THE BALANCE IN GOVERNMENT
Ross, Professor Edward Alsworth
The Balance in Government Slavish Following of Musty Precedents By Courts and the Stiffening of Traditions Leads To a Kind of Rigor Mortis By PROFESSOR EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS Prof. E. A. Ross is...
...Citizens allow themselves to be ranged into two parties, import into political discussion military phrases—"campaign," "battle," "the enemy," "chiefs," "war cries," "banners"—and military features—torchlight processions, uniforms, and marching companies...
...Militarism strangles liberal political development and strengthens revolutionary and imperialistic tendencies...
...A little folk with no such cheering hope is despised as cumberer of the earth...
...Conservatives, who brand this as folly or sacrilege, deny society's sacred right of self-adaptation...
...It was a well-known Washington newspaper correspondent who asked one of the leading standpat Republican Senators the question...
...3,000,000,000 If to these figures are added the cost to Holland, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries of maintaining neutrality, the direct war debt will easily approach $150,000,000,000...
...IN THE piloting of society no valuable element should have either too little influence or too much influence...
...In these instances the instincts of the masses proved a more trustworthy guide than the half-baked cosmopolitanism of the intellectuals...
...If the working millions accept these values, tbey cease to respect themselves and will in the end let themselves be governed by the wealthy...
...and commercialized prostitution, are spared on the ground that they are "business...
...nothing is beautiful unless it is made of costly materials...
...The idea that sages should mark a groove for society for all time shatters on the fact that society ceaselessly changes...
...China's great need is men of high integrity, and she cannot grow them so long as the impressionable boyhood years are passed in the company of an unlettered, narrow-minded, neglected and despised woman...
...Government is looked upon, not as a guardian of every great public interest, but as a bulwark of property rights and maintainer of conditions favorable to making money...
...One cannot imagine them treating juvenile offenders as if they were adult, expecting to make bad men good by solitary confinement, shutting up people who cannot pay their debts, imprisoning persons without any provision for feeding them, or settling cases by judicial combat...
...Here the role of leaders has been to direct attention rather than to persuade...
...whereas a man is insulted if you call his business "philanthropic," or "religious," or "educational...
...no Celestial with Confucius...
...WflLE women, owing to their being largely occupied with bearing and rearing children, have developed fewer specialists than men, they ought to be conceded a large social influence in order to counteract certain bad masculine tendencies...
...This is well nigh as bad as if evil djinns should persuade us to be ashamed of breathing or eating or any other necessary function...
...At the social summit, to be sure, are some so" sure of their place that they are free to lead a "simple" life, but in general the leisured develop a prodigal manner of life, which most of the useful people accept as the only proper way of living...
...The military chafe under civil authority, while.they sneer at parliamentary debate as "mere talk...
...During the period 1890-1905 American opinion was led by commercial minds, and the results are writ large in the alarming growth of materialism and corruption throughout this period...
...6,000,000,000 United States...
...One fetter of such enslavement is fear of offending the spirits of the departed...
...The health of the masses is conserved, not out of concern for their welfare, but to preserve their military fitness...
...Thus the social atmosphere lost the stimulating ozone it had in the old inspiring days when the Chinese invented gunpowder, block-printing, banknotes, porcelain, the compass, the compartment boat and the taxicab...
...The matter is by no means so simple...
...In Chinese thought the world is divided between good and evil, Yang and Yin...
...The people are taught that speculation is not gambling, that tax dodging is not larceny, that railroad rebating is not treachery, that free transportation passes are not bribery, that deleterious adulteration is not murder...
...It is responsible for the feeling that conservatism is dignified, while radicalism is "vulgar" and "bad form...
...Army :.nj fleet are not watchdogs to protect the people in their peaceful pursuits, but the means of imposing the national will on lower races, of "organizing" backward peoples, or of fulfilling "cultural missions" to unwilling neighbors...
...so is the allowing of donors to fix for all time the use to which their endowments shall be put...
...Thus the government regulation of railroads was an article of faith among farmers in the seventies, while it received the late and grudging acquiescence of professional and business men not earlier than the nineties...
...That the claims of business should take precedence over life and limb, over health and family js monstrous...
...The only certain means of demonstrating the existence in each element of a bias which unfits it for unqualified leadership in society is to show what has actually happened when some element has gained such ascendancy that it has been able to mold society, as it were, to its heart's desire...
...no raiment is fine but silk or broadcloth...
...Yet the fighting instinct leads thoughtless men generally to look upon it"as a prize ring, with-the implication, of course, that somebody is bound to get hurt...
...In the slums the spread of heavy drinking among women is a sure sign of demoralization born of despair...
...This is why good men long justified child labor, the wrecking of the health of working girls, the night work of women, preventable work accidents, Even yet many disinterested men feel that stopping the sale of diseased meat or "doctored" canned goods is unfair interference, like depriving prize fighters of their best blows and ruses...
...for the palate like champagne and truffles...
...Exempt itself from labor, it makes leisure the cardinal index of superiority and meets all who would enter its charmed circle with the challenge: Do you work for a living...
...17,500,000,000 Bulgaria and Turkey...
...With the other belligerents and neutrals included the whole daily cost is in the neighborhood of $150,000,000...
...He is regarded, not as a killer, but as a hero ready to shed his blood for king and country...
...This affinity between the nobility and the army may be an inheritance from feudalism, or it may be the outcome of deliberately petting, pampering, and privileging the military in order to draw into it those able to contribute most to its spirit and prestige...
...If, then, the plain people had waited for the intellectuals to take notice of their grievances and to guide them to redress, they would have waited till the crack of doom...
...Reverence for Business...
...but the worst that can happen to the unfaithful husband is a tongue lashing, which he is expected to hear patiently...
...6,600,000,OOA Italy...
...no Parsee with Zoroaster...
...In gold-mining camps recklessness is habitual, and to save himself a little trouble the miner endangers the life he is toiling to enrich...
...Property is put above life, and lawmakers stay their hand when business men predict ruin if required to keep their work places safe and sanitary...
...national resources and productive power, as possible sinews of war...
...Only men are foolish enough to persist in applying pain to offenders without self-control, who manifestly can never be improved by punishment...
...Vision in such matters calls for a fuller knowledge or a wider range of observation than the average uneducated person possesses...
...The recent extraordinary infatuation of Americans with this class suggests that such a tendency appears when the big economic tasks which press upon a young and growing country have lent extra importance to the business man, when business has attracted an overlarge share of national ability, and when the commercial spirit is held in check neither by aristocratic traditions nor by strongly organized liberal professions...
...Well, as a matter of fact we have been proposing to expel La Follette from the Senate because he advocated just that very thing...
...From the male point of view it is fitting that the woman be sacrificed to the man, but not that man, the superior being, be sacrificed to woman...
...Germany is spending approximately the same as Great Britain, French and Italian expenditures combined are not far from $30,000,000 a day...
...The embryo Pasteur or Edison was so intimidated by the universal opinion that wisdom died with the ancient sages that he could bring forth nothing...
...Since 190C he has been professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin...
...Property is put above life and lawmakers stay their hand when business men predict ruin if required to keep their work places safe and sanitary...
...or else the prisons are run to make money for prison contractors...
...Yet the simple truth is that no one element is wise enough to be followed without question...
...Values that are not pecuniary values, such as race vigor, public health, natural beauty, scientific progress, moral tone, and ideals dl life, he will sacrifice when they interfere with national or personal gain...
...12,000,000.000 Italy...
...It is possible to estimate with a fair degree of accuracy the cost of the four years of war ending with July 31...
...2,800,000,000 Russia...
...But when present reason is held weaker than that of some golden or classical age and the living are powerless to free themselves from the yoke of the past, we have the rule of the dead...
...As we saw from the example of the English in Flanders, it leads to war being conducted by amateurs as a sport instead of by professionals as a lethal industry...
...Lacking psychology, the Chinese thinkers never recognized the role of the mother in shaping the character of her sons...
...If, then, the plain people had watted for the intellectuals to take notice of their grievances and to guide them to redress, they would have waited till the crack of doom...
...Thus it may temper male ascendency by diffusing that idealization of the feminine which grew np with mediaeval chivalry and gave birth to "lady" worship...
...hence blind conservatism is especially strong wherever, as in the Far East, ancestor worship prevails...
...A crime committed without malice and merely in the way of business is condoned...
...Let us designate as "intellectuals" those from whom leadership Would naturally be expected, while the to-be-led may be called "the plain people...
...WHEN new-rich force their way into high society with a torrent of expenditure no social barriers can withstand, the effect on public morals is yet more disastrous...
...His ideal is high wages, big salaries, and fat dividends, so that whatever stands in the way of maximizing these "hurts business" and is anathema...
...Prior to August 1, 1914, the debt of the warring nations was as follows: Great Britain...
...As for inherited institutions, we see two hundred millions of Hindus divided into three thousand hereditary castes, between which there is no marriage and very little social intercourse, and from which no man can "escape...
...Since then Great Britain has been spending at the daily rate of from $30,000,000 to $35,000,000...
...deadly disease, the breeder whose discoveries in heredity open vistas of race improvement, the civilizer of a savage folk, the projector of a new education, the founder of a great social settlement—these are not "men who do things...
...A written constitution, made so hard to amend as to deny succeeding generations the creative freedom enjoyed by the makers of the instrument, is also a yoke upon the living...
...It is reprinted in abbreviated form with his permission.—Editor's Note...
...In other words, the interest charges will equal the pre-war debt of Great Britain, Italy and the United States and be 50 per cent, in excess of the 1914 national debts of the Central Powers...
...The resort to inter-national violence is identified with the evolutionary "struggle for existence," and the losers of a war are branded as "unfit...
...Male pugnacity kept in force long after its due time the hoary conception of government as mere keeper of the lists rather than as machinery for serving certain common needs...
...The actual figures are available for the period to December 31, 1917...
...Mothers subjected their little daughters to the torturing bandages, because without the "golden lilies" they stood no chance whatever of marriage...
...Again, the leisured take the enjoyer's point of view rather than the trader's and check commercialism by insisting on valuing a thing or an activity by what it can add to life and not by what it will fetch...
...When a ganglion of gray matter is not left free to do well its proper work, or when it cannot get a fair hearing for its good ideas and hence is not making to the intelligent guidance of the whole that contribution which it is capable of making, it has too little influence...
...worship...
...The rule of the old delays needful adaptation, although to a less degree than the rule of the dead...
...Again women, with their better psychological insight, would hardly have been guilty of the follies men have committed in the penal field...
...Hence, when the old men monopolize places and influence, readjustment lags at least a generation behind need...
...At the threshold of the leisure clas3 forms a corrupt half-world of demi-raondaines, procurers, on-hangers, gamblers, touts, charlatans, swindlers, bravoa, "gentlemen of fortune," and other higher parasites, which like an abscess, continually pours out infection...
...Conditions in China...
...Darkness is "Yin," cold is "Yin," earth spirits are "Yin," and woman is "Yin," Although necessary, she is inferior and should be held under a firm control...
...triple it and the meaning is "intrigue...
...The subjection of the living to the dead flouta what we know of life and society...
...E. A. Ross is one of the leading sociologists of the United States...
...Since it is illogical to require the conscript to kill those he regards as defending their country, while not requiring of stay-at-homes the lesser sacrifice of keeping silent when they disapprove state policy, militarism calls for censorship of newspapers, suppression of public meetings, control of university professors and religious teachers, and the suppression of writers and speakers who criticize the war policy or take "the enemy point of view...
...Moreover, the eco-_nomic self-interest of the intellectuals, or of the classes they affiliate with, has in some cases been squarely against reform...
...So has it been with homestead laws, rural credit, postal savings banks, the graduated income tax, the fight on the "Pinkerton" plague...
...The reason is that on these questions the farmers or the wage earners drew upon an experience which the intellectuals utterly lacked...
...Of this type are the abolition of slavery and peonage, the suppression of prostitution and the liquor traffic, the humanization of punishments, the suppression of Mormon polygamy, the protection of the home, religious toleration, and international peace...
...THE state of women under masculine ascendancy may be seen in China...
...Again, the living are paralyzed by the notion that some period or product of the far past is holy, that of yore the gods were nigher to men, that then they revealed their will THE slavish following of musty precedents by courts of justice is another form of the rule of ,the dead...
...It may be above greed, it may be above the lust for power, but it will never be above the craving for influence...
...Of course no element has ever ruled without check from any quarter, but there are instances which reveal clearly enough the tendencies which lurk in each of the groups that has, one time or another, set its stamp upon the social mind...
...Nearly every people revere some ancient scripture or institution of such transcendent prestige that the living dare not doubt, or probe, or criticize it...
...Senator-, what do you think of the President's address in which he recommends that a bill be passed at this session for additional taxes on war profits and incomes and luxuries 1" Senator: "What do I think of it...
...Women, on the other hand, shrink from a self-poisoning...
...Thus double the ideograph for "woman" and you have "to wrangle...
...The opposition of the plain people of the Pacific slope to Chinese coolie immigration, although our men of light and leading almost unanimously condemned such opposition, has since been justified by sociology...
...6,000,000,000 Germany ......................$32,000,000,000 Austria-Hungary...
...Since the smaH business men take their cue from the great merchants, financiers, and heads of big enterprises, in an era of commercialism these, their spokesmen, become the leaders and tone-givers of society...
...Just now it is above $40,000,000...
...Man-made throughout, Chinese culture is full of male contempt for women...
...He cannot see that there are business profits which cost some of us ten times their worth in salubrity, or quiet, or peace of mind...
...Its master aim is business prosperity, on the theory, "Make employers content and they will make the people content...
...Moreover, the whole people are held back because men have dwarfed women to suit their own tastes and prejudices...
...What he desiras is prosperity rather than welfare...
...In China the women never generally took to opium smoking till the district was hopeless...
...In certain other matters the plain people took a stand long before the intellectuals were heard from...
...A school board must be a "business" board, scholars should be picked and officered by a business man as university president, and the ultimate control of churches, colleges, and charities is left to the solid men of business whose money makes these possible...
...They feel that nothing adorns like precious stones...
...A candidate's trump card is the promise of a "business" administration...
...The prevention of industrial accidents, the prohibition of child labor, and the protection of working women were in the program of the American labor unions for twenty years before it became respectable to support them...
...Its love of pleasure may tend to counteract the morbid asceticism and "other-world-liness" which sometimes radiates from the clergy...
...The reason is that on these questions the farmers or the wage-earners drew upon an experience which the intellectuals utterly lacked...
...A movement to clean up rotten cijy government is deprecated as "hurting business...
...Doubtless woman's gain in social influence will make for firmer dealing with race poisons...
...Individual For State IN MILITARIST philosophy the state is not for the individual, but the individual is for the state...
...They have few acquaintances, save relatives, and take no part in picnics, excursions and feasts...
...the public-utilities commission, to make a market for issues of corporation securities...
...The slavish following of musty precedents by courts of justice ia another form of the rule of the dead...
...Nature's stores are not conserved for posterity, lest opportunities for immediate profit be curtailed...
...for pleasure, like a theater party or a meet with hounds...
...The commercial fallacy befuddles society to the point of being no longer able to know its bad from its good...
...National self-conceit is sedulously fostered by a pseudo ethnology, a falsified history, and a systematic blackening of the character of rival peoples...
...The large-scale malefactor of high finance goes unpunished because he is a "Napoleon," a "superman," "asserting the higher law which great enterprises have the right to command...
...For they give blessings, mere blessings, but no money income...
...They knew where the shoe pinched, for they had to wear it...
...Such as» cendancy is likely to occur when army and navy officers are drawn chiefly from a hereditary upper order, so that their professional prestige is reinforced by class prestige...
...Nevertheless, under commercialism the money yardstick will be naively applied to achievement anywhere, with the result that alongside successful business- men the head men in every line of intellectual or idealistic endeavor will look like dwarfs...
...During peace militarists demand ever heavier armament and longer training, heedless of the fact that other militarists are persuading their peoples to do the same, so that after the utmost sacrifices the relative positions of the rivals are unchanged...
...Chinese ladies are excessively small and frail in comparison with their men folk, owing no doubt to the foot binding and the confinement imposed by male opinion...
...Chicane is tolerated, if it is merely "the tricks of the trade...
...There is another group of matters on which the plain people take a stand without needing the initiative of intellectuals...
...Thanks to a sudden flood of light on the ways of big business (known as the "literature of exposure) other groups—the educators, the social workers, the economists, the geologists, and the physicians—have in recent years won the confidence of the public, while a much better type has replaced the specialized and unscrupulous business men who spoke for the American commercial class at the opening of the century...
...the schools to provide employer* with cheap youth, skilled at the public expense...
...Thus has masculinism conserved the happiness of women...
...The idea rules that the people exist, not to live out their lives, but to win wars...
...As the public comes to feel this, cupidity will be sharpened and corruption will invade every type of structure in society...
...THE dead count as a social element, for their recorded experience and transmitted institutions may be stalwart factors in the life of their descendants...
...The only wealth that is real to him is bankable wealth...
...Out among the plain people, who, like Atlas, support the world on their shoulders, runs like devil grass thj fantastic idea that work is disgraceful, until millions, who have nothing to look forward to but the common lot, are set at odds with their bread and butter...
...AS CORRECTIVE of unwholesome tendencies the leadership of those who do not have to work for a living may be most salutary...
...The influence of the leisure class fortifies the cultural studies in the schools against the demand for vocational studies and helps letters hold their place in the curriculum against the pressure from science...
...1,200,000,000 Germany...
...It is the custom of leisure-class families to keep about them numerous servants ostensibly to render their masters personal service, but really to perform "vicarious leisure," to use Veb-len's happy phrase...
...The boy's upbringing is not shaped to please the other sex but everything in the upbringing of the girl—her foot binding, "tottering lily" gait, hairdressing, skill in embroidery, innocence, ignorance, obedience—is obviously a catering to the male...
...20,000,000,000 Russia...
...Funny Old World This WASHINGTON newspaper correspondent...
...all sound women, as potential mothers of soldiers...
...It is felt demeaning to clean your clothes, black your boots, carry your luggage, roll your baby carriage, answer your doorbell, wait on your table, groom your horses, or wash your car...
...On the other hand, the surgeon who establishes a new operation, the experimenter who finds the antidote for a WAR IS deemed not a thing of dread, but "a biological necessity...
...The estimate of Chinese observers in 1910 was that from 6 to 10 per cent of girl babies were exposed...
...Such are the upholding of the public credit, the conservation of natural resources, the promotion of scientific research, civil service reform, appreciation of the expert in the public service, efficiency in government, the isolation of contagious diseases, public-health protection, compulsory vaccination, scientific yac-cination, scientific charity, and eugenics...
...A written constitution, made so hard to amend as to deny succeeding generations the creative freedom enjoyed by the makers of the instrument, is also a yoke upon the living...
...In aduft recreation it belittles play in favor of sports involving skill...
...This is why some centuries ago the Chinese held that a widow ought to kill herself at her husband's funeral, whereas the notion that a widower ought to do the same at his wife's funeral never entered the Celestial mind...
...Social diversion is organized for men, not for women...
...Each class or profession which attracts to itself many of the talented of each generation is quite sure that, if only society would submit to its guidance, all would be well...
...A remarkably ilose review of the situation has been made by the Federal Reserve Board and appears in its April Bulletin...
...There are cases in which intellectuals and plain people even disagreed, and the event proved the plain people to be right...
...Women, on the contrary, insist, in their simplicity of mind, that the palming off of putridity and poison under the guise of food, upon mothers buying nourishment for the children they have risked their lives to bring into the world is not in any sense business, but black treachery...
...In view of the sapping effect of its standards and examples upon the basic virtues of the self-supporting, organized society would be justified in so taxing great incomes as to make a hereditary leisure class impossible...
...Masculinized politics becomes a fight in which civic ends are lost sight of...
...4,000,000,000 The whole debt of these countries, therefore, when they have concluded the fourth year of the war, will be about $175,000,000,000...
...Acting on the maxim, "To the victors belong the spoils," the winning party proceeds, amid the general approval of the voters of both parties, to convert the rewards of government to private and party advantage...
...culine tutelage ? Since the married daughter belongs completely to her husband's family and cannot be looked to by her parents in their old age, it is female infants that are done away with as superfluous, never male infants...
...If we strike an average for the $175,000,000,000 of 4>A per cent, the service of this debt next August, will be at the annual rate cf nearly eight billions' of dollars...
...They suffer much from neurasthenia and heart lesion, owing to the strain of their lot, and their faces are stamped with pain, patience and gentle resignation rather than with happiness...
...The trouble is- not any lack of ability, but the bias to which it is subject by reason of its esprit de corps or its distinctive work and manner of life...
...No one, however, has ever seen working women regularly risk their wages on a card...
...But when the leisure class has the last word on everything, its influence may be very noxious...
...Even if the best minds today are no match for the "Fathers" of the federal constitution, it is certain that men of today can legislate for our needs better than the men of 1787 could suit their work to our needs...
...22,000,000,000 United States...
...Another gyve is overvaluation of whatever is classic...
...Moreover, the economic self-interest of the intellectuals, or of the classes they affiliate with, has in some cases been squarely against reform...
...At times the militarist bias in society is financed and promoted by concessionaires, battleship builders, and armament makers...
...3,500,000,000 France...
...Life is correspondence to environment, so that the stiffening of traditions and institutions is a kind of rigor mortis...
...It shows that for the three and a half years the public debts of twelve warring countries grew nearly $112,000.-000,000...
...Record of Suicide IN THE West suicide is from three to five times as frequent among men as among women, whereas among the Chinese the women kill themselves from five to ten times as often as men...
...Now, it will be bad for society if at every fork in the road the intellectuals stride ahead along what they think is the right road, while the plain people follow them with the childlike trust...
...When, however, the leadership of society is shared among the various important elements, their special habits of thought neutralize one another, and the resultant is on the whole reasonable...
...So has it been with homestead laws, rural credit, postal savings banks, the graduated income tax, the fight on the "Pinkerton" plague...
...Leisure Class Ascendancy...
...on the nature of the questions that come up, on the plane of popular intelligence, on the familiarity of the people with methods of public discussion and debate, on their experience in following argument, on their skill in detecting the demagogue, on the fulness of the control they exercise over their government, on the complexity of society, and on the nature of the education, the intellectual habits, and the disinterestedness of the elements that would lead the people...
...No Arab today stands on a footing with the writer of tne Koran...
...War is deemed, not a thing of dread, but "a biological necessity...
...During peace militarists demand even heavier armament and longer training, heedless of the fast that other militarists are persuading their peoples to do the same, so that after the utmost sacrifices the relative positions of the rivals are unchanged...
...For example, the premium of the old state-examination system of China put upon the writings of certain thinkers who lived long before our era tended to sliackle the original minds of i pach generation...
...Such government services as public health, conservation, education, recreation, and charities are starved in order to keep taxes low or to subsidize private enterprises...
...They knew where the shoe pinched, for they had to wear it...
...The following article by him was first presented in the American Journal of Sociology...
...Toilet, opium smoking, gossiping with the servants, visits from a few friends—no wonder the doctors find their worst cases of nervous exhaustion among these repressed creatures...
...So long as business men of this limited vision have their spell upon the public mind, "success" means the same as "business success"— that is, making money...
...Such are what are termed "moral questions," i. e., questions which are answered out of one's moral perception rather than out of special knowledge...
...Even if the best minds today are no match for the "Fathers" of the federal Constitution, it is certain that men of today can legislate for our needs better than the men of 1787 could suit their work to our needs...
...Finding itself in a plight unforeseen by its ancestors, a people casts about for an adjustment...
...Results and Conclusion...
...be roughly gauged by the money he has been able to make under the accepted codes, but the success of the divine, jurist, officer, statesman, scholar, thinker, artist, or poet is not properly measured by his gain...
...but no pailow is raised to the youth who remains true to the memory of his lost sweetheart, for such constancy would be ridiculed...
...Peace within the nation is priceless, but between nations it is "a dream and not even a beautiful dream...
...The ancient sages stressed the danger of letting women become educated and go about freely, for thus might they gain the upper hand and wreck society...
...Now, one who is a business man and nothing else slips easily into the fallacy of ignoring non-economic goods and of rating well-being by dollar income...
...So there grows up among them a sense of the shamefulness of waiting on yourself, which spreads out from the leisure class and prompts people who can ill afford it to pay some menial to do for them things they could easily do for themselves...
...Interests plainly antisocial, such as the liquor traffic, race-track gambling, THE idea that it hurts society to disturb persons making money, just as it hurts the hive to disturb bees secreting "wax, causes various elements of public good to be sacrificed out of a superstitious reverence for business...
...Nature's stores are not conserved for posterity, lest opportunities for immediate profit be curtailed...
...Kl spite of itself its judgment becomes warped by its special psychology...
...so is the allowing of donors to fix for all time the use to which their endowments shall be put...
...On the loans made since war began the average would be nearly five per cent...
...The nation allows itself to become a polyglot hodgepodge, because mill-owners, mine operators, contractors, and railroads insist on an unlimited flow of cheap alien labor...
...The only remedies for this bondage are to dispel the golden haze that hangs about the origins of religions and codes, to test myths and legends in the crucible of scientific scholarship, to strip the remote past of its purple and to reveal it in everyday garb, to gain a true perspective of the development of civilization and human society, and to teach men that the Here is as sacred, the Now as inspired, as some spot in Western Asia twenty or thirty centuries ago...
...The slavery to mother-in-law, which drives many brides to suicide, and the ideas of wifely propriety that impel young widows to make away with themselves originated with men and have never been molded in the least by the sex they affect...
...The prevention of industrial accidents, the prohibition of child labor, and the protection of working women were in the program of the American labor unions for twenty years before it became respectable to support them...
...Influence of Leisure Cla...
...Employers who pay the wages and salaries that keep many families are hailed as the chief public benefactors and are given whatever they ask...
...Thus foppish standards, begotten of spenders' rivalry, leach out through society and corrupt sound homebred notions of what is fit or decent, or worthwhile...
...Each element, then, pushes its in fluence as far as it can and is checked only by the spirit of independence or by the influence of some other element...
...No people that is intelligent and free can long endure the unqualified ascendancy of the commercial,element...
...A business man's success in his undertakings may...
...Ascendancy of Militarism THE UNDUE ascendancy of the military profession gives rise to militarism...
...Male irrationality comes out again in the needless taking of chances...
...In American experience we find certain matters in which the intellectuals had the truth before the plain people, and the latter learned to _«ee through their eyes...
...Men nearly monopolize the consumption of alcohol and narcotics, even though many are well aware of the harm these do...
...no Jew with the giver of the Mosaic law...
...There are cases in which the intellectuals a»d plain people even disagreed, and the event proved the plain people to be right...
...In the name of patriotism it insists that the Citizen-soldier relinquish every civil right and submit to cruel and degrading punishments without trial by jury for the smallest assertion of Ctlf-respect, not against discipline, but against insolence and class domination...
...Such a man is tender with poisonous smelter fumes, grade crossings, factory smoke, and noisy advertising, because he can realize the money cost of suppressing them, but not the harm they do...
...The Rule of the Dead...
...In these instances the instincts of the masses proved a more trustworthy guide than the half baked cosmopolitanism of the intellectuals...
...When the fighting caste gives public opinion its key, the pursuits ai th« soldier are esteemed nobler than those of the civilian...
...the parks to enrich street-car companies...
...The relation of the officer to his men is the pattern for the relation of a government to its citizenry...
...The English working class sympathy with the cause of the North during the American Civil War, in spite of the pro-Southern spirit of the leading class, is now recognized by the English themselves as political sagacity...
...Able and useful as business men are, their influence needs to be balanced by that of other groups...
...War Costs Reach $175,000,000,000 IN the remaining two months of the fourth year of the war, attention will be centered wholly on the military aspects of it...
...Germany now has a carryiog charge that is more than the equivalent of her pre-war debt.—(From Review of Reviews, June...
...AJUST balance, too, should be preserved between leaders and led...
...1,165,000,000 Austria Hungary...
...Reign of Commercialism When traders, manufacturers, capitalists and bankers wield the baton, commercialism reigns...
...The English working class sympathy with the cause of the North during the American Civil War, in spite of the pro-Southern spirit of the leading class, is now recognized by the English themselves as political sagacity...
...EACH of the elements in society intellectually qualified to lead has not only its special interest—which it may try to advance at the expense of other interests—but it has also its special point of view, which it always strives to make prevail...
...Thus the government regulation of railroads was an article of faith among farmers in the seventies, while it received the late and grudging acquiescence of professional and business men not earlier than the nineties...
...There is nothing for furniture like rosewood and mahogany...
...The unfaithful wife is stoned or drowned...
...In taking over this terrible burden without inquiring into its authority or worth, the living become thralls to certain ideas and decisions of their far ancestors...
...Foot binding was a disability imposed by man, for until recently it was a rare father who would marry his son to a girl with natural feet...
...Generally a man has a rather full set of convictions by the age of thirty, so that to allow for developments occurring thereafter calls for a mental effort which few are willing to make...
...THE idea that it hurts society to disturb persons making money, just as it hurts the hive to disturb bees secreting wax, causes various elements of public good to be sacrificed out of a superstitious reverence for business...
...Thus we arrive at the principle of balance, which may be formulated as follows: In the guidance of society each social element should share according to the intelligence and public spirit of its members, neither overshadowing other elements nor overshadowed by them...
...While in earlier stages of social development the leisure class contributed many valuable elements to the culture of the people, it now performs no useful functions which cannot be better rendered by paid public servants at a tithe of the cost...
...The pre-war interest rate of the greater portion of the debt would average about 3% per cent...
...All sound men are looked upon as potential soldiers...
...Many wars have no other cause, and if the policies of states obeyed the wills of men and women rather than of men only, the world would enjoy more peace...
...The tone they give reflects, of course, their characteristic habits of thought so far as these have not been qualified or neutralized by nonbusiness influences...
...How does the female sex fare under this masHonest Instincts Of Plain People IN CERTAIN other matters the plain people took a stand long before the intellectuals were heard from...
...The intellectuals should be willing to give reasons, while the plain people should keep their eyes open and use their common sense...
...But, as the summer goes on, the economic aspects will become more prominent...
...And that Senator made the answer quoted above...
...The nation allows itself to become a polyglot hodge-podge because mill-owners, mine operators, contractors, and railroads insist on an unlimited flow of cheap alien labor...
...You are snob to those below and toady to those above you, so that the higher are cankered with pride, the lower with envy...
...When on the other hand, it is so ascendant as to make all the rest the victim of its special psychology, it has too much influence...
...Each castes more and more upon the altar of the war god, yet is no whit safer than before...
...Not one great man have the Chinese brought forth since they took to binding the feet and neglecting the education of their daughters...
...By "business" a rational being understands the social system of making and distributing economic goods...
...Ungratified worldliness gnaws at the heart of the multitudes, while greed is whetted till even decent men turn to monopoly, extortion, chicane, and acquisitive crime...
...This is one reason for the moral rottenness which always develops in an aristocratic society...
...The war debts of the different powers, to July 31, 1918, will be about as follows: Great Britain and colonies......$33,000,0C0,000 France...
...Then, too, timidity is likely to grow with age, so that the old lack the courage to start changes which they know are necessary.' Rule of Masculinism...
...A girl who remains for life unwed, her betrothed having died -before their marriage, is deemed worthy of a memorial portal or pailow...
...In order to hire these things done for them, the middle class scrimp on necessaries and have few children, while living is made dearer for all because too many workers abandon production in order to render superfluous services...
...A season of heavy battles is ahead...
...When the living acknowledge an initial presumption in favor of whatever has survived from the past, yet preserve toward it a scrutinizing critical attitude, the generations are in proper balance...
...The needs of the state are not the happiness of its citizens nor the advancement of mankind, but mystic goals, vaguely related to civilization, the super-race, destiny, or God...
...Leaders and Led...
...The United States' daily cost, for the period, will average an equal amount...
...The balance to be struck between the educated and the people depends on a number of things...
...The highest compliment that can be paid a philanthropic, religious, or educational scheme is to pronounce it "business-like...
...Reason labors continually to eliminate hazard, and all insurance . rests on the human desire to substitute certainty for risk...
...Yet men who sweat for their money will gamble away their week's wage in an evening...
...Proficiency in war is deemed the be-all and end-all of national organization and effort...
...Her budget for 1918-19 s $15,000,000,000...
...The resort to international violence is identified with the evolutionary "struggle for existence," and the losers of a war are branded as "unfit...
...The fighting instinct of the male sex seriously unfits it to take sole charge of society...
...Women have an instinct for security and strive to lessen risk, while men fatuously create it...
...Not only do sensitive and aspiring workers come to hate their work, but, in order to avoid tho ignominio^ thing, the shrewd crowd into shady occupations and invent numberless ways of "living by one's wits...
...The slow transformation of government from coercion into service reflects in part the growing influence of women...
...After the arrival of wives men acquire a more rational view and learn to shun needless dangers...
...People fall apart into as many exclusive social groups as there are styles of living and forget how to meet their fellow-men on the level...
...The opposition of the plain people of the Pacific slope to Chinese coolie immigration, although our men of light and leading almost unanimously condemned such opposition, has since been justified by sociology...
...Each casts more and more upon the altar of the war god, yet is no whit safer than befiore...
...The prestige of a leisure class rests on conspicuous waste as well as on conspicuous leisure...
...The spectacle of their baronial estates, princely houses, liveried lackeys, and Sybaritic luxury contaminates even hard-headed persons with wealth...
...People come to scorn the joys at their elbow and pine for luxuries out of their reach...
...Then too, the open vice shop "brings people to town...
...Since in the eyes of commercial-minded people money income is the only income, it idolizes those who line its pockets...
...Peace within the nation is priceless, but between nations is it "a dream and not even a beautiful dream...
...through channels which have since become choked...
...Again, the women of the classes for the most part pass their lives within four walls, away from the stimulus of street and public resort, and rarely go out save in a closed cart or a covered chair...
...There is no society but the joint enjoyment of the expensive, no marriage save a church wedding, no rest save at a watering-place hotel...
...It is fond of dynasties and scorns democracy...
Vol. 10 • June 1918 • No. 6
