Part 18 (1/2)
I was somewhat surprised to have the banker take this preposterous statement seriously, respectfully. ”Well, that is quite conceivable with your system. What should you say,” he demanded of the rest of us generally, ”was our ideal of greatness?”
No one replied at once, or at all, till the manufacturer said: ”We will let you continue to run it.”
”Well, it is a very curious inquiry, and I have thought it over a good deal. I should say that within a generation our ideal has changed twice.
Before the war, and during all the time from the Revolution onward, it was undoubtedly the great politician, the publicist, the statesman. As we grew older and began to have an intellectual life of our own, I think the literary fellows had a pretty good share of the honors that were going--that is, such a man as Longfellow was popularly considered a type of greatness. When the war came, it brought the soldier to the front, and there was a period of ten or fifteen years when he dominated the national imagination. That period pa.s.sed, and the great era of material prosperity set in. The big fortunes began to tower up, and heroes of another sort began to appeal to our admiration. I don't think there is any doubt but the millionaire is now the American ideal. It isn't very pleasant to think so, even for people who have got on, but it can't very hopefully be denied. It is the man with the most money who now takes the prize in our national cake-walk.”
The Altrurian turned curiously toward me, and I did my best to tell him what a cake-walk was. When I had finished, the banker resumed, only to say, as he rose from his chair to bid us good-night: ”In any average a.s.sembly of Americans the greatest millionaire would take the eyes of all from the greatest statesman, the greatest poet, or the greatest soldier we ever had. That,” he added to the Altrurian, ”will account to you for many things as you travel through our country.”
IX
The next time the members of our little group came together, the manufacturer began at once upon the banker:
”I should think that our friend the professor, here, would hardly like that notion of yours, that business, as business, has nothing to do with the education of a gentleman. If this is a business man's country, and if the professor has nothing in stock but the sort of education that business has no use for, I should suppose that he would want to go into some other line.”
The banker mutely referred the matter to the professor, who said, with that cold grin of his which I hated:
”Perhaps we shall wait for business to purge and live cleanly. Then it will have some use for the education of a gentleman.”
”I see,” said the banker, ”that I have touched the quick in both of you, when I hadn't the least notion of doing so. But I shouldn't really like to prophesy which will adapt itself to the other--education or business. Let us hope there will be mutual concessions. There are some pessimists who say that business methods, especially on the large scale of the trusts and combinations, have grown worse instead of better; but this may be merely what is called a 'transition state.' Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the darkest hour comes before dawn--and so on. Perhaps when business gets the whole affair of life into its hands, and runs the republic, as its enemies now accuse it of doing, the process of purging and living cleanly will begin. I have known lots of fellows who started in life rather scampishly; but when they felt secure of themselves, and believed that they could afford to be honest, they became so. There's no reason why the same thing shouldn't happen on a large scale. We must never forget that we are still a very novel experiment, though we have matured so rapidly in some respects that we have come to regard ourselves as an accomplished fact. We are really less so than we were forty years ago, with all the tremendous changes since the war. Before that we could take certain matters for granted. If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted a quarter-section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free-fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free-fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital. Decidedly, we are in a transition state, and if the higher education tried to adapt itself to business needs, there are chances that it might sacrifice itself without helping business. After all, how much education does business need? Were our great fortunes made by educated men, or men of university training? I don't know but these young fellows are right about that.”
”Yes, that may all be,” I put in. ”But it seems to me that you give Mr.
h.o.m.os, somehow, a wrong impression of our economic life by your generalizations. You are a Harvard man yourself.”
”Yes, and I am not a rich man. A million or two, more or less; but what is that? I have suffered, at the start and all along, from the question as to what a man with the education of a gentleman ought to do in such and such a juncture. The fellows who have not that sort of education have not that sort of question, and they go in and win.”
”So you admit, then,” said the professor, ”that the higher education elevates a business man's standard of morals?”
”Undoubtedly. That is one of its chief drawbacks,” said the banker, with a laugh.
”Well,” I said, with the deference due even to a man who had only a million or two, more or less, ”we must allow _you_ to say such things. But if the case is so bad with the business men who have made the great fortunes--the business men who have never had the disadvantage of a university education--I wish you would explain to Mr. h.o.m.os why, in every public exigency, we instinctively appeal to the business sense of the community as if it were the fountain of wisdom, probity, and equity.
Suppose there were some question of vital interest--I won't say financial, but political or moral or social--on which it was necessary to rouse public opinion, what would be the first thing to do? To call a meeting over the signatures of the leading business men, because no other names appeal with such force to the public. You might get up a call signed by all the novelists, artists, ministers, lawyers, and doctors in the state, and it would not have a t.i.the of the effect, with the people at large, that a call signed by a few leading merchants, bank presidents, railroad men, and trust officers would have. What is the reason? It seems strange that I should be asking you to defend yourself against yourself.”
”Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all,” the banker replied, with his caressing bonhomie. ”Though I will confess, to begin with, that I do not expect to answer your question to your entire satisfaction. I can only do my best--on the instalment plan.”
He turned to the Altrurian, and then went on: ”As I said the other night, this is a business man's country. We are a purely commercial people; money is absolutely to the fore; and business, which is the means of getting the most money, is the American ideal. If you like, you may call it the American fetish; I don't mind calling it so myself. The fact that business is our ideal, or our fetish, will account for the popular faith in business men, who form its priesthood, its hierarchy. I don't know, myself, any other reason for regarding business men as solider than novelists or artists or ministers, not to mention lawyers and doctors.
They are supposed to have long heads; but it appears that ninety-five times out of a hundred they haven't. They are supposed to be very reliable; but it is almost invariably a business man of some sort who gets out to Canada while the state examiner is balancing his books, and it is usually the longest headed business men who get plundered by him. No, it is simply because business is our national ideal that the business man is honored above all other men among us. In the aristocratic countries they forward a public object under the patronage of the n.o.bility and gentry; in a plutocratic country they get the business men to indorse it. I suppose that the average American citizen feels that they wouldn't indorse a thing unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safe--he is cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks, and business is a game of chance, in a certain degree. Have I made myself intelligible?”
”Entirely so,” said the Altrurian; and he seemed so thoroughly well satisfied that he forbore asking any further question.
No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and resumed at the point where he left off when I ventured to enter upon the defence of his cla.s.s with him. I must say that he had not convinced me at all. At that moment I would rather have trusted him, in any serious matter of practical concern, than all the novelists I ever heard of. But I thought I would leave the word to him, without further attempt to reinstate him in his self-esteem. In fact, he seemed to be getting along very well without it, or else he was feeling that mysterious control from the Altrurian which I had already suspected him of using. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the banker proceeded with his contribution to the Altrurian's stock of knowledge concerning our civilization:
”I don't believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really needed nothing beyond the three R's, and the working-man needed no R at all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which n.o.body of our generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a generalization?” the banker asked of me.
”Oh,” I admitted, with a laugh, ”it is a good deal like one of my own. I have always been struck with that phase of our civilization.”
”Well, then,” the banker resumed, ”take the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R's, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception and application.”