Fifty years in Wall Street
workers, who think work with the head more genteel than work with the
hands, and a great shortage of farm workers that are needed to develop
our agricultural resources. Even the children of the most ignorant
foreigners are imbued with this ambition before they are able to speak
our language. Too many despise honest labor and want to live by their
wits. So we have a vast host of surplus politicians, office-seekers,
promoters, brokers, lawyers, clerks, canvassers and drones.
In olden days the young were willing to follow in the footsteps of the
old, and begin life where their fathers began. Now they expect to begin
where their fathers leave off, and are dissatisfied and disappointed if
they find that they have to start from the foot of the ladder.
What we most need in this country to promote and popularize farm and
village life, and check the general tendency of both young men and young
women to drift to the large cities, is a change in our educational
system. We should establish trade schools everywhere to teach the trades
and practical sciences, and so make country-bred people proficient in
occupations that they could follow on the farm, and in village as well
as town life. This knowledge would induce them to stay where they were
born, instead of rushing off to make or mar their fortunes in the
overcrowded cities where many come to grief. Thus the congestion of
population in the cities would be relieved, and the country generally
would be able to retain the men and women it needs for its industries
that are now held in check by an insufficiency of labor. In this way we
might gain millions of good mechanics and other useful workmen where
they are most needed, and reduce the number of the inefficient and
unemployed in the cities, to say nothing of the chronic idlers and the
sporting, gambling and criminal classes. Men instructed for the
professions would of course still study in the colleges, but the masses
have no use to which they can put the higher education of even the high
schools.
There are a lot of well-meaning theorists engaged in so-called Social
reform who are largely responsible for many things that add to the
unrest in the poorer sections of our cities. Far be it from me to
criticize anyone who has the desire to better the condition of his less
fortunate brothers, but the work of many of these reformers reminds me
of the man who threw a panful of kerosene on a small fire with the idea
of putting out the flames. To be a true Social reformer a man must be
well informed on conditions which obtain on all sides of life. A rich
man may have acquired wealth by miserly habits, but if he has not been
dishonest he is entitled to his savings, and no law can compel him to
divide with the poor man who has been profligate in the use of his
earnings. The thousands of immigrants who arrive at our ports each week
are, for the most part, poor and ignorant. The greater number of them
remain in our cities and add to the congestion and widespread poverty of
the cities. But these same immigrants are willing to work, and in a year
or two, instead of being a charge upon the community, have savings bank
accounts of their own. However, they are ripe for the reception of the
gospel of unrest, as they have lived hitherto in places where the poor
are always poor, with no lookout for improvement, and willingly listen
to the agitator and prophet of discontent. Mr. Roosevelt has said and
done things in the last four years which have shaken our land. Many
investors have thought that he had gone too far in his insistence that
the law should be rigidly enforced, as they, innocent holders of
securities, had been made to suffer loss by the depression in prices.
While it is hard that such losses should have been incurred, it is no
fault of the President, and his action, in the long run, is to be of
untold value to our national and individual prosperity. If his actions
will insure the fulfillment of the law by the magnates in power in our
railroads and corporations, the little man will be on a par with the big
man, and all investments will be on a safer basis, and the dark secrets
of the manipulator will give place to the open publication of rates and
earnings so that a stockholder will know where he stands and what his
company is doing.
Daniel Webster, as far back as 1842, found that the spirit of unrest was
in the air as it is now. In an address in that year he said:
“There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression,
speculation and the pernicious influence of accumulated wealth. They cry
out loudly against all banks and corporations and all means by which
small capitals become united in order to produce important and
beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established
institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry, and dry all the
streams. In a country of unbounded liberty they clamor against
oppression. In a country of perfect equality they would move heaven and
earth against privilege and monopoly. In a country where property is
more evenly divided than anywhere else they rend the air shouting
agrarian doctrines. In a country where the wages of labor are high
beyond parallel, they would teach the laborer that he is but an
oppressed slave.”
I will here deviate to another division of the subject.
Considerable uneasiness and unrest have been evinced not only by the
Socialists, but by many others, as to whether great individual or
corporate wealth—in other words, capital—is inimical and hostile to the
public welfare and a menace to our institutions.
I think that it can be clearly shown that this anxiety and unrest are
without any good foundation. There is nothing in fact to justify this
unrest.
In our own country especially, where individual opportunities are
practically limitless and where thought and effort are exerted to the
utmost straining point, most fruitful, indeed, has been the result. We
have seen that the making of large fortunes coincidently with great
general prosperity, that is, by those doing a profitable business on a
large scale, is an inevitable economic result.
The past forty-five years in the United States embrace a new era of
wealth—an era in which the accumulation of vast amounts of money, or its
equivalent, in individual and corporate hands, has accompanied the most
marvelous national growth and prosperity in all history.
New conditions have arisen, and new methods have had to be employed,
while new men, equipped with new ideas, have not been found wanting to
meet all requirements, and to keep step with the march of progress on
both land and sea. Unlike the people of some of the older countries,
where, as in Russia, they distrust their government, Americans do not
hoard their wealth. They employ it. They have nothing to hoard it for.
Their quickly acquired fortunes are generally lavishly disbursed, both
in their style of living and their investments. With much of the money
they put into circulation, railroads are built and extended, mammoth
factories are constructed, labor is employed on a larger scale than
before, more farms are cultivated, and more crops are moved and
exported. Through all the arteries of trade and commerce the wealth thus
employed flows and adds to the growth and prosperity of the country.
Keeping the wheels of commerce moving, by supplying the demands of the
financial, mercantile, manufacturing and agricultural world with the
“sinews of war,” in the up-to-date American way, instead of merely
gathering wealth and hiding it away, has been to my mind one great
secret of our unprecedented national advancement.
Although it is impossible to demonstrate just how important an influence
this practice of keeping wealth actively in use has played in helping to
bring about and preserve the generally progressive and prosperous
condition of affairs, there is evidence enough to refute much that has
been said against the possession of great wealth, and also to show that
the hostile or critical attitude of the press and the people toward it
is unjust, and should be derided instead of being popular with the
masses, as it is. The assistance which Americans of great wealth have
given the nation, in the founding and preservation of institutions for
the public benefit and in many other ways, has never been sufficiently
appreciated or acknowledged.
Wealth in good hands serves good purposes. The richest men of the
Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution were among the most active
and self-sacrificing of American patriots. They included George
Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison
and Robert Morris, whose names are imperishable on our national roll of
fame.
In that glorious struggle for freedom, these wealthy patriots performed
a leading and arduous part, and aided largely in effecting that grand
result—the establishment of this great republic, the United States of
America, under the best and freest Constitution in the world.
Passing onward from that memorable time, we come to that of the
Rebellion, when Secession reared its aggressive head, and the very life
of our institutions was in extreme jeopardy. In the early part of the
great Civil War—when the Government, friendless abroad, knew not which
way to turn for the financial aid that it so sorely needed to defend
itself and prosecute the war—history will recall that the great wealth
of private individuals proved not a menace, but a blessing and a godsend
to the Nation. These served their country well by coming forward with
their wealth and buying United States bonds in large amounts when the
risk was hazardous. By so doing they rendered patriotic public service
that should make even the Socialists hesitate before condemning great
individual wealth as dangerous to the national welfare.
I might in illustration of what I say enumerate instances almost without
number where, from the rock-ribbed coast of Maine to the Golden Gate of
California, under the beneficent rays of great gifts of the wealthy the
seeds of education have been sown broadcast and have grown into grand
and telling factors in shaping the character of the rising generation of
American manhood and the destiny of this great country.
In keeping with the hostility, or unrest, concerning great individual
wealth, and large corporate capital, we are at times confronted by the
bold assertion, made by extremists, that some limit should be set to the
amount of property an individual may own. The impracticability and
inadvisability of any such measure are at once apparent. You might as
well try to limit the capacity or energy of an individual. When you
prevent an individual from accumulating you at once discourage his
productiveness. This is an axiom beyond dispute.
As regards great corporate capital, I must admit that there has been in
many instances, in the past, good cause for much of the unrest and
dissatisfaction manifested by the people.
Toward competitors large corporations have too often been unscrupulous,
just as the railways were in giving rebates to control the heavy
traffic. These illegal and reprehensible methods were pursued far too
long, not only causing immense personal and commercial loss and injury,
but shaking the confidence of the public in the large corporations
called Trusts. These offences can, however, under our new laws, hardly
be repeated in the future.
Under the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust law, the Elkins
Anti-Rebate law and other and later restraining statutes, condign
punishment will, doubtless, be dealt out to offenders, and a rigid
enforcement of these laws, and their necessary amendments, will be
sufficient to regulate corporate bodies and stand as an ægis of
protection for the nation.