The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3

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Title: The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3

Author: Various

Release Date: May 22, 2005 [EBook #15876]

Language: English

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The

Unpopular Review

Vol. II, No. 3

July-September, 1914

Published Quarterly at 35 West 32d Street, New York, by

Henry Holt and Company

Contents

[pg 1]

Unsocial Investments

Return to Table of Contents

The new social conscience is essentially a class phenomenon. While it pretends to the rôle of inner monitor and guide to conduct for all mankind, it interprets good and evil in class terms. It manifests a special solicitude for the welfare of one social group, and a mute hostility toward another. Labor is its Esau, Capital its Jacob. Let strife arise between workingmen and their employers, and you will see the new social conscience aligning itself with the former, accepting at face value all the claims of labor, reiterating all labor’s formulæ. The suggestion that judgment should be suspended until the facts at issue are established is repudiated as the prompting of a secret sin. For, to paraphrase a recent utterance of the Survey, one of the foremost organs of the new conscience, is it not true that the workers are fighting for their livings, while the employers are fighting only for their profits? It would appear, then, that there can be no question as to the side to which justice inclines. A living is more sacred than a profit.

It is virtually never true, however, that the workers are fighting for their living. Contrary to Marx’s exploded iron law they probably had that and more before the trouble began. But of course we would not wish to restrict them to a living, if they can produce more, and want all who can’t produce that much to be provided with it—and something more at the expense of others.

It may be urged that the employer’s profits also represent the livings of a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays for a reactionary view. We stand for [pg 2]man as against the dollar. If you say that the dollar is metonymy for the man possessed of a dollar, with rights to defend, and reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict yourself of reaction. These gentry (I quote from the May Atlantic) suppose themselves to be discussing the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights of stockholders. The true view, the progressive view, is obviously that the possessors of the dollar, the recipients of profits and dividends, are excluded from the communion of humanity. Labor is mankind.

The present instance is of course not the only instance in human history of the substitution of class criteria of judgment for social criteria. Such manifestations of class conscience are doubtless justified in the large economy of human affairs; an individual must often claim all in order to gain anything, and the same may be true of a class. Besides, the ultimate arbitration of the claims of the classes is not a matter for the rational judgment. What is subject to rational analysis, however, are the methods of gaining its ends proposed by the new social conscience. Of these methods one of wide acceptance is that of fixing odium upon certain property interests, with a view to depriving them immediately of the respect still granted to property interests in general, and ultimately of the protection of the laws. It is with the rationality of what may be called the excommunication and outlawing of special property interests, that the present paper is concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property interests—or property owners—insists with equal vehemence upon absolving the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts. The Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, [pg 3]instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him for his misdeeds, but we can make him an object of public reproach; expel him from social intercourse (if that, so often talked about, is ever done); fasten his iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

II

In the country at large the property interests involved in the production and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The unreformed best society may still tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would a well organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter the city’s poor. Outlawry is not far distant. These tenements must go. Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, [pg 4]will be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for excommunication. Pillars of society and the church have already been seen tottering on account of revelations of working conditions in factories from which they receive dividends. Property affected by a public use, that is, investments in the instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a compromising possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the personal integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. Enriched by unearned increment—who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that the delegates and their constituencies—all honest lovers of mankind—will refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land.

III

The existence of categories of property interests resting under a growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer’s acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a cancellation of the [pg 5]liquor dealer’s lease. This they refused to do, on the ground that the building in question is, by location, eminently suited to its present use, but very ill suited to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee would immediately reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to their partner’s desire would therefore result in a reduction of their own profits, but would advance the public welfare not one whit. Disheartened by her partners’ obstinacy, my friend is seeking to dispose of her interest in the building. As she is willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in order to get rid of her complicity in what she considers an unholy business, the transfer will doubtless soon be made. Her soul will be lightened of the profits from property put to an anti-social use. But the property will still continue in such use, and profits from it will still accrue to someone with a soul to lose or to save.

In her fascinating book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Miss Jane Addams tells of a visit to a western state where she had invested a sum of money in farm mortgages. I was horrified, she says, by the wretched conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind…. The farmer’s wife [was] a picture of despair, as she stood in the door of the bare, crude house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces, almost covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust, that they looked like flattened hoofs. The children could not be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me quite impossible to receive interest from mortgages upon farms which might at any season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment. And thereby made the supply of money for such farmers [pg 6]that much less and consequently that much dearer. This is quite a fair example of much current philanthropy.

We may safely assume that, however much this action may have lightened Miss Addams’s conscience, it did not lighten the burden of debt upon the farmer, or make the periodic interest payments less painful, and it certainly did put them to the trouble and contingent expenses of a new mortgage. The moral burden was shifted, to the ease of the philanthropist, and this seems to exhaust the sum of the good results of one well intentioned deed. Do they outweigh the bad ones?

So, doubtless, there are among our friends persons who, upon proof that factories in which they have been interested pay starvation wages, have withdrawn their investments. And others who, stumbling upon a state legislature among the productive assets of a railway corporation, have sold their bonds and invested the proceeds elsewhere. It is a modern way of obeying the injunction, Sell all thou hast and follow me. And not a very painful way, since the irreproachable investments pay almost, if not quite, as well as those that are suspect.

It is not, however, impossible to conceive of a property owner driven from one position to another, in order to satisfy this new requirement of the social conscience, without ever finding peace. Miss Addams put the money withdrawn from those hideous farm mortgages into a flock of innocent looking sheep. Alas, they were not so innocent as they seemed. The sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each was not reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool and farm enabled the partners to end the enterprise without loss. Sales of mutton? Let us hope those eight hundred infected hoofs are well printed on the butcher’s conscience.

And the net result of all these moral strivings? The evil investments still continue to be evil, and still yield [pg 7]profits. Doubtless they rest, in the end, upon less sensitive consciences. Marvellous moral gain!

IV

We are bound to the wheel, say the sociological fatalists. All our efforts are of no avail; the Wheel revolves as it was destined. Not so. Our strivings for purity in investments, puny as may be their results in the individual instance, may compose a sum that is imposing in its effectiveness. How their influence may be exerted will best appear from an analogy.

It is a settled conviction among Americans of Puritan antecedents, and among all other Americans, native born or alien, that have come under Puritan influence, that the dispensing of alcoholic beverages is a degrading function. This conviction has not, to be sure, notably impaired the performance of the function. But it has none the less produced a striking effect. It has set apart for the function in question those elements in the population that place the lowest valuation upon the esteem of the public, and that are, on the whole, least worthy of it. In consequence the American saloon is, by common consent, the very worst institution of its kind in the world. Such is the immediate result of good intentions working by the method of excommunication of a trade.

This degradation of the personnel and the institution proceeds at an accelerated rate as public opinion grows more bitter. In the end the evil becomes so serious, so intimately associated with all other evils, social and political, that you hear men over their very cups rise to proclaim, with husky voices, The saloon must go! At this point the community is ripe for prohibition: accordingly, it would seem that the initial stages in the process, unpleasant as were their consequences, were not ill-advised, after all. But prohibition does not come without a political struggle, in which the enemy, selected for brazenness and schooled in corruption, employs methods that leave [pg 8]lasting scars upon the body politic. And even when vanquished, the enemy retreats into the morasses of unenforcible laws, to conduct a guerilla warfare that knows no rules. Let us grant that the ultimate gain is worth all it costs: are we sure that we have taken the best possible means to achieve our ends?

In the poorer quarters of most great American cities, there is much property that it is difficult for a man to hold without losing the respect of the enlightened. Old battered tenements, dingy and ill lighted tumbledown shacks, the despair of the city reformer. Let us say that the proximity of gas tanks or noisy railways or smoky factories consign such quarters to the habitation of the very poor. Quite possibly, then, the replacement of the existing buildings by better ones would represent a heavy financial loss. The increasing social disapprobation of property vested in such wretched forms leads to the gradual substitution of owners who hold the social approval in contempt, for those who manifest a certain degree of sensitiveness. The tenants certainly gain nothing from the change. What is more likely to happen, is a screwing up of rents, an increasing promptness of evictions. Public opinion will in the end be roused against the landlords; the more timid among them will sell their holdings to others not less ruthless, but bolder and more astute. Attempts at public regulation will be fought with infinitely greater resourcefulness than could possibly have been displayed by respectable owners. Perhaps the final outcome will be that more drastic regulations are adopted than would have been the case had the shifting in ownership not taken place. There would still remain the possibility of the evasion of the law, and it is not at all improbable that the progress in the technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in regulation, thus leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from the process as a whole.

The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—literally—and [pg 9]then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediæval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediæval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for profit—that is, a potential property interest—was outlawed. In consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to engage in the business. Usury therefore came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from the current ethical formulation, who were protected, for a consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern property interests may be protected by the political boss.

Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of experience in this method of dealing with the usurer’s trade. The business shifted from the control of citizens to that of aliens; from the hands of those who were aliens merely in a narrow, national sense, to the hands of those who are alien to our common humanity. Such lawless, tricky, extortionate loan sharks as now infest our cities were probably not to be found at all in mediæval or early modern times. They are a product of a secular process of selection. Their ability to evade the laws directed against them is consummate. It is true that from time to time we do succeed in catching one and fining him, or even imprisoning him. For which risk the small borrower is forced to pay, at a usurer’s rate.

Social improvement through the excommunication of property interests is inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in operation we are sure to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples. First, a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for the one responsive to public sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile popular action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the resourceful and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, [pg 10]evoking a desperate attempt on the part of the interests threatened to protect themselves by political means—that is, by gross corruption; or, if the menaced interest is a vast one, dominating a defensible territory, by armed rebellion, as in our own Civil War. If the interest is finally overwhelmed politically, and placed completely under the ban of the law, it has been given ample time to develop an unscrupulousness of personnel and an art of corruption that long enable it to exist illegally, a lasting reproach to the constituted authorities.

V

Suppression of anti-social interests by the methods in vogue amounts to little more than their banishment to the underworld. And we can well imagine the joy with which the denizens of the underworld receive such new accessions to their numbers and power. For in the nature of the case, it is inevitable that all varieties of outcasts and outlaws should join forces. The religious schismatic makes common cause with the pariah; the political offender with the thief and robber. Such association of elements vastly increases the difficulty of repressing crime. The band of thieves and robbers in the cave of Adullam doubtless found their powers of preying vastly increased through the acquisition of such a leader as David. The problem of mediæval vagabondage was rendered well-nigh incapable of solution by the fact that any beggar’s rags might conceal a holy but excommunicated friar.

Let us once more review our experience with the usurer. As an outcast he offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn supported by them. The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely allied: without the pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a precarious living; without the picking of pockets, many pawnshops would find it impossible to meet expenses. The salary loan shark often works hand in glove with the professional gambler; each procures victims for the other. The hole-in-the-[pg 11]wall or blind tiger provides a rendezvous for all the outcasts of society. Boot-legging is a common subsidiary occupation for the pander, the thief and the cracksman. Where it flourishes, it serves to bridge over many a period of slack trade. Franchises whose validity is subject to political attack, bring to the aid of the underworld some of the most powerful interests in the community. The police are almost helpless when confronted by a coalition of persons of wealth and respectability with professional politicians commanding a motley array of yeggs and thugs, pimps and card-sharpers.

Let us suppose that the developing social conscience places under the ban receipt of private income from land and other natural resources, and that a powerful movement aiming at the confiscation of such resources is under way. It is superfluous to point out that the vast interests threatened would offer a desperate resistance. The warfare against an incomparably lesser interest, the liquor trade, has taxed all the resources of the modern democratic state—on the whole the most absolute political organization known. In no instance has the state come out of the struggle completely victorious; the proscribed interest is yielding ground, if at all, only very slowly. What, then, would be the outcome of a struggle against the vastly greater landed interest? Perhaps the state would be victorious in the end. But for generations the landed interest would survive, if not by title of common law, at least by title of common corruption. And in the course of the conflict, we can not doubt that political disorder would flourish as never before, and that under its shelter private vice and crime would develop almost unchecked.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a mere majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only when the outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority. Arbitrarily to increase the outlawed interests is to undermine the very foundations of society.

[pg 12]

VI

The trend of the foregoing discussion, it will be said, is reactionary in the extreme. There are, as all must admit, private interests that are prejudicial to the public interest. Are they to be left in possession of the privilege of trading upon the public