The Political Menace of the Discontented

AT first sight, it seems a discouraging thing that the American people should be obliged to devote the energy of a presidential campaign to assert that a debased currency cannot bring prosperity. It seems all the more discouraging when it is recalled that we have had abundant experience with this error. He who knows our own history but slightly knows that at various times, under varying conditions, we have tried this same method of relief from “ hard times,” always with disaster.

Yet perhaps if we had chosen we could not have done better than take this subject in hand for campaign discussion ; for a clear analysis of public opinion in the United States for thirty years will show that the false notion of money, dating back to the successful issue of greenbacks during the war, has never ceased to affect the popular imagination. Not only have the discontented and the unbalanced held the doctrine of fiat money ever since, in one form or another, but by far the larger part of our public men—the very men who are now doing excellent service against the absurdity — have at one time or another dallied with it. Even the Supreme Court of the United States once fell a victim to it, and three post-bellum Presidents have had to veto unsoundmoney bills. This legacy from the wartime has cost us, first and last, far more in arrested commercial development than the war itself cost us in treasure. So magnificent and impressive was the demonstration of the credit of the government that the successful issue of greenbacks was almost from the first popularly regarded not as a forced loan, but as one of the proper functions of the Treasury Department. The supreme act of the government in making a direct issue of money seemed so easy and natural that belief in its power to issue money at will has hardened into the most persistent political superstition of our time. Cheap money has been proposed as a remedy for a long succession of different ills. No other superstition, indeed, ever lent itself so well to impressive statistical statement, or showed such an easy adaptability to every condition of discontent. It is well, then, that it should once for all be baldly asserted, and put to trial at the polls. Efforts to wear it out by compromise have failed, and have cost us dear. To subject it to open discussion, stripped of confusion with other subjects, — this is the democratic fashion of dealing with a fallacy ; and no better use could be made of the energy that spends itself in a national campaign than to direct it all to the defeat of so persistent and costly an error.

The campaign has an even wider educational value. Besides the necessity of sound money another lesson is forcibly taught, — a larger corollary of the same proposition, that financial honesty is the basis of character, — the lesson, namely, of the intricate workings and supreme value of credit. The danger now involved in the threat to debase the currency is not simply the danger of substituting a base coin for a good one in the small transactions of individual men, but the danger of deranging instantly our relations with the whole world. All the civilized parts of the earth have become one trading community. Credit delicately adjusts this closely knit world community, part to part, and in this complex sense it is a new instrument and measure of civilization, and even a new conception to most men. It is the one great fact in the practical world of to-day that more clearly than any other marks us off from the practical world of preceding times. We often speak of the changes wrought by modern transportation and instantaneous communication and enlarged publicity. All these new instruments of modern life do their nimble and far-reaching service in the appraisal of men and communities and nations, and this appraisal is registered as credit. So accurate and prompt is the registration that credit is fast making coin one of the crude tools of civilization. The business of the world is done with a constantly lessening use of so primitive an instrument.

Thus, simultaneously with the growth of credit, and as a part of the same movement, has come, not by any decree of men, of course, but by the inevitable and irreversible process of social development, the gold standard. The steps from wampum to beads, from beads to iron, from iron to copper, from copper to silver (if this was the order), each required a long period of time. The step from silver to gold, in the more rapid development of modern life, was more quickly taken, and it is small wonder that men to whom the very conception of credit is foreign should look upon the passing of silver as a standard of value with superstitious fear, especially men who have no personal contact with the great processes of interchange, — men who live apart from the channels of trade, and men, of a very different class, who speculate on human progress without knowledge of the instruments by which it is brought about.

For these larger reasons the campaign that we are now conducting is an effort at public education that has no recent parallel in its scope or aim. The credit of a democracy is no greater than the sum total of the people’s credit, just as the fighting strength of a nation is no greater than the sum total of the fighting strength of its men. Before we can have a stable popular government, under modern conditions, there must be a popular understanding of the meaning and value of credit in its widest sense. This is the lesson that we must learn, and perhaps the only lesson, before we can contest with Great Britain the commercial supremacy of the world. Now, there is no way more quickly or forcibly to teach the people this fundamental truth than by facing this definite threat to take the United States from the first rank of commercial nations and to put it in the third rank; and nothing but a military attack could so arouse our patriotism as this assault on our national character ought to arouse it, and fortunately is arousing it. The assault, therefore, looks very like an evil out of which will come unexpected good. At any rate, it is reassuring to see the most abstruse subject that was ever brought upon the stump taken up with confidence in the effectiveness of free discussion to eradicate a superstition.

But the most significant aspect of the Chicago programme is not its political, nor even its commercial, but its social aspect; and from this point of view it is a symptom of a condition that may cause anxiety. It was in a sense an accident that the several groups of the discontented hit upon the free coinage of silver as their shibboleth. This action was due, as we have seen, to the vitality of the superstition about cheap money, helped by the overzealous activity of the owners of silver mines. But they have threatened also a reorganization of the Supreme Court of the United States for a partisan purpose, and made a protest against the use of the executive power to protect the property of the general government; each of these “ demands ” being the work of a different element in the convention. The alarming fact is that nearly all the groups of malcontents that have Hitherto existed separately are now united. We have before had a Greenback party, Socialist-Labor parties, Farmers’ Alliances, the “ Wheel,” Nationalists, and other detached groups of the dissatisfied or unbalanced, and their activity separately has generally been harmless. Now, practically, all these groups are united, and the consolidated organization includes also the unthinking mass of the Democratic party. This mass gives the movement its strength. This body of ignorance that the revolutionists have thus made captive, if left to itself or if properly led, would not do violence to our civilization; for it does not understand that the present programme means ruin. The unthinking masses look upon it merely as a method of removing the cause of their discontent.

The social fact that we must consider, then, is the existence of a widespread discontent. This is the meaning of the heterogeneous declarations made at Chicago as understood by those who approve them. These malcontents are not as prosperous as they think they ought to be, and they think that there is some artificial barrier to their prosperity.

Now what are the causes of a widespread dissatisfaction ? And are there artificial hindrances to prosperity ?

One important cause of discontent is the shrinking of agricultural profit. By reason of machinery and improved methods, the relative number of men required to produce farm products has constantly become less. It is probable, too, that the cultivated area of good land has been extended faster than the food demand has increased. Agricultural profit has shrunk not only in our own country, but in Europe as well, for the complaint is world-wide. Following the farmer’s loss of profit has come also a certain loss of dignity. The tiller of the soil, who in the days of our fathers was the embodiment of economic independence and of civic virtue, has passed away. He is a stock figure no longer of the orator, but only of the humorist. His relative social standing has been lost. The “ sturdy yeoman ” has become the “ hayseed.” This agricultural discontent is a large part of the organized unrest, and it has been gathering volume for a dozen years.

But there are still other causes of unrest. The reflex influence on rural life of the great movement of the population to the cities makes rural life less and less attractive; and there is abundant evidence of a sort of social revolt by the countryman against the townsman. The town sets the fashion not in attire only, but in the whole round of living. The social disadvantage of the dweller in the country must be reckoned as an important cause of discontent, especially since cheap and rapid communication and the newspapers bring to the envious knowledge of the countryman an intimate acquaintance with the follies as well as with the advantages of town life ; and the vice of living beyond one’s income has spread from the town to the farm.

The organization of vast enterprises into forms that lessen personal responsibility also has had its effect on the popular imagination. It is not by saving, but by “ booming,” that fortunes are thought to be made, and “ booming ” is but another name for borrowing with only a speculative opportunity to pay. Here, indeed, we are disposed to think, is the very root of the malady which expresses itself in this composite revolutionary programme ; for attacks on property always come from those who not only do not have property, but who cannot conserve it or wisely use it. It is more than a coincidence that the menace to property and to credit is most determined in the two parts of the Union that have nothing in common but a lack of thrift, —in the South, where the unsound economic habit of life that was the basis of slavery yet lingers, and in the mining States, where industry itself has been speculative. In the last analysis it is these defects of character that we must confront. With these, we may be sure, we shall have to deal again and often. Some forms of unrest are passing moods, and will disappear with a revival of trade ; but the discontent that has its root in a lack of thrift and of a rigid commercial morality is more serious.

Besides these more or less specific causes there is a general cause of widespread dissatisfaction. The frontier has disappeared. The public lands have practically all been taken. The adventurous and the dissatisfied can no longer leave their homes and find new homes for the asking. From the beginning of our history the unoccupied land in the West has provoked, and it has till lately absorbed, the restlessness of our people, but that restlessness must now find new outlets. We have too long bred pioneers and wanderers and adventurers to settle down easily and quickly to anything humdrum, even to a humdrum prosperity.

This general dissatisfaction has some of the symptoms of the discontent that has projected itself into the politics of all old governments. We are no longer free from the kind of social maladies that have afflicted the Old World, but have hitherto spared us, thanks to our simplicity of life, to our vast territory, and to our more elastic institutions ; and we know by this token that we are now become a part of complex civilization.

A class feeling more distinct than ever before has asserted itself in politics. In Jackson’s time a similar thing happened, but in those youthful days of the republic it was comparatively harmless. Now it is the most harmful spirit that could be evoked. True, the population of the United States is made up of classes, as the population of every other country is, — the rich and the poor, the cultivated and the ignorant, the well bred and the rude. But in political life it is our theory, and has been our boast, that we have no classes. This campaign has taken a more dangerous form than any preceding one, because so direct and so essentially dishonest an appeal has been made to the envy of the mass of men, and a candidate for the presidency has himself appealed directly to the class feeling of the dissatisfied. Now, if our institutions are in danger from any quarter, if the democratic plan of government is to fail at last, if we are to suffer the ancient sorrows of other societies which it was hoped we had outgrown, and if it shall turn out that we are but going through a cycle of Old-World experience, and not making progress at all, — the blessings which we have credited to our institutions being only the blessings of a vast domain and of elbow-room for a time,—the most alarming symptom of such a collapse and failure would be the appearance of sharp class distinctions in politics. The very threat of such a disaster makes a thoughtful man shudder.

But if the time is ever to come when there is good reason why the poor and the rich should be permanently arrayed against each other at the polls, it ought not yet to come ; for we have not passed out of the period when the poor of to-day become the rich of to-morrow. Though it assumes the guise of the supremest danger, the present agitation ought to turn out, as it seems likely to turn out, to be a farce ; for no other fact is so conspicuous in our recent history as the very rapid increase in the number of the well-to-do. If we roughly divide the population into the poor, the well-to-do, and the rich, and could determine the numbers in each class at any two given periods, say in 1876 and 1896, we should see that while there has been a large absolute and small comparative increase alike in the number of the rich and in the number of the poor, there has been an enormous increase, both absolute and relative, in the number of the well-to-do. Never since industrial society was organized has there been such a general rise from poverty to comfort as there has been in the United States during the last thirty years. There is no more fallacious doctrine than that the rich are becoming richer, and the poor poorer. The truth is, the lift from poverty to plenty has so engaged our thought that we have come too near to forgetting that other things than material well-being are needful to make a great people, and we are now paying one of the penalties of this forgetfulness.

But we are at least reminded that a new test of our institutions is now to be made. These new problems of democracy are of a kind that our predecessors did not anticipate. It requires a considerable effort, indeed, to picture to ourselves the comparative simplicity of life in the United States even half a century ago, and the comparative simplicity of our political problems at that time, except the one problem of maintaining the Union. Even that was a definite and concrete task. For one thing, those who tried to disrupt the Union lived in one group of States, and those who opposed disruption lived in another. But there is no sharp geographical line between the discontented and the prosperous.

Now, when, in this very definite way, the ominous social side of politics presents itself, our political machinery lacks something of its earlier elasticity to deal with it. The government, like all other complex modern instruments, is become a great machine, infinitely more powerful and more effective, but far less personal, than any form of government dreamed of by our fathers. It has necessarily been developed along the lines of all other modern activity, dealing swiftly with large units. In many ways, in government as in all other active and practical things, the individual becomes less and less. It is this feeling that in some way the government has ceased to be his, as it was his in a time nearer to the townmeeting, that has aroused the suspicion of the isolated man. It is in fact a contest between the isolated and the organized, with the isolated suddenly organized for the moment, without the training that brings wisdom or prudence, — in a word, a mob on one side, and on the other side civilization. The government has proved its strength, and the question now is whether it be flexible enough to serve alike and at once a complex society of the modern type and the primitive conditions of half a century ago that yet prevail in a large part of our territory. The present task is to save it as an instrument of civilization. Thereafter will come the duty of removing the real causes of discontent.