The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891. Various
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these are not endowments that in such connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. “Jim” Fisk had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels and money. The so-called “great men” of Wall Street are foes of society—foes merciless and malign. Their “generalship,” their “Napoleonic” attributes are terms coined by people of their own damaging class, people with low motives, with even brutish morals. It is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares and Penates hideous little gods carved by their own misanthropy from the harsh granite of self-worship. Every new conspiracy to amass millions through wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling, in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big gambler’s treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.
But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were, with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it. Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds; forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public crimes.
Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be held remarkable, perhaps even unique,—as an age of violent contrasts, violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial tinge. There are men among us—and men of august intellects, too—who urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume, if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall Street, its air foul with the mephitic exhalations that rise from dead and rotting principle. When the state is corrupt, and large bodies of its citizens are not only corrupt but wholly scornful of every fraternal and philanthropic purpose as well,—when communities like this of Wall Street, cold-blooded, shameless, injurious, are bowed to as powers, instead of being shunned as pests, then the ideals of such men as Karl Marx and his disciples loom distant and indefinite on the horizon of the future. Tritest of metaphors though it may be, all civilization is a garden, and in this garden of our own western tillage Wall Street towers to-day like a colossal weed, with roots deep-plunging into a soil they desiccate and de-fertilize. When and whose will be the extirpating hand?
Here dawns a question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some coming Œdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge—the conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion—will dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself headlong into the sea!
PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE—WHICH?
The advocates of free trade in this country at the present time are very unlike Emerson’s “fine young Oxford gentlemen” who said “there was nothing new, and nothing true, and no matter.” They not only believe their pet doctrine to be true, but they seem to assume that it is also new. They further treat it as if it were an exact science and a great moral question as well. Unwarranted assumptions merely confuse and this question of national economic policy is too important to be clouded with confusions. It is worth while, therefore, to look at these assumptions one by one and try, before attempting any discussion of the tariff, to clear the ground from cant and to see the question exactly as it is.
In the first place, the question of free trade or protection is in no sense a moral one. Free traders are prone to forget that their great prophet, Adam Smith, drew this distinction very plainly at the outset. He wrote two important works. One of them all the world has read. It is called “The Wealth of Nations,” deals with the selfish interests of mankind, and embodies the author’s political economy. The other is an equally elaborate work entitled “The Moral Sentiments.” It is the complement of “The Wealth of Nations,” which is devoted to the selfish side of human nature and the world at large has found no trouble in forgetting it. Adam Smith himself was under no confusion of mind as to his subject when he wrote about political economy. He knew that he was dealing with questions of a selfish character, of an enlightened selfishness, no doubt, but none the less questions of self-interest. He never for a moment thought of putting his political economy on a plane of pure morality.
When the great political movement toward free trade began in England, it was largely a movement of the middle classes and of the industrial interests of Great Britain. The great middle class of England, which furnishes the backbone and sinew of the nation, is essentially a moral class, and in appealing to it the political leader is always tempted to put forward the moral aspect of his theme, even if he has to twist his argument and his facts to find one. The manufacturers of England believed that free trade would be profitable, but it soothed them to be assured that the system was also highly moral. It is to the Manchester School, therefore, that we owe the attempt to give to the entire free trade system a moral coloring for which the narrower question of the repeal of the corn laws afforded an opportunity. Our own free traders for the most part are devout followers of the Manchester School, and take all their teachings and practices with little discrimination. They are essentially imitative. The anti-corn law agitators pointed their arguments by exhibiting loaves of bread of different sizes, and so our free traders, during a campaign, have gone about in carts and held up pairs of trousers, a more humorous if less intelligent form of object lesson. They attempt, too, in like fashion, to give the weight of morality to their doctrines. Unfortunately for them, inasmuch as everyone likes to be moral at some one’s else expense, their position is untenable. Adam Smith’s distinction was a broad and sound one; and deeply important as political economy and questions of tariff are, they are in no sense matters of morals. They are purely questions of self-interest, of profit and loss, and can be decided properly on these grounds alone.
In the second place, the assumption made tacitly, at least, if not avowedly, that political economy is an exact science is wholly misleading. Political economy covers a wide range of subjects of which the tariff is only one; but in none of its branches is it an exact science. Modern investigation has, no doubt, revealed certain economic laws which we may fairly say operate with reasonable certainty, but this is a very different proposition from that which would make the conclusions of economists in all directions as absolute as those of mathematicians. Political economy, in fact, does not differ greatly in this respect