fish for his supper; that Poe lived in a hut in the woods, unable to achieve or afford a more suitable abode. I am not quarreling; I cite these as interesting facts.
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An interviewer once questioning me in regard to the significance of the American financial type (it was just after I had published “The Financier”), raised the question as to whether the American financial type, then so abundant and powerful, had ethically the right to be as it was or do as it was doing, seeing that it was being and doing about as it pleased. My answer was, and I still see no reason for changing it, that, in spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the social chain in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The murderer has under the written law no right to murder anybody. It is perfectly plain that he has the right if he is willing to pay the penalty, or if he can evade it. Conscience, this thing called conscience to which people repeatedly appeal, is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, little more than a built-up net of social acceptances and agreements in regard to society or the agreed state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we arrive here; in other words all the things which we wish to do and be, or avoid. It is not anything save an inherent condition of balance in Nature which desires and achieves a very rough equation, but nothing which works exact justice to any individual anywhere. The so-called “still, small voice,” ever present at one’s inner or spiritual ear, is, if it is anything at all, a sense of self-preservation and conditional desire for equation or peace—stillness, rest, lack of friction.
It is true that the individual may not always agree with the ethics of his time, or that he may smack of anything but sweetness and light, may even seem a little gross or terrible; but if he prove essential, as he nearly always does, his revolt against the commonplace fixity, rigidity and the like of the slower-moving man cannot be looked upon as either wholly evil or in vain. Indeed, if he did no more than throw a new light on this strange phantasmagory called existence, then, ethics or no ethics, he would have been worth while and it would make no essential difference whether he agreed with passing theories or not. Apparently the world, or let us say the race, is moving along in some curious way to possibly a larger, more widespread condition of complexity and articulation, part with part (variety in unity, unity in variety), and a self-sensating intellectual perception and appreciation of the same. Who knows? But beyond that, what? Is man better, purer, more spiritual, more generous than ever he was? Do any of the savages or animals lack any of the emotional or charitable traits which we possess? Observe the wolf with its young; the cat; the dog; the lion. Are not all swayed by conditioning laws of subsistence and which they obey, but nothing more? True, they kill to eat, to preserve themselves. Has man ever done less—or more?
Any naturalistic philosopher can, of course, trace all the steps for you, how it is that you have come to be seemingly so different, although he cannot tell you why or where you are going. My own guess would be that we, or rather the race, is going on to a greater individuality, plus a greater weakness as to its component and clinging atoms, providing it does not suffer an endless dark age of mass control or total extinction in some form or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching individuality, greater individuality for everybody who could achieve it, and to a certain extent he was right. Greater individuality than the world has yet seen will certainly be achieved by some. Schopenhauer, before him, announced that only failure for the individual was possible, and to a certain extent he was right also. The two saw the oversoul from different angles. Again, Marx, the humanitarian, appeared preaching solidarity for the mass and mass control, and his work will probably result in greater material battles between the individual and the mass than any yet witnessed. If one stands with the individualists, as one may well do, and believes that there are no laws created by mass conditions and necessities which the individual should not be allowed to break for the subsequent good of the mass, and also that the mass only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual, then one will be compelled to agree with Nietzsche that it is folly not to wish that the significant individual will always appear and will always do what his instincts tell him to do. On the other hand if one feels, as so many of the less well-equipped do, that in the long run and in the plan of Nature itself the individual is nothing, the type all, and that mass conditions favoring the production of many of the best type are most important, then the airs and dreams of the individual in regard to his personal satisfaction and satiation will not seem so important, the general welfare of each individual of the mass more important than anything else. And this will mean that always the special individual, the genius of any kind, will be curbed and restrained if not actually pushed into the background. And, in the main, life proves this nearly all the time. Attempts at world domination on the part of one individual and another have proved failures, as witness Darius, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, the Kaiser.
Yet theories and doxies wear thin with the course of time, and the “still, small voice” of one age is not the “still, small voice” of the next, strange as it may seem. At best, all we have is the individual, not always financial, by any means, or artistic, but one who has dreamed out something: music, a picture, poetry, a machine, a railroad, an empire—anything, in short, that man as race or nation can use or rejoice in. If to have a Woolworth Building, a transcontinental railroad, a Panama Canal, a flying machine, to say nothing of literature and art, means that we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain, ridiculous in many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in order to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency, the result of which will be some one of these things, there are many who would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him along with all his lacks or vices, in order that this other may be.” If it is a question of having a Villon or not, provided we cannot have him without having a thief at the same time, then the same or another group would cry, “Let us have the thief and the poem concerning the ‘Snows of Yesterday.’” For my part I am convinced that so-called vice and crime and destruction and so-called evil are as fully a part of the universal creative process as are all the so-called virtues, and do as much good—providing, as they do, for one thing, the religionist and the moralist with their reasons for existing. At best, ethics and religion are but one face of a shield which is essentially irreligious and unethical as to its other face, or the first would not exist.
For myself, then, I cannot say that personally or socially the American or any other financier, as I have investigated him, is not as satisfactory as may be, all things considered. Artistically thus far he is not much to survey, but a giant or a Titan he certainly has been. As for the majority of them, they were by no means presentable or even acceptable socially, but what would you? They were, in the main, too ignorant, too insistent on their own views, too self-hypnotized by their own dreams of self-advancement and dominance. A leader of polite society anywhere, for instance, might not be willing to welcome a Russell Sage, a Jay Gould, or a John W. Gates or his wife, or indeed any other American financial type thus far known, and this solely on the ground of expediency or social or artistic fitness or unfitness for the lighter forms of living, but that in itself proves nothing. It could truthfully be said, on the other hand, that it would scarcely be possible to admit the average society man to the threatening precincts of radical energy or thought in any form. One thing is sure: the individual cannot wholly understand the mass, nor the mass the individual. Both have their significance, their place, but if one were to say of either that it or he alone had claim to significance as a helpful factor in life, or as dramatic or artistic material, or as a spectacle, one would be greatly mistaken. Both have. All have.