It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth—not so much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which he is the appendage; one might with truth say, the victim—is not only the most conspicuous factor in American life to-day, but also one of the most potent factors. The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home—in its own homes—that is our “peril.”
A great monster indeed, fully up to the harrowing descriptions of our radical orators and writers. But why does the average, common-sense American refuse to be terrified? Because he does not see it? Hardly that. No; the real reason is that the American is fundamentally incapable of those caste and class feelings, without which a plutocracy can never hope to erect itself into an aristocracy, and therefore a real “peril.”
To see America—the America that was, and is, and shall be—we must leave the neighborhood of the palaces of the plutocracy with its servile parasites and imitators, its fawning menials and shopkeepers; we must also leave the neighboring slums, where the American is so sadly caricatured—not more sadly, in truth, than where the plutocracy flaunts. We must go to the smaller cities and the towns and villages and the farms, where in ten thousand homes a sane and sober life is led by a sane and sober people. And we find there no tendencies toward the development of caste, far-reaching though the poisonous influence of the plutocracy is.
For our hopeful, yes, convincing comparisons, we need not bring forward the early days of the republic, when the surviving silly old Colonial aristocracy was strong enough to restrict the suffrage, to enforce rigid class distinctions, to threaten us with an official aristocracy of “birth.” We only need compare forty years ago with to-day to see the substantial progress of true Democracy. Proportionately, are there not vastly fewer people to-day lacking that high sense of self-respect which caused so much open, profuse and shamefaced apologies for electing to the Presidency a man of such “low origin” as Lincoln? At the time of the Civil War, and even thereafter, the rich men in every community had great political influence simply because they were rich, and property, as property, claimed and was conceded a right to a more potent voice in the public affairs. Is it so to-day? Is not the property influence exercised only in secrecy and stealth? Is the rich man a favorite for elective office, or are the people, roused by the frequent coincidence of wealth and corruption, jealously suspicious of the rich man in politics?
Outside the umbra and penumbra of plutocracy we find the American with the inborn sense of equality, the American that rejoices in humble origin as proof of the personal worth of him who has risen. We are still a nation of working men and women, the sons and daughters of working people. And just as soon as one of us becomes ashamed of his birth or of his own past, becomes infected with the cheap and silly vulgarisms that Europe is always thrusting upon us, just so soon does he or she begin to fall behind in the procession. Influential relatives will not long save him or her, nor inherited property; misused opportunity to better education will only hasten the downfall.
Never was country made up of more kinds of people than the United States; but we have no classes. There is no condition to which one is born from which one may not escape. Class means such a condition. Now, were caste altogether a matter to be determined by the rich, by those “on top,” we might well tremble for the future of our social state. The rich of a thousand localities would not be slow to take advantage of the chance were it offered them. But fortunately caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.
However many Americans there may be who would like to look down, there are few, there are ever fewer, with the quaint fancy for looking up. It is true that in our so-called “foreign element” there seems to lie the possibility of a dangerous influence. This vast mass of foreigners, coming from lands where class distinctions are centuries old, is regarded with hope, consciously and unconsciously, by our plutocratic with caste aspirations. But let us recall the facts about that other flood of immigration, the Irish and the Germans who came in the middle part of the last century—proportionately a greater flood than the one which has been sweeping in upon us for the last twenty years. In the fifties of the last century, as to-day, it was confidently predicted that the downfall of Democracy had already begun. The slavocracy of the South struck hands with the then existing manufacturing plutocracy of the North, and the basis of the Northern plutocracy was the hordes of ignorant immigrants. What happened? The war? More than that. Democracy absorbed away the basis of the rising Northern aristocracy just as the war swept away the basis of slavocracy. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants became the most strenuous of Americans.
Our “foreign element” does not remain foreign. It comes here to become American, and it sets about the accomplishment of its purpose with an energy and a resolution that are unconquerable. When our plutocracy of to-day leans upon the “foreign element” it leans upon a breaking reed. And the more heavily it leans the worse will be the fall.
In manners more easily than any other way can we see Democracy in progress. There should be no confusing that respectful consideration for others, which in an honest way most of us have, with the European idea of deference. Whether at home or abroad, the big asset of the American is his lack of deference, his freedom from that which angered Walt Whitman into crying out haughtily:
“By heaven, there has been about enough of doffing and deprecating. I find no sweeter fat than that which clings to my own bones.”
Manners bespeak mental attitude; and mental attitude is the man. Americans should be careful how they permit themselves to trifle with their manners. We are hearing a great deal about “growing distinctions between class and mass” now-a-days. Many are “viewing with alarm” and “deeply deploring” such evidences of it as, to use the most often cited instance, the increasing tendency of well-to-do parents to send their children to private schools instead of, as formerly, to the public school.
The viewers with alarm seem to miss the point. It is not the “mass” that is going to suffer by this imported passion for exclusiveness; it is the “class.” The “class” cuts itself off from the “mass,” from the full, strong currents of democratic life which alone give vitality and endurance. The mass remains vital and energetic and progressive; the class withers and shrivels and sloughs away.
Nevertheless, the disposition on the part of some Americans to despise and forsake the splendid triumph-producing ideas of their country for the mean and petty, disaster and decay-producing ideas of the Old World, is a matter which should not be passed over without comment. Of necessity our snobs will be pushed aside and trampled in the resistless onrush of the Democratic idea. The nation would be feeble indeed if it could be halted or even slackened by such an obstacle. But the snobs ought to be noted and warned. Disobedience to the great laws which determine the evolution of mankind is important only to the disobedient individual. But it is part of our humanitarian duty as democrats to be patient with the ignorant, the weak and the erring, and to be helpful to them as far as we can. It is impossible for any one with the broad sympathies which Democracy engenders not to feel the impulses of pity when he sees fellow-beings, through vanity or ignorance, flinging themselves and their innocent young children across the very pathway of the mighty wave of Democracy.
A snob is a person who feels inferior and wants company in his misery, and longs for the consolation of finding those even lower than himself. Snobism should be exterminated, just as, more and more scientifically, bodily disease is being stamped out. The snob is the only one who wants class distinctions, or who can encourage their existence. It is the snob who returns from abroad deeply impressed by courtesies shown him over there in expectation of and in exchange for tips. He uses his first intake of native air to fall afoul of the native manners. And no doubt our manners do need improving. We have always been in a great hurry under press of work, and there is still a great deal more to do than our competent doers can find time for. But in polishing our manners we must be careful to use a sound brand of democratic polish, not the English brand so much admired by those who yearn for a deference from others which they would not when alone venture to show themselves.
Back of manners is instinct. Often a man’s lack of manners enables us to see whether his instincts are right or not. Aristocratic manners hide moral and mental defects, just as whiskers and clothes hide physical defects. What we ought to develop is sincere manners—not the bowings and scrapings of fear and cupidity and servility. Democratic manners!
Good manners among the various kinds of public and semi-public servants in England would not be considered good manners here. Without disputing the point with those admirers of the English servant, we must insist that it would be ridiculous for a self-respecting American citizen to grovel and scrape and look and act “humble.” We want no servility here, much as we would like to please those persons who constantly feel the need of assurances from others that they are as grand folks as they would like to think themselves.
Scraping and cringing, whether in a duke or in a domestic, are as bad manners for a human being as are arrogance and impertinence.
The grotesque nature of the snob complaints against the manners of our everyday people is striking when one recognizes a certain criticism that can justly be made against us. It is among so-called well-bred people, a certain brand of them, our snobs, that bad manners are most prevalent. For out of them is left that on which alone good manners can be built—the proud, erect, democratic spirit.
It is not difficult to have good manners in a graded social system. It is extremely difficult to have good manners in a Democracy. Any one can easily be a snob, a looker-up and a looker-down. But how very difficult it is to be a simple, unaffected man or woman, considerate, courteous, looking all other men and women straight in the eyes and saying: “You are certainly as good as I am. I hope I am as good as you are.”
“I am your equal” is at the basis of democratic bad manners. “You are my equal” is the basis of democratic good manners.
Again and again in fashionable society, frequently among those most prone to call their poorer countrymen and women ill-mannered, there are barbarities and repulsive lapses of good taste not merely tolerated, but approved as marks of fashion and refinement. For example: A rich woman gives a cotillon, provides many thousand dollars’ worth of handsome favors. You look about the ballroom—there sits a circle of girls, pretty and ugly and passable, attractive and unattractive. Some are loaded down with favors—you can hardly see their radiant faces for the mass of articles which testify to their popularity.
Others have only a few favors, and those of the poorest. Yet there they must sit, acting as foils for the pretty and lucky girls who are emphasizing their homeliness and bad luck. Their sufferings do not show in their faces—at least not very plainly. But they would not be human if they did not feel the pangs of humiliated and wounded vanity at this most conspicuous advertisement of their inferiority in charm.
Yet the cotillon is regarded as the very highest kind of refined social entertainment. And hostesses will beam upon this sorry scene with never a thought for the sufferings of their slighted and wounded girl guests. In a truly refined society would any one ever give any form of entertainment at which there would be frank discrimination among the guests?
Again, a woman gives a dinner. You go to her house and find her receiving in a magnificent dress and displaying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry. She is far and away the most gorgeously, the most expensively dressed person at her dinner. She outshines all her women guests. In a truly sensitively refined society would a hostess do this? Would she not rather dress simply, even plainly? Her dinner, and its service, should of course be the best she can provide—there she is honoring her guests. But in her own dress, in the one feature of her entertainment where invidious and humiliating comparisons could be instantly made, she would think not of gratifying her own vanity, but of putting her guests at their ease. And so she would save her best jewels and dresses for places other than her own house and eyes other than those of her own guests.
The kinds of grossly bad manners of which these are fair and familiar examples would not surprise us in Europe, where the education is narrow and souls are shaped in pettiness and vulgarity by class distinctions. But they would and do surprise us in America.
There is one trait in our national character that is a veritable Gibraltar against caste tendencies. It is that passion for up-to-dateness, which is so American, which is the cause of American progress, which is the secret of the ever rising plane of the comfort and intelligence of the American masses.
A European landowner or manufacturer, filled with the spirit of conservatism, the spirit of “good enough” and “it will do” and “don’t destroy old landmarks,” clings to musty and rusty antiquities, hampers himself and his associates and neighbors, drags and makes them drag at the wheels of advance. With the American, how quickly is the new building, the new machine, the new method already improved into antiquity! Away with it! Replace it by the latest and best. Better one big item in the profit and loss account than steadily decreasing profits and wages and products, and steadily increasing losses through the triumphs of competitors. The new, always the new! The new, always hopeful of the new! Give the new a trial! To-day must be better than yesterday; to-morrow will surely be better still. That is America.
And this same spirit wages incessant and successful war against caste. If the new man is the best man we put him to the front. Does our “irreverence” for things ancient sometimes offend a super-æsthetic few? It is a pity they are so enraptured by European picturesqueness of the antique that they fail to note the European peasant bending and groaning under the weight of the past. Does this disrespect for hampering tradition proclaim us “new”? That is well. When did youth become a calamity and a reproach? May we ever be “new,” looking at the problems of life with hopeful young eyes, confident that better, more beautiful things lie in the future than past suns ever shone upon.
There are two kinds of stability—the stability of the ship rotting at its wharf; the stability of the ship, strong and steady, on its way through the midst of the sea.
America is all for the latter. It abhors barnacles and rust. And it combats monopolistic tendencies most fiercely because, however adroitly disguised as “communities of interest,” they promote the stability of stagnation, blindfold the eager eyes of competition, bribe brain and muscle to sloth, hold up the heavy hands of sluggard and incompetent, and discourage individual ambition and hope. There should be no structure of any kind whatsoever, whether national or social, which, when it has clearly outlived its use, can be saved by sentiment or interest or bulwarks of brainless boodle-bags. And Democracy will have none such. Let those who tremble for our future be calmed. As for those who fancy they can in their own interest create such structures, let them read history and learn to laugh at their folly.
The principle applies to those less tangible but more insidious structures—those ideas that would give permanence or prominence to people because of what some one else has been, or what they have been in the past—structures existent only in the minds of comparatively few, gone daft in their love of European imitation. But we tear down too quickly for them. While the fine building of class distinctions is constructing, changes occur that knock out the foundation stones.
An old New York “aristocrat”—his grandfather came over in the steerage—glanced around the Metropolitan Opera House one night not long ago and said: “There are not a dozen families on the list of boxholders twenty years ago that are on that list to-day. All new people—and from heaven knows where.” Where were the new people from? Why, from whence this old “aristocrat’s” grandparents came, from where his grandchildren will be.
Whenever a fence is put up by any group of people around themselves one of two things happens. Either those inside grow terribly weary of their exclusiveness, and, finding that no particular benefit seems to be coming from it, voluntarily let down the fence; or the society-mad herd, seeing the fence, makes a rush for it to get in. A coarse rattling of hoofs and horns, a discovery of a loose paling, a crash, a mad scramble, and there are more inside than out.
Democracy is as much the law of our social order as gravitation is of our physical order. Those who don’t like it will, if they are wise, either leave the country or adjust themselves and their children to its conditions. For if they stay and bring up their children out of harmony with the existing and unalterable order, their children will be punished, even though they themselves, through obedience in their earlier lives, escape the worst consequences of their folly.
The part of the coming generation that is trained in Democracy is the part that will survive and prosper and progress. The part that is bred in exclusiveness and caste feeling is going to be bitterly discontented and deplorably unprogressive certainly, and in all probability, except in a few rare cases, downright unprosperous.
Why do not the plutocratic “exclusives” and aspirants to exclusiveness see these things and take warning? Because vanity is so much stronger in influence over the average human being than is reason. They pile up the millions, make safe investments, plot monopolies that will insure stability of property, and imagine that their family line will be secure. Then they educate their children to folly and superciliousness and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of high finance. Thus does Nature, abhorring permanence, craftily use them for their own undoing. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make drunk on the fumes of vanity.
The plutocracy and its imitators bring up their children in hot-houses. Some of the youngsters are ejected from the hot-house and exposed as soon as they are grown—or sooner; others remain in the hot-house and perhaps breed there. But the day of fate comes. The hot-house is emptied or destroyed.
Fortunately for the masses and their children, fortunately for the prosperity and progress of the race, few can build these hot-houses; only a few can dwell in them. And with the swift progress of Democracy in these modern days, this cruel, mocking favoritism swiftly decreases.
Manners there can be, but they must be democratic manners. Refinement, culture, there can be, but it must be democratic. Idealism there can be, but it must be true idealism, broad, deep and high, not a “class” matter, not a vanity, not a pretentious crushing down of millions to make luxurious holiday for a few.
The aristocratic idealisms in manners, education, politics, religion, mode of life, are fleeing like shades of night before the bright daylight of Democracy. Only ignorance could ever have thought them fair.