Part 24 (1/2)
You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and while that is the case the Jeffersonian politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will a.s.suredly be sometimes out of work. Then your inst.i.tutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.
In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a cla.s.s, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated cla.s.s; of a cla.s.s which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained.
The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness.
I have seen England pa.s.s three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described.
Through such seasons the United States will have to pa.s.s in the course of the next century, if not this. How will you pa.s.s through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plan that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.
The day will come when in the State of New York a mult.i.tude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates are likely to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread?
I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such seasons of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation.
There is nothing to stop you. Your Const.i.tution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own inst.i.tutions.
I have the honor to be, dear sir, your faithful servant, T.B. Macaulay.
H.S. Randall, Esq., etc., etc., etc.
A FOOL'S PARADISE
Radical propagandists, with a sublime disregard for facts and history, persist in extolling the tenets of Russian Communism as new discoveries in the art of government. They a.s.sert that the Bolshevists have solved for the first time in history the problem of social equality. They say the experiment of the ”dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat” has never before been attempted and that it fails to find favor outside Russia because peoples are always p.r.o.ne to condemn what they do not understand.
Russia, however, is but the last of many countries to rebel against its own prosperity. During the twenty years preceding the World War Russia enjoyed the greatest growth and development, both of its resources and education, in the history of the country. Two-thirds of the agricultural land in the nation was owned and occupied by the farming cla.s.ses, which comprised nearly three-fourths of the population. In ten years the number of depositors in the savings banks of Russia had doubled and the gross amount of the deposits had quadrupled.
Then came the war, to be followed by Bolshevism. The experience of Russia in the last two years, however, is not unique in the history of nations. The narration of the spoliation of the rich, the confiscation of the estates and the profligate waste of the national substance is only a repet.i.tion, almost verse for verse and line for line, of the license and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoveris.h.i.+ng of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery G.o.ds, it is all ”old stuff.”
The Charmides of Xenophon's ”Banquet” celebrates the pleasures and profits of poverty. He once possessed a fortune that made him fear thieves and sycophants--in reality the same thing--Athens had levied heavy taxes on the rich and had pa.s.sed laws making it a capital offense for a person of wealth to attempt to flee the state. The money raised by thus taxing the wealthy was distributed to the poor in the public places. Any one holding a certificate showing that he had not sufficient wealth to be taxed was admitted free to the theaters and was ent.i.tled to one meal a day at restaurants supported by the state.
The people's council, fearful that there might be a disposition to stop this waste of public money, pa.s.sed acts which decreed capital punishment to any orator who should propose to modify the laws which made ”poverty a blessing.”
Charmides recounts that he once lived in a state of perpetual terror.
New taxes were decreed every day, each of which he was compelled to pay.
He was deprived of the liberty even of leaving the state. His lot was worse than that of the meanest slave.
Behold! a fertile imagination came to his rescue. He embarked in a speculation in which failure was inevitable. Good fortune attended him.
Within a brief time he was penniless and happy. The unfortunate speculator who had gained possession of the wealth of Charmides lived for a brief time in the agony of wealth; then he attempted to flee the state, was apprehended and executed.
Charmides makes votive offerings to the G.o.ds of Athens for his escape from the terror and servitude of property. ”How comfortably I sleep!” he cries. ”The republic has confidence in me. I am no longer threatened. It is I who threaten others. A free man, I can go or stay. I appear at the theater. I am admitted free. The rich rise in trembling and offer me the best seats. When I walk abroad in the streets they stand aside to offer me an un.o.bstructed pa.s.sage. To-day I resemble a tyrant. Then I was a slave. Then I paid tribute to the state. Now the state, my tributary, supports me. I lose nothing; for I have nothing.”