The Righteousness of Money-Making

IT has become painfully evident, during the past few years, that no branch of investigation has received so little attention. in this country, as the problems which are grouped under the general title of “ political economy.” In Europe, men of the highest type of genius have spent their lives in investigating and made themselves eminent by their works upon these subjects; but as yet no great advance has been made with us, and the simplest principles are as yet unrecognized by the mass of the people. It may be from this cause that — although our great boast has been the ease with which material welfare can be secured, although we are proud of the common wealth of our people — the special wealth of individuals, which, when aggregated, makes up the gross sum of which we are so proud, is in itself a cause of jealousy, and at the present time, in some cases, almost a mark for legal confiscation.

The discussion of the land grant, policy, of the general railroad question, and of what is called the labor question, has revealed an under-current of resentment, not only on account of alleged frauds and abuses, but also because men should have undertaken to become rich out of what are called public services, like the construction of railroads. Coupled with this is a jealousy of wealth or possession itself, which finds expression not only in public discussion, but also, in a far more mischievous and wide-spread way, in the poor work of large classes of mechanics and employés; the proportion of journeymen who take a pride in doing good work being lamentably small, the general sentiment appearing to be that society owes the laborer a good subsistence irrespective of the return which he may make.

This state of feeling does not imply an absolute wrong intent on the part of those of whom it is true. The vast majority of men will deal fairly with each other if left to the innate sense of trust and honor which is in them: but the attempt of legislators to alter the conditions of distribution, by perverting the laws for imposing public taxes into instruments for enlarging private profits under the pretense of keeping up wages; the enforced use of bad money; the unavoidable effect of the war in making a few men very rich, and other like causes, have created a feeling of unfair treatment, and while there may be few who can reason the matter out, there are great numbers who have an instinctive sense of being unjustly served. They perceive that there have been vast improvements and inventions from which they as yet get little benefit, and, impatient at the slow remedy, they become somewhat hopeless and undertake to get a remedy by the same wrong method of meddlesome legislation that has caused many of the ills under which they suffer.

A very large part of these wrong ideas about wealth and the jealousy of property may doubtless be attributed to the continued use of bad money, whereby the government of the nation now lends itself to every fraud committed by individuals, in being itself the exponent of a lie and of useless and fradulent insolvency.

But in addition to this potent cause of the evil indicated in this paper, there are others more subtle and remote. During the exceptional period of war legislation and of the absolute loss and unequal distribution of wealth that has always ensued from war, there has been a good deal more than the usual amount of nonsense talked at and to the laborer about the dignity of labor; as if a man was peculiarly meritorious because he is poor, and so obliged to work with his hands. Of course nothing is to be said against a man who is obliged to be a digger and a delver, or to saw wood or feed a furnace all da; but no man stays in such a position a moment longer than he can help, and just as soon as he can substitute brain power for muscle, as soon as he can learn to operate a machine instead of being a machine, as soon as he can become a “ boss ” instead of being a common workman, he takes the step, — and it is a step upward, as every laborer knows, when specious talkers undertake to mislead him. But yet the possession and use of wealth itself need to be reëstablished as a righteous aim for men of force and character, and it is now especially a time when the true function of wealth, of rich men, of merchants, of capitalists, and the like, should be restated, lest the mischievous theories of communists and socialists, and of grangers who without being aware of it are becoming agrarians, should work more harm than good.

It would by no means be wise to prevent the agitation of communistic ideas even if it were possible, because the discussion will bring to light the fact that many old and popular methods of legislation, now supported by men who profess the utmost horror of communism, are but phases of that theory. The very fundamental idea of what is called protection is communistic. It is a perversion of statute law from its true function of promoting liberty and justice into an engine for making a different distribution of wealth from that which would take effect in a really free country; and the same logic by which a protective tariff is defended would warrant legislation for an equal rather than an equitable distribution of all products, without regard to the comparative effort or skill of the producers. But it is not my intention to enter upon this branch of the subject at present, but rather to assert that it is time for the men of affairs — the men by whom all the wheels of modern industry are kept in motion, the money-makers, as they are called —to assert themselves and claim their true and necessary place in the history of human progress. Heretofore they have not done so, but have been too apt to defer even to shallow pretenders in science and literature, and to dogmatic theologians, as if these were entitled to a place upon a higher plane than mere utilitarian money-getters.

The merchant and the manufacturer have repaired the evils inflicted upon humanity by the priest and the soldier; their work is to remove the causes of want which mere charity cannot cope with, and they carry the blessings of civilization and education to dark places in distant lands where without them the missionary would be powerless.

It is surely true that progress in civilization has been coincident with the progress in commerce and manufacturing. May it not be true that the pursuit and accumulation of wealth have been the most potent causes, and not the consequence, of civilization ?

In early ages all distribution was conducted under the gravest dangers. The obligation of contracts, for a long time after contract had formal existence among men, depended more upon force than upon the honor of the parties in the transaction, and only he could be rich who was also strong. In the Middle Ages the merchant needed the protection of the lord, not of the law; the ship was of necessity armed. Rapine upon land and piracy upon the sea were the honorable pursuits, and gain by peaceful methods was ignoble. But the Crusades and other religious wars removed the seigneurs and the knights. Under the impulse of the enthusiasm which governed them, they were ready to part with estates which had been previously retained with the utmost jealousy; land thus became distributed, the feudal tenure was broken, and its representatives killed off; but the men-at-arms who had been forced into distant and so-called holy wars returned, brought home the arts of the East, and changed the face of Western Europe. The invention of gunpowder next altered all the conditions of distribution by making the serf equal in individual force to the knight; thus greater division of labor became possible. Gradually and surely the true honor of the merchant and the tradesman, and the sacredness of contract, took the place of the false standard of chivalry, and now the time has almost come when only the idle man need be called ignoble.

For a time it was doubtless true that the security of contracts depended as much upon the force of statute law as upon integrity, or more; but as time advances the chief dependence of all who buy and sell and get gain is upon character, not upon coercion.

It cannot now be said that our vast system of exchanges depends in any very large measure upon statutes. On the contrary, the chief rightful use of statutes is to arbitrate and determine what is equity in the few cases of disagreement or attempted fraud, — few cases, I say, even in these days when the government itself sets the example of fraud, if the number of cases which occur is considered in their relation to the enormous total of transactions. The wrongful use of statutes is to alter the conditions of distribution and to make men rogues who, except for such statutes, would have been honest men.

There has been a gradual evolution in the method of affairs corresponding with the development of character among those who do the work, and this has caused the repeal of laws for imprisonment for debt and of usury laws; it is this which has modified other coercive and protective statutes; it has also caused business men to have less and less recourse to courts, if lawsuits are considered in their proportion to the number and magnitude of transactions.

If it shall be said that the fulfillment of contracts is the rule because the existence of statutes for their enforcement makes their infringement dangerous, attention need only be called to the single fact that in the last year’s panic there was one class of transactions which was positively law-forbidden, but yet represented the largest aggregate of any single kind, and did not result in the loss of a single dollar to any one connected therewith. I refer to the law-forbidden practice of the New York banks of certifying checks as good before deposits have been made to cover them, the only reliance of the banks being upon the good faith of their depositors, many of whom they knew to be engaged in affairs doubly unlawful because usurious. Well has it been said that “the integrity of the many creates the opportunity for the fraud of the few.”

I do not intend to defend stock gambling, or efforts to make profits which must in their very nature be at the loss of some one else; only that commerce is to be deemed righteous which works a mutual service; and the time will come when the same evolution of character which has placed us even where we are, in some of our ways, will elevate all to a plane on which that profit which is gained only at another’s loss will be sought no more than gain by rapine and piracy. Yet these very men whose gain from stock-jobbing must be mainly at the cost of others’ loss, by whom a large portion of such checks are given, are better than their creed; if they were absolutely miserable sinners, if there was no good in them, all their transactions would be impossible. If men were not on the whole intending to do right and to be true to their engagements, our trade would stop. We act every day upon our firm faith in the divinity of human nature, while professing to believe in its deviltry.

There is no possibility of great exchanges of stocks, money, or merchandise except upon the basis of the trust imposed upon and deserved by the great mass of dealers; and the rule of rectitude and probity is so well established as to render insurance that trusts will be maintained worth but a very small premium.

Now, while we may present these general principles and may affirm the high character of business men, it is necessary to admit that the increase of comfort and abundance for the great mass of men comes slowly. The competitive system under which merchants and capitalists act, the true effect of which is to decrease the general cost of production and distribution and to increase abundance, works very slowly and has not divested itself of the hardships which accompany it. These hardships will remain just so long as education is deficient or not well directed; hence, constant attempts to hasten by legislation what can come only from gradual development.

The advocates of coercive legislation, whether in the nature of protective tariffs, eight-hour laws, usury laws, liquor laws, and the like, never advocate them for their own protection, but always for the protection of others who are alleged to be very ignorant or feeble persons. If education was as good as it is common, this pretext would not hold.

The capitalist demands a protective tariff in order that labor may be better employed, and really persuades himself that his motive is single and that his purpose is not to get greater gain; the laborer responds to this effort by demanding an eight-hour law for the protection of himself and his associates from the rapacity of capital: between the two the real function of capital, and the true position of the rich man, are obscured. He has been set up by some and looked up to by others, as one who is to confer benefit, not to render service in what he does.

The superficial preacher will barely justify the possession of wealth if the owner gives much in charity; otherwise his pursuit is held to be almost unchristian, — of the earth, earthy, — while the wage that he pays is spoken of more as a boon than as a price.

The common expression that the capitalist ”gives employment” implies an entire misunderstanding of the true relation between the parties. There is no giving in the case, but a simple exchange for mutual benefit. The moment the idea of a gift comes into the transaction, the freedom of the laborer is affected. — he becomes a dependent, not a free agent ; and the employer must soon become imbued with the idea that he has a right to control and direct the laborer in a manner that he would not submit to himself if placed in the same circumstances. Hence the very common and very false assumption of the possessors of property, that they are more competent to make laws than those who have nothing; and hence also often a false humility and a secret jealousy among those whom circumstances have prevented from ever earning more than a subsistence. There are many persons who have substituted the dogma of the “ divine right of property ” for the “ divine right of kings,” and who look to statute law and therefore ultimately to force only as the sole protection for property. If the right to property had not its foundation in the nature of man, and did not exist for the common welfare, statute law would be for it a feeble defense.

On the other hand, many persons act as if they must give an excuse for accumulating wealth, and there is a strong but unadmitted conviction in the minds of very many persons, perhaps of a majority of the community, that it is more Christian to be poor than to be rich. Of course mere possession does not entitle a man to any special position, but there are many men now, and, as time goes on, there will be far more, with whom the pursuit of wealth and its accumulation will be the pursuit in which they can engage most usefully to the community. There are quacks in business as there are in law, physic, and theology; butthe man of real force in the conduct of material interests needs as high qualifications as those called for in any other occupation, and it is as great a loss to humanity to pervert a boy from his calling, who has an honest instinct for business and for gain, and convert him into a dull preacher or a plodding doctor, as it would be to divert the instinct for science to mere purposes of entirely selfish gain.

Each pursuit supplements the other, each is the necessary complement of the other, and each may be entitled, as a pursuit, to an equal recognition and to the utmost liberty. It may have been well said by Agassiz that he could not afford the time to make money; neither could Faraday, nor many other exceptional men ; but, to complete the statement, and present the whole truth, neither could these men of science afford to have some other men give up their function of making money or of accumulating wealth, lest all should starve together, and the whole benefit of the discoveries in science be lost. It is the men of capital who apply the discoveries of science, and thus render the general struggle for life less arduous. It is the money-maker, the somewhat ignoble person, able only with extreme difficulty to enter the kingdom of heaven, who has clothed the naked, fed the hungry, removed famine from civilized lands, abolished the plague, increased the duration of life, and in every way has budded better than he knew. All this has been accomplished, not by wholesale alms-giving, which only pauperizes, but in the mere way of trade. Science in these matters would have been helpless unless it had called to its aid the power of capital; and capital has only been accumulated under the stimulus of the prospective enjoyment of wealth. When we read that it would be more possible for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must remember not only that the “ needle’s eye ” was a narrow gate in the wall of Jerusalem, but also that the rich man of that day was the Roman, or the Romanized and protected Jew, whose wealth was the product of rapine and plunder, and not of commerce. Roman rule destroyed commerce, and substituted slavery and the plunder of captive nations. The great Roman roads were for the transport of troops out from Rome, and for carrying back the forced contributions of those they had conquered. Some one has well said that “for Roman roads we have substituted a bill of exchange.’ ’

When this accumulation of wealth seems to work individual hardship, when some ill-paid laborer gets little and he who employs him gets rich, it must yet be constantly remembered that the cure is working; that the larger the absolute share that falls to capital out of the total production, the less relative share will be taken from the laborer, because as capital accumulates the less rate of interest or profit can it obtain. It is therefore absolutely true that in proportion to the success of these apparently blindly selfish money - getters, who by force of competition are said to grind the faces of the poor, does their power to work the harm that is attributed to them pass away. Yet in the thought of a very large and perhaps increasing portion of the community, these selfish men of wealth can only compound for the wrong of their accumulation by giving freely in mere charity.

It is time for the merchant and the manufacturer, the railroad builder and the banker, to assert their right to a place among those who are helping on the progress of the world by their mere trades: they must repel the charge that they are only engaged in laying up earthly treasure, and that in the very nature of worldly things they must detach themselves from worldly pursuits if they would enter heaven. They must assert and prove that the true and manly life is entered through the countingroom door, and that good work deserving of the highest praise may be proved by the very magnitude of the sum that is placed to their credit in their profit and loss account; may be proved, I say, not must be; and yet the time shall come when the positive term will be the fit one, since all true and permanent commerce is based upon mutuality of service, and the few who have completely grasped this central truth can even now say that their dollars are the tokens of their well-doing.

There should be a method of teaching in school and college based upon the idea that in the necessary pursuit of the almighty dollar, in which most graduates must perforce engage, the gain of the dollar may be symbolic of the highest welfare, both to him who gains and to those by whose aid he gains. The time may come when it shall no longer seem or be the most intense irony to measure a man’s worth by the number of dollars he possesses, as we do, in common speech. Some men’s true worth may even now be so measured, and they prove it by the judicious use they make of the capital so righteously saved.

The teaching which is suggested would modify the common estimate of many historic persons, both statesmen and soldiers, and would elevate to distinction many whose names are wholly lost. The despised Jew of the Middle Ages who saved capital and prevented commerce from coming to utter destruction would take a worthy place beside the monk who saved science and literature, while the historic men of rank and station who performed the chivalrous work of mutual slaughter would be chiefly commended for relieving the world of a class whose function in the world’s progress had come to its end.

Where the men of chivalry failed, as they did in the Crusades, progress ensued, and commerce and the useful arts grew up in the places they had left. Where they succeeded, as they did in driving the Moors from Spain, commerce turned to piracy, and the useful arts died.

Among the Teutonic races the spirit of liberty has been strong ; wealth, which always accompanies liberty, has accumulated. The same spirit of protestantism which has worked religious liberty has proved effective in matters of trade, and, as I have before said, the merchant and the manufacturer have repaired the injuries that had been inflicted by the priest and the soldier. It is the merchant who makes two blades of grass and two ears of grain grow where one grew before, for he bears to the hungry the food which, except for him, could not be carried and would not be grown.

It is the manufacturer who clothes the naked by bending all his energy toward making cloth at less and less cost of time, labor, and capital.

As I said at the beginning, it is but a few centuries since all distribution was accomplished by force. It is scarce a century since it was the universal belief in matters of trade, especially between nations, that what one gained another must lose, and in this enlightened country, boastful of its common schools, this false and pernicious idea still pervades the whole body of our fiscal system. Hence it is that our laws are dishonest while the people are true. The scandals of the moiety system were not the necessary result of the statutes granting moieties to informers; they arose because the laws passed under the pretense of being revenue laws have been so perverted from their true purpose as to render a brood of spies and informers necessary for their enforcement.

It is to prevent such scandals and wrongs that we need a liberal education in school, college, and university for the merchant and the man of affairs; and, if titles are due to the Doctor of Divinity, of Laws, or of Philosophy, there should be one of equal distinction for the true Masters of the Arts, who build and guide our mills, works, and railroads, and for the controllers of commerce, who “ launch the ships that pass between this land and that, weaving the web of concord among the nations.”

The true and fit commercial history also remains to be written. Only in detached chapters here and there has the true function of the men of affairs taken its right prominence. I trust we need not wait for it for men to become educated in the right method of fiscal legislation.

The vast majority of frauds and peculations which mark this day and produce much of the class jealousy which exists, making it needful for us to fall back on our faith in human nature lest we should become hopeless, are lawmade frauds and crimes; and the responsibility for their commission lies at the door of those who have perverted legislation to unfit uses, and have thereby placed temptation in the way of the weak and have made the opportunity for wicked men.

Most of these laws exist because the mass of tradesmen and business men who are of, or who control, legislatures and congresses have not been fitted for their work, and know not how to compass the ends they seek. We are repeating yearly and daily in all branches of legislation the errors of the past in other countries, because of the general ignorance of economic science and commercial history. Our education has been as common in quality as it has been in quantity, and we have yet to learn the A B C of social science.

How, then, shall business men be trained for their calling and enabled to uphold the dignity of their profession? We have schools of law, medicine, and theology, and he who enters upon these courses of instruction is commended, and not sneered at as seeking only a breadand-butter training. We have technical schools and methods of education for the engineer, the chemist, and the architect, and all this is well; but he who wishes to find a course of study that shall specially fit him for business pursuits may seek far and wide, and he will not find it. Ought not the business man to know something of the elements of jurisprudence; to be trained from his youth upward so that when he becomes a man he may be aware that law is a science, and that he cannot secure his ends by arbitrary statutes? Where is there to be found any course of instruction in the principles of law, except in the technical schools intended for professional lawyers? Ought there not to be an advanced course in physical and commercial geography? But where can it be found? May not a course in natural science be laid out for those who do not intend to be professed chemists or geologists, or to enter into the higher problems of physics? Where is the instruction in the principles of banking, in the use and abuse of money, in the system of exchanges? Where is the department of commercial history? — not the history of trade, and anecdotes of merchants and the like, but the commercial history in the true sense, by which the power of commerce as one of the world’s great motors may be learned.

It may be that those whose only instruction has been that of a common school are unfit to indicate the right course of training for their children, but we know what we ourselves have lacked or have gained only by long and painful groping in the dark, with no one to guide us. It may be said that all the points named may be covered in many colleges under the elective system of studies; but the experience of many who have had to do with schools and colleges tends to prove that the elective system carried to an extreme may result in a desultory and scrappy method of study, and that young men are not themselves competent to lay out the best course. Far better would it be that a course of instruction should be planned in full, having as its objective point the profession of merchant or manufacturer, and the whole of that course made compulsory as the condition of a degree.

It is never urged that the instruction of the schools of law, medicine, and theology fail to develop the mind and form the man even though they are special; neither could this objection be raised against the business course when once the equal importance of the welltrained merchant or manufacturer has been claimed and recognized.

In some of the foreign universities this need has been recognized and met, and it may be that the reason why the German merchant is found in every corner of the world, doing more and better work than most other men in all branches of commerce, is that his wants have been foreseen and the need has been met in the schools of his native land.

If our professional brethren are unwilling to admit our claim to an equal place with them, we will only remind them that it is not very long since surgeon and barber were synonymous terms, while the parson was in many places only the companion of menials. Times have changed, and it is commerce and manufactures that have changed them, and formed the base on which the learned professions have reached their present high place. We seek not to depress them, but to elevate ourselves and our calling to the true plane on which we and it belong in the world’s history and in the progress of humanity.

In some of our technical schools it has become evident that there may be as much pedantry in science as among the advocates of a purely classical training, and it has also become obvious that the basis even of purely professional training in science must rest upon a broad and general education in other matters. Hence every professional school has its solid course in English and other modern languages, and some add history, logic, physical geography, and other subjects.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has in part opened the way for the business man’s education by establishing its fixed course in science and literature, but it has not yet the means and appliances to do all that needs to be done. But we have passed the boastful period in regard to our school system, and are in the critical stage, and it is not to be doubted that as soon as the expression of the want shall take form, the demand will be fully met.

Edward Atkinson.