The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891. Various
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Crœsus or pauper, comprehends that to empower the executive with greater responsibility than it already possesses would mean to tempt national ruin, and that until mankind has become a race of angels the hideous problem of human suffering can never be solved by vesting private property-rights in the hands of public functionaries. But the note of anguish in that voice of desperation and revolt need not, for all this, be confused with its madder strains. The claim of poverty upon riches is to-day a tremendously ethical one. Help—and help wise, earnest, persistent—is the inflexible moral tax levied by life itself on all who have an overplus of wealth wherewith to relieve deserving misery. The occasional careless signing of a cheque, or even a visit now and then among the filthy slums of Bayard and Hester Streets, cannot cancel these mighty obligations. And there are better ways of schooling the soul to recognize the magnitude and insistence of such obligations than by organizing ultra-select dancing-classes at Sherry’s; giving “pink luncheons” to a bevy of simpering female snobs; uncorking eight-dollar bottles of Clos de Vougeot for a fastidious dinner company of men-about-town; squandering three thousand dollars on a Delmonico ball, or purchasing at vast prices the gowns and jewels of a deposed foreign empress. Yes, there are better ways. And for people who are solely pleasure-seekers to call themselves Christian is, from their own points of view, blasphemy unspeakable; since whatever we agnostics may say and believe about the alleged “divinity” of Christ, they hold that the Galilean was the son of God, and that in such miraculous character he spoke when saying: “Leave all and follow me.”
The American snob is a type at once the most anomalous and the most vulgar. Why he is anomalous need not be explained, but the essence of his vulgarity lies in his entire absence of a sanctioning background. It is not, when all is said, so strange a matter that anyone reared in an atmosphere of historic ceremonial and precedent should betray an inherent leaning toward shams and vanities. But if there is anything that we Americans, as a race, are forever volubly extolling, it is our immunity from all such drawbacks. And yet I will venture to state that in every large city of our land snobbery and plutocracy reign as twin evils, while in every small town, from Salem to some Pacific-slope settlement, the beginnings of the same social curse are manifest. Of course New York towers in bad eminence over the entire country. Abroad they are finding out the absurd shallowness of our professions. Nearly seven years ago an able literary man said to me in London: “I am wearied, here, by the necessity of continual aristocratic patronage. Especially true is this,” he added, “regarding all new dramatic productions. Lord This and Lady That are more thought of as potentially occupying stalls or boxes at a first performance than is the presence of the most sapient judges.” And then again, after a slight pause, he proceeded: “But I hear it is very much the same thing with you. I have often longed to go to America, just for the sake of that social emancipation which it has seemed to promise. But they tell me that in your big cities a good deal of the same humbug prevails.” I assured him that he was fatally right; but I did not proceed to say, as I might have done, that our “aristocracy” rarely patronizes first nights at theatres, holding most ladies, and gentlemen connected with the stage in a position somewhere between their scullions and their head footmen.
London laughs and sneers at New York when she thinks of her at all, which is, on the whole, not very often. If London esteemed New York of greater importance than she does esteem her, the derisive laughter might be keener and hence more salutary. Imagine America separated by only a narrow channel from Europe, and imagine her to contain in her chief metropolis, as she does at present, the amazing contradictions and refutations of the democratic idea which are to be noted now. What food for English, French, and German sarcasm would our pigmy Four Hundred then become! In those remote realms they have already shrank aghast at the licentious tyrannies of our newspapers. England has freedom of the press, but she also has a law of libel which is not a cipher. Our law of libel is so horribly effete that the purest woman on our continent may to-morrow be vilely slandered, and yet obtain no adequate form of redress. This is what our extolled “liberty” has brought us—a despotism in its way as frightful as anything that Russia or the Orient can parallel. Is it remarkable that such relatively minor abuses as those of plutocracy and snobbery should torment us here in New York when bullets of journalistic scandal are whizzing about our ears every day of our lives, and those who get wounds have no healing remedy within their possible reach? Some one of our clever novelists might take a hint for the plot of a future tale from this melancholy state of things. He might write a kind of new Monte Cristo, and make his hero, riddled and stung by assaults of our unbridled press, find but a single means of vengeance. That means would be the starting of a great newspaper on his own account, and the triumphant cannonading of his foes through its columns. More influential New York editors would doubtless already have forced their way within the holy bounds of patrician circles, were it not that, in the first place editors are somewhat hard-worked persons, and that in the second place they are usually men of brains.
Marriage, among the New York snobs and plutocrats, ordinarily treats human affection as though it were a trifling optic malady to be cured by a few drops of corrective lotion. Daughters are trained by their mothers to leave no efforts untried, short of those absolutely immoral, in winning wealthy husbands. Usually the daughters are tractable enough. Rebellion is rare with them; why should it not be? Almost from infancy (unless when their parents have made fortunes with prodigious quickness) they are taught that matrimony is a mere hard bargain, to be driven shrewdly and in a spirit of the coolest mercantile craft. Sometimes they do really rebel, however, mastered by pure nature, in one of those tiresome moods where she shows the insolence of defying bloodless convention. Yet nearly always capitulation follows. And then what follows later on? Perhaps heart-broken resignation, perhaps masked adultery, perhaps the degradation of public divorce. But usually it is no worse than a silent disgusted slavery, for the American woman is notoriously cold in all sense of passion, and when reared to respect “society” she is a snob to the core. Some commentators aver that it is the climate which makes her so pulseless and prudent. This is possible. But one deeply familiar with the glacial theories of the fashionable New York mother might find an explanation no less frigid than comprehensive for all her traits of acquiescence and decorum. How many of these fashionable mothers ask more than a single question of the bridegrooms they desire for their daughters? That one question is simply: “What amount of money do you control?” But constantly this kind of interrogation is needless. A male “match” and “catch” finds that his income is known to the last dollar long before he has been graduated from the senior class at Columbia or Harvard. Society, like a genial feminine Briaræus, opens to him its myriad rosy and dimpled arms. He has only to let a certain selected pair of these clutch him tight, if he is rich enough to make his personality a luring prize. Often his morals are unsavory, but these prove no impediment. The great point with plutocracy and snobbery is to perpetuate themselves—to go on producing scions who will uphold for them future generations of selfishness and arrogance. One sees the same sort of procreative tendency in certain of our hardiest and coarsest weeds. Sometimes a gardener comes along, with hoe, spade, and a strong uprooting animus. In human life that kind of gardener goes by the ugly name of Revolution. But we are dealing with neither parables nor allegories. Those are for the modish clergymen of the select and exclusive churches, and are administered in the form of dainty little religious pills which these gentlemen have great art in knowing how to palatably sugar.
“SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?”
PART I.—Objections to National Ownership Considered
When the paper published in the February Arena, entitled “The Farmer, the Investor, and the Railway,” was written, the writer was not ready to accept national ownership as a solution of the railway problem; but the occurrences attending the flurries of last autumn in the money markets, when half a dozen men, in order to obtain control of certain railways, entered into a conspiracy that came near wrecking the entire industrial and commercial interests of the country, having shed a lurid light upon the enormous and baleful power which the corporate control of the railways places in the hands of what Theodore Roosevelt aptly termed “the dangerous wealthy classes,” has had the effect of converting to the advocacy of national ownership not only the writer but vast numbers of conservative people of the central, western, and southern States to whom the question now assumes this form: “Which is to be preferred: a master in the shape of a political party that it is possible