The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 by Various

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THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW

VOL. II, NO. 3

JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1914

Published Quarterly at 35 West 32d Street, New York, by

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

Unsocial Investments A.S. Johnson
A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism The Editor
An Experiment in Syndicalism Hugh H. Lusk
Labor: "True Demand" and Immigrant Supply Arthur J. Todd
The Way to Flatland Fabian Franklin
The Disfranchisement of Property David McGregor Means
Railway Junctions Clayton Hamilton
Minor Uses of the Middling Rich F.J. Mather, Jr.
Lecturing at Chautauqua Clayton Hamilton
Academic Leadership Paul Elmer More
Hypnotism, Telepathy, and Dreams The Editor
The Muses on the Hearth Mrs F.G. Allinson
The Land of the Sleepless Watchdog David Starr Jordan
En Casserole
Special to our Readers--Philosophy in Fly Time--Setting Bounds
to Laughter (A.S. Johnson)--A Post-Graduate School for Academic
Donors (F.J. Mather, Jr.)--A Suggestion Regarding
Vacations--Advertisement--Simplified Spelling

UNSOCIAL INVESTMENTS

The "new social conscience" is essentially a class phenomenon. While it
pretends to the role of inner monitor and guide to conduct for all
mankind, it interprets good and evil in class terms. It manifests a
special solicitude for the welfare of one social group, and a mute
hostility toward another. Labor is its Esau, Capital its Jacob. Let strife
arise between workingmen and their employers, and you will see the new
social conscience aligning itself with the former, accepting at face value
all the claims of labor, reiterating all labor's formulae. The suggestion
that judgment should be suspended until the facts at issue are established
is repudiated as the prompting of a secret sin. For, to paraphrase a
recent utterance of the _Survey_, one of the foremost organs of the new
conscience, is it not true that the workers are fighting for their
livings, while the employers are fighting only for their profits? It would
appear, then, that there can be no question as to the side to which
justice inclines. A living is more sacred than a profit.

It is virtually never true, however, that the workers are fighting for
their "living." Contrary to Marx's exploded "iron law" they probably had
that and more before the trouble began. But of course we would not wish to
restrict them to a living, if they can produce more, and want all who
can't produce that much to be provided with it--and something more at the
expense of others.

It may be urged that the employer's profits also represent the livings of
a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays for a reactionary view.
"We stand for man as against the dollar." If you say that the "dollar" is
metonymy for "the man possessed of a dollar," with rights to defend, and
reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict yourself of reaction.
"These gentry" (I quote from the May _Atlantic_) "suppose themselves to be
discussing the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights
of stockholders." The true view, the progressive view, is obviously that
the possessors of the dollar, the recipients of profits and dividends, are
excluded from the communion of humanity. Labor is mankind.

The present instance is of course not the only instance in human history
of the substitution of class criteria of judgment for social criteria.
Such manifestations of class conscience are doubtless justified in the
large economy of human affairs; an individual must often claim all in
order to gain anything, and the same may be true of a class. Besides, the
ultimate arbitration of the claims of the classes is not a matter for the
rational judgment. What is subject to rational analysis, however, are the
methods of gaining its ends proposed by the new social conscience. Of
these methods one of wide acceptance is that of fixing odium upon certain
property interests, with a view to depriving them immediately of the
respect still granted to property interests in general, and ultimately of
the protection of the laws. It is with the rationality of what may be
called the excommunication and outlawing of special property interests,
that the present paper is concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists
upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property
interests--or property owners--insists with equal vehemence upon absolving
the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts. The
Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which they were
implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank
injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, instead
of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the
congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the
spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional
causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials,
the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better
habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are
urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent
from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him for his misdeeds, but
we can make him an object of public reproach; expel him from social
intercourse (if that, so often talked about, is ever done); fasten his
iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and
ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social
interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

II

In the country at large the property interests involved in the production
and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The unreformed
"best society" may still tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes
are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the
social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would
a well organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as
candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the
prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been
followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same
title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to
excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter
the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant. "These tenements must go."
Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the
subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, will
be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the
owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises
paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful
conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for excommunication.
Pillars of society and the church have already been seen tottering on
account of revelations of working conditions in factories from which they
receive dividends. Property "affected by a public use," that is,
investments in the instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a
compromising possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the
personal integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes
from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is
unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene
dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. "Enriched by
unearned increment"--who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be
held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that
the delegates and their constituencies--all honest lovers of mankind--will
refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural
resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place
themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to
sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land.

III

The existence of categories of property interests resting under a growing
weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in
private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of
casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer's
acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in
a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon.
Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a cancellation
of the liquor dealer's lease. This they refused to do, on the ground that
the building in question is, by location, eminently suited to its present
use, but very ill suited to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee
would immediately reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to
their partner's desire would therefore result in a reduction of their own
profits, but would advance the public welfare not one whit. Disheartened
by her partners' obstinacy, my friend is seeking to dispose of her
interest in the building. As she is willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in
order to get rid of her complicity in what she considers an unholy
business, the transfer will doubtless soon be made. Her soul will be
lightened of the profits from property put to an anti-social use. But the
property will still continue in such use, and profits from it will still
accrue to someone with a soul to lose or to save.

In her fascinating book, _Twenty Years at Hull House_, Miss Jane Addams
tells of a visit to a western state where she had invested a sum of money
in farm mortgages. "I was horrified," she says, "by the wretched
conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of
drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind.... The
farmer's wife [was] a picture of despair, as she stood in the door of the
bare, crude house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried
to keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces, almost
covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare feet so
black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust, that they looked
like flattened hoofs. The children could not be compared to anything so
joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me
quite impossible to receive interest from mortgages upon farms which might
at any season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience
to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as speedily as
possible I withdrew all my investment." And thereby made the supply of
money for such farmers that much less and consequently that much dearer.
This is quite a fair example of much current philanthropy.

We may safely assume that, however much this action may have lightened
Miss Addams's conscience, it did not lighten the burden of debt upon the
farmer, or make the periodic interest payments less painful, and it
certainly did put them to the trouble and contingent expenses of a new
mortgage. The moral burden was shifted, to the ease of the philanthropist,
and this seems to exhaust the sum of the good results of one well
intentioned deed. Do they outweigh the bad ones?

So, doubtless, there are among our friends persons who, upon proof that
factories in which they have been interested pay starvation wages, have
withdrawn their investments. And others who, stumbling upon a state
legislature among the productive assets of a railway corporation, have
sold their bonds and invested the proceeds elsewhere. It is a modern way
of obeying the injunction, "Sell all thou hast and follow me." And not a
very painful way, since the irreproachable investments pay almost, if not
quite, as well as those that are suspect.

It is not, however, impossible to conceive of a property owner driven from
one position to another, in order to satisfy this new requirement of the
social conscience, without ever finding peace. Miss Addams put the money
withdrawn from those hideous farm mortgages into a flock of "innocent
looking sheep." Alas, they were not so innocent as they seemed. "The sight
of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each was not reassuring to
one whose conscience craved economic peace. A fortunate series of sales of
mutton, wool and farm enabled the partners to end the enterprise without
loss." Sales of mutton? Let us hope those eight hundred infected hoofs are
well printed on the butcher's conscience.

And the net result of all these moral strivings? The evil investments
still continue to be evil, and still yield profits. Doubtless they rest,
in the end, upon less sensitive consciences. Marvellous moral gain!

IV

We are bound to the wheel, say the sociological fatalists. All our efforts
are of no avail; the Wheel revolves as it was destined. Not so. Our
strivings for purity in investments, puny as may be their results in the
individual instance, may compose a sum that is imposing in its
effectiveness. How their influence may be exerted will best appear from an
analogy.

It is a settled conviction among Americans of Puritan antecedents, and
among all other Americans, native born or alien, that have come under
Puritan influence, that the dispensing of alcoholic beverages is a
degrading function. This conviction has not, to be sure, notably impaired
the performance of the function. But it has none the less produced a
striking effect. It has set apart for the function in question those
elements in the population that place the lowest valuation upon the esteem
of the public, and that are, on the whole, least worthy of it. In
consequence the American saloon is, by common consent, the very worst
institution of its kind in the world. Such is the immediate result of good
intentions working by the method of excommunication of a trade.

This degradation of the personnel and the institution proceeds at an
accelerated rate as public opinion grows more bitter. In the end the evil
becomes so serious, so intimately associated with all other evils, social
and political, that you hear men over their very cups rise to proclaim,
with husky voices, "The saloon must go!" At this point the community is
ripe for prohibition: accordingly, it would seem that the initial stages
in the process, unpleasant as were their consequences, were not
ill-advised, after all. But prohibition does not come without a political
struggle, in which the enemy, selected for brazenness and schooled in
corruption, employs methods that leave lasting scars upon the body
politic. And even when vanquished, the enemy retreats into the morasses of
"unenforcible laws," to conduct a guerilla warfare that knows no rules.
Let us grant that the ultimate gain is worth all it costs: are we sure
that we have taken the best possible means to achieve our ends?

In the poorer quarters of most great American cities, there is much
property that it is difficult for a man to hold without losing the respect
of the enlightened. Old battered tenements, dingy and ill lighted
tumbledown shacks, the despair of the city reformer. Let us say that the
proximity of gas tanks or noisy railways or smoky factories consign such
quarters to the habitation of the very poor. Quite possibly, then, the
replacement of the existing buildings by better ones would represent a
heavy financial loss. The increasing social disapprobation of property
vested in such wretched forms leads to the gradual substitution of owners
who hold the social approval in contempt, for those who manifest a certain
degree of sensitiveness. The tenants certainly gain nothing from the
change. What is more likely to happen, is a screwing up of rents, an
increasing promptness of evictions. Public opinion will in the end be
roused against the landlords; the more timid among them will sell their
holdings to others not less ruthless, but bolder and more astute. Attempts
at public regulation will be fought with infinitely greater
resourcefulness than could possibly have been displayed by respectable
owners. Perhaps the final outcome will be that more drastic regulations
are adopted than would have been the case had the shifting in ownership
not taken place. There would still remain the possibility of the evasion
of the law, and it is not at all improbable that the progress in the
technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in regulation, thus
leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from the process as a
whole.

The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to
excommunication--literally--and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer,
or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediaeval mind there was
something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the
furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediaeval
position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity
for profit--that is, a potential property interest--was outlawed. In
consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to engage in the
business. Usury therefore came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from
the current ethical formulation, who were "protected," for a
consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern property interests
may be protected by the political boss.

Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of experience in this
method of dealing with the usurer's trade. The business shifted from the
control of citizens to that of aliens; from the hands of those who were
aliens merely in a narrow, national sense, to the hands of those who are
alien to our common humanity. Such lawless, tricky, extortionate loan
sharks as now infest our cities were probably not to be found at all in
mediaeval or early modern times. They are a product of a secular process of
selection. Their ability to evade the laws directed against them is
consummate. It is true that from time to time we do succeed in catching
one and fining him, or even imprisoning him. For which risk the small
borrower is forced to pay, at a usurer's rate.

Social improvement through the excommunication of property interests is
inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in operation we are sure
to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples. First,
a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for the one
responsive to public sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile popular
action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the
resourceful and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous
political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, evoking a
desperate attempt on the part of the interests threatened to protect
themselves by political means--that is, by gross corruption; or, if the
menaced interest is a vast one, dominating a defensible territory, by
armed rebellion, as in our own Civil War. If the interest is finally
overwhelmed politically, and placed completely under the ban of the law,
it has been given ample time to develop an unscrupulousness of personnel
and an art of corruption that long enable it to exist illegally, a lasting
reproach to the constituted authorities.

V

Suppression of anti-social interests by the methods in vogue amounts to
little more than their banishment to the underworld. And we can well
imagine the joy with which the denizens of the underworld receive such new
accessions to their numbers and power. For in the nature of the case, it
is inevitable that all varieties of outcasts and outlaws should join
forces. The religious schismatic makes common cause with the pariah; the
political offender with the thief and robber. Such association of elements
vastly increases the difficulty of repressing crime. The band of thieves
and robbers in the cave of Adullam doubtless found their powers of preying
vastly increased through the acquisition of such a leader as David. The
problem of mediaeval vagabondage was rendered well-nigh incapable of
solution by the fact that any beggar's rags might conceal a holy but
excommunicated friar.

Let us once more review our experience with the usurer. As an outcast he
offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn supported by them.
The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely allied: without the
pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a precarious living; without the
picking of pockets, many pawnshops would find it impossible to meet
expenses. The salary loan shark often works hand in glove with the
professional gambler; each procures victims for the other. The
"hole-in-the-wall" or "blind tiger" provides a rendezvous for all the
outcasts of society. "Boot-legging" is a common subsidiary occupation for
the pander, the thief and the cracksman. Where it flourishes, it serves to
bridge over many a period of slack trade. Franchises whose validity is
subject to political attack, bring to the aid of the underworld some of
the most powerful interests in the community. The police are almost
helpless when confronted by a coalition of persons of wealth and
respectability with professional politicians commanding a motley array of
yeggs and thugs, pimps and card-sharpers.

Let us suppose that the developing social conscience places under the ban
receipt of private income from land and other natural resources, and that
a powerful movement aiming at the confiscation of such resources is under
way. It is superfluous to point out that the vast interests threatened
would offer a desperate resistance. The warfare against an incomparably
lesser interest, the liquor trade, has taxed all the resources of the
modern democratic state--on the whole the most absolute political
organization known. In no instance has the state come out of the struggle
completely victorious; the proscribed interest is yielding ground, if at
all, only very slowly. What, then, would be the outcome of a struggle
against the vastly greater landed interest? Perhaps the state would be
victorious in the end. But for generations the landed interest would
survive, if not by title of common law, at least by title of common
corruption. And in the course of the conflict, we can not doubt that
political disorder would flourish as never before, and that under its
shelter private vice and crime would develop almost unchecked.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a mere
majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only when the
outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority. Arbitrarily to
increase the outlawed interests is to undermine the very foundations of
society.

VI

The trend of the foregoing discussion, it will be said, is reactionary in
the extreme. There are, as all must admit, private interests that are
prejudicial to the public interest. Are they to be left in possession of
the privilege of trading upon the public disaster--entrenching themselves,
rendering still more difficult the future task of the reformer? By no
means. The writer opposes no criticism to the extinction of anti-social
private interests; on the contrary, he would have the state proceed
against them with far greater vigor than it has hitherto displayed. It is
important, however, to be sure first that a private interest is
anti-social. Then the question is merely one of method. It is the author's
contention that the method of excommunication and outlawry is the very
worst conceivable.

We are wont to hold up to scorn the British method of compensating liquor
sellers for licenses revoked. It is an expensive method. But let us weigh
its corresponding advantages. The licensee does not find himself in a
position in which he must choose between personal destitution and the
public interest. He dares not employ methods of resistance that would
subject him to the risk of forfeiting the right to compensation. He may
resist by fair means, but if he is intelligent, he will keep his skirts
clear of foul. If his establishment is closed, he is not left, a ruined
and desperate man, to project methods for carrying on his trade illicitly.
On the contrary, the act of compensation has placed in his hands funds in
which he might be mulcted if convicted of violation of the law. And if
natural perversity should drive him to illegal practices, he would not
find himself an object of sympathy on the part of that considerable
minority that resent injustice even to those whom they regard as
evil-doers.

There can be little doubt that by the adoption of the principle of
adequate compensation, an American commonwealth could extinguish any
property interest that majority opinion pronounces anti-social. We may
have industries that menace the public health. Under existing conditions
the interests involved exert themselves to the utmost to suppress
information relative to the dangers of such industries. With the principle
of compensation in operation, these very interests would be the foremost
in exposing the evils in question. It is no hardship to sell your interest
to the public. Does any one feel aggrieved when the public decides to
appropriate his land to a public use? On the contrary, every possessor of
a site at all suited for a public building or playground does everything
in his power to display its advantages in the most favorable light.

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