The old wooden clock in the kitchen began to strike, and she rose briskly to her feet and went and laid the books she had been holding in her lap on the table beside Mrs. Camp’s bed. “We must really be going,” she said, as she leaned over and kissed the invalid. “It is your dinner-time, and we shall barely get back for lunch if we go by the Loop road; and I want very much to have Mr. Homos see the Witch’s Falls on the way. I have got two or three of the books here that Mr. Makely brought me last night — I sha’n’t have time to read them at once — and I’m smuggling in one of Mr. Twelvemough’s, that he’s too modest to present for himself.” She turned a gay glance upon me, and Mrs. Camp thanked me, and a number of civilities followed from all sides. In the process of their exchange, Mrs. Makely’s spirits perceptibly rose, and she came away in high good-humor with the whole Camp family. “Well, now, I am sure,” she said to the Altrurian, as we began the long ascent of the Loop road, “you must allow that you have seen some very original characters. But how warped people get living alone so much! That is the great drawback of the country. Mrs. Camp thinks the savings-bank did her a real injury in taking a mortgage on her place, and Reuben seems to have seen just enough of the outside world to get it all wrong. But they are the best-hearted creatures in the world, and I know you won’t misunderstand them. That unsparing country bluntness — don’t you think it’s perfectly delightful? I do like to stir poor Reuben up, and get him talking. He is a good boy, if he is so wrong-headed, and he’s the most devoted son and brother in the world. Very few young fellows would waste their lives on an old farm like that; I suppose, when his mother dies, he will marry and strike out for himself in some growing place.”
“He did not seem to think the world held out any very bright inducements for him to leave home,” the Altrurian suggested.
“Oh, let him get one of these lively, pushing Yankee girls for a wife, and he will think very differently,” said Mrs. Makely.
The Altrurian disappeared that afternoon, and I saw little or nothing of him till the next day at supper. Then he said he had been spending the time with young Camp, who had shown him something of the farm-work, and introduced him to several of the neighbors; he was very much interested in it all, because at home he was, at present, engaged in farm-work himself, and he was curious to contrast the American and Altrurian methods. We began to talk of the farming interest again, later in the day, when the members of our little group came together, and I told them what the Altrurian had been doing. The doctor had been suddenly called back to town; but the minister was there, and the lawyer and the professor and the banker and the manufacturer.
It was the banker who began to comment on what I said, and he seemed to be in the frank humor of the Saturday night before. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a hard life, and they have to look sharp if they expect to make both ends meet. I would not like to undertake it myself with their resources.”
The professor smiled, in asking the Altrurian: “Did your agricultural friends tell you anything of the little rural traffic in votes that they carry on about election time? That is one of the side means they have of making both ends meet.”
“I don’t understand,” said the Altrurian.
“Why, you know, you can buy votes among our virtuous yeomen from two dollars up at the ordinary elections. When party feeling runs high, and there are vital questions at stake, the votes cost more.”
The Altrurian looked round at us all aghast. “Do, you mean that Americans buy votes?”
The professor smiled again. “Oh no; I only mean that they sell them. Well, I don’t wonder that they rather prefer to blink the fact; but it is a fact, nevertheless, and pretty notorious.”
“Good heavens!” cried the Altrurian. “And what defence have they for such treason? I don’t mean those who sell; from what I have seen of the bareness and hardship of their lives, I could well imagine that there might sometimes come a pinch when they would be glad of the few dollars that they could get in that way; but what have those who buy to say?”
“Well,” said the professor, “it isn’t a transaction that’s apt to be talked about much on either side.”
“I think,” the banker interposed, “that there is some exaggeration about that business; but it certainly exists, and I suppose it is a growing evil in the country. I fancy it arises, somewhat, from a want of, clear thinking on the subject. Then there is no doubt but it comes, sometimes, from poverty. A man sells his vote, as a woman sells her person, for money, when neither can turn virtue into cash. They feel that they must live, and neither of them would be satisfied if Dr. Johnson told them he didn’t see the necessity. In fact, I shouldn’t myself, if I were in their places. You can’t have the good of a civilization like ours without having the bad; but I am not going to deny that the bad is bad. Some people like to do that; but I don’t find my account in it. In either case, I confess that I think the buyer is worse than the seller — incomparably worse. I suppose you are not troubled with either case in Altruria?”
“Oh no!” said the Altrurian, with an utter horror, which no repetition of his words can give the sense of. “It would be unimaginable.”
“Still,” the banker suggested, “you have cakes and ale, and at times the ginger is hot in the mouth?”
“I don’t pretend that we have immunity from error; but upon such terms as you have described we have none. It would be impossible.”
The Altrurian’s voice expressed no contempt, but only a sad patience, a melancholy surprise, such as a celestial angel might feel in being suddenly confronted with some secret shame and horror of the Pit.
“Well,” said the banker, “with us the only way is to take the business view and try to strike an average somewhere.”
“Talking of business,” said the professor, turning to the manufacturer, who had been quietly smoking, “why don’t some of you capitalists take hold of farming here in the East, and make a business of it as they do in the West?”
“Thank you,” said the other; “if you mean me, I would rather not invest.” He was silent a moment, and then he went on, as if the notion were beginning to win upon him: “It may come to something like that, though. If it does, the natural course, I should think, would be through the railroads. It would be a very easy matter for them to buy up all the good farms along their lines and put tenants on them, and run them in their own interest. Really, it isn’t a bad scheme. The waste in the present method is enormous, and there is no reason why the roads should not own the farms, as they are beginning to own the mines. They could manage them better than the small farmers do in every way. I wonder the thing hasn’t occurred to some smart railroad man.”
We all laughed a little, perceiving the semi-ironical spirit of his talk; but the Altrurian must have taken it in dead earnest: “But, in that case, the number of people thrown out of work would be very great, wouldn’t it? And what would become of them?”
“Well, they would have whatever their farms brought to make a new start with somewhere else; and, besides, that question of what would become of people thrown out of work by a given improvement is something that capital cannot consider. We used to introduce a bit of machinery in the mill, every now and then, that threw out a dozen or a hundred people; but we couldn’t stop for that.”
“And you never knew what became of them?”
“Sometimes. Generally not. We took it for granted that they would light on their feet somehow.”
“And the state — the whole people — the government — did nothing for them?”
“If it became a question of the poor-house, yes.”
“Or the jail,” the lawyer suggested.
“Speaking of the poor-house,” said the professor, “did our exemplary rural friends tell you how they sell out their paupers to the lowest bidder, and get them boarded sometimes as low as a dollar and a quarter a week?”
“Yes, young Mr. Camp told me of that. He seemed to think it was terrible.”
“Did he? Well, I’m glad to hear
that of young Mr. Camp. From all that I’ve been told before, he seems to reserve his conscience for the use of capitalists. What does he propose to do about it?”
“He seems to think the state ought to find work for them.”
“Oh, paternalism! Well, I guess the state won’t.”
“That was his opinion, too.”
“It seems a hard fate,” said the minister, “that the only provision the law makes for people who are worn out by sickness or a life of work should be something that assorts them with idiots and lunatics, and brings such shame upon them that it is almost as terrible as death.”
“It is the only way to encourage independence and individuality,” said the professor. “Of course, it has its dark side. But anything else would be sentimental and unbusinesslike, and, in fact, un-American.”
“I am not so sure that it would be un-Christian,” the minister timidly ventured, in the face of such an authority on political economy.
“Oh, as to that, I must leave the question to the reverend clergy,” said the professor.
A very unpleasant little silence followed. It was broken by the lawyer, who put his feet together, and, after a glance down at them, began to say: “I was very much interested this afternoon by a conversation I had with some of the young fellows in the hotel. You know most of them are graduates, and they are taking a sort of supernumerary vacation this summer before they plunge into the battle of life in the autumn. They were talking of some other fellows, classmates of theirs, who were not so lucky, but had been obliged to begin the fight at once. It seems that our fellows here are all going in for some sort of profession: medicine or law or engineering or teaching or the church, and they were commiserating those other fellows not only because they were not having the supernumerary vacation, but because they were going into business. That struck me as rather odd, and I tried to find out what it meant, and, as nearly as I could find out, it meant that most college graduates would not go into business if they could help it. They seemed to feel a sort of incongruity between their education and the business life. They pitied the fellows that had to go in for it, and apparently the fellows that had to go in for it pitied themselves, for the talk seemed to have begun about a letter that one of the chaps here had got from poor Jack or Jim somebody, who had been obliged to go into his father’s business, and was groaning over it. The fellows who were going to study professions were hugging themselves at the contrast between their fate and his, and were making remarks about business that were, to say the least, unbusinesslike. A few years ago we should have made a summary disposition of the matter, and I believe some of the newspapers still are in doubt about the value of a college education to men who have got to make their way. What do you think?”
The lawyer addressed his question to the manufacturer, who answered, with a comfortable satisfaction, that he did not think those young men if they went into business would find that they knew too much.
“But they pointed out,” said the lawyer, “that the great American fortunes had been made by men who had never had their educational advantages, and they seemed to think that what we call the education of a gentleman was a little too good for money-making purposes.”
“Well,” said the other, “they can console themselves with the reflection that going into business isn’t necessarily making money; it isn’t necessarily making a living, even.”
“Some of them seem to have caught on to that fact; and they pitied Jack or Jim partly because the chances were so much against him. But they pitied him mostly because in the life before him he would have no use for his academic training, and he had better not gone to college at all. They said he would be none the better for it, and would always be miserable when he looked back to it.”
The manufacturer did not reply, and the professor, after a preliminary hemming, held his peace. It was the banker who took the word: “Well, so far as business is concerned, they were right. It is no use to pretend that there is any relation between business and the higher education. There is no business man who will pretend that there is not often an actual incompatibility if he is honest. I know that when we get together at a commercial or financial dinner we talk as if great merchants and great financiers were beneficent geniuses, who evoked the prosperity of mankind by their schemes from the conditions that would otherwise have remained barren. Well, very likely they are, but we must all confess that they do not know it at the time. What they are consciously looking out for then is the main chance. If general prosperity follows, all well and good; they are willing to be given the credit for it. But, as I said, with business as business, the ‘education of a gentleman’ has nothing to do. That education is always putting the old Ciceronian question: whether the fellow arriving at a starving city with a cargo of grain is bound to tell the people before he squeezes them that there are half a dozen other fellows with grain just below the horizon. As a gentleman he would have to tell them, because he could not take advantage of their necessities; but, as a business man, he would think it bad business to tell them, or no business at all. The principle goes all through; I say, business is business; and I am not going to pretend that business will ever be anything else. In our business battles we don’t take off our hats to the other side and say, ‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, have the goodness to fire.’ That may be war, but it is not business. We seize all the advantages we can; very few of us would actually deceive; but if a fellow believes a thing, and we know he is wrong, we do not usually take the trouble to set him right, if we are going to lose anything by undeceiving him. That would not be business. I suppose you think that is dreadful?” He turned smilingly to the minister.
“I wish — I wish,” said the minister, gently, “it could be otherwise.”
“Well, I wish so, too,” returned the banker. “But it isn’t. Am I right or am I wrong?” he demanded of the manufacturer, who laughed.
“I am not conducting this discussion. I will not deprive you of the floor.”
“What you say,” I ventured to put in, “reminds me of the experience of a friend of mine, a brother novelist. He wrote a story where the failure of a business man turned on a point just like that you have instanced. The man could have retrieved himself if he had let some people believe that what was so was not so, but his conscience stepped in and obliged him to own the truth. There was a good deal of talk about the case, I suppose, because it was not in real life, and my friend heard divers criticisms. He heard of a group of ministers who blamed him for exalting a case of common honesty, as if it were something extraordinary; and he heard of some business men who talked it over and said he had worked the case up splendidly, but he was all wrong in the outcome — the fellow would never have told the other fellows. They said it would not have been business.”
We all laughed except the minister and the Altrurian; the manufacturer said: “Twenty-five years hence, the fellow who is going into business may pity the fellows who are pitying him for his hard fate now.”
“Very possibly, but not necessarily,” said the banker. “Of course, the business man is on top, as far as money goes; he is the fellow who makes the big fortunes; the millionaire lawyers and doctors and ministers are exceptional. But his risks are tremendous. Ninety-five times out of a hundred he fails. To be sure, he picks up and goes on, but he seldom gets there, after all.”
“Then in your system,” said the Altrurian, “the great majority of those who go into what you call the battle of life are defeated?”
“The killed, wounded, and missing sum up a frightful total,” the banker admitted. “But whatever the end is, there is a great deal of prosperity on the way. The statistics are correct, but they do not tell the whole truth. It is not so bad as it seems. Still, simply looking at the material chances, I don’t blame those young fellows for not wanting to go into business. And when you come to other considerations! We used to cut the knot of the difficulty pretty sharply; we said a college education was wrong, or the hot and hot American spread-eaglers did. Busi
ness is the national ideal, and the successful business man is the American type. It is a business man’s country.”
“Then, if I understand you,” said the Altrurian, “and I am very anxious to have a clear understanding of the matter, the effect of the university with you is to unfit a youth for business life.”
“Oh no. It may give him great advantages in it, and that is the theory and expectation of most fathers who send their sons to the university. But, undoubtedly, the effect is to render business life distasteful. The university nurtures all sorts of lofty ideals, which business has no use for.”
“Then the effect is undemocratic?”
“No, it is simply unbusinesslike. The boy is a better democrat when he leaves college than he will be later, if he goes into business. The university has taught him and equipped him to use his own gifts and powers for his advancement; but the first lesson of business, and the last, is to use other men’s gifts and powers. If he looks about him at all, he sees that no man gets rich simply by his own labor, no matter how mighty a genius he is, and that, if you want to get rich, you must make other men work for you, and pay you for the privilege of doing so. Isn’t that true?”
The banker turned to the manufacturer with this question, and the other said: “The theory is, that we give people work,” and they both laughed.
The minister said: “I believe that in Altruria no man works for the profit of another?”
“No; each works for the profit of all,” replied the Altrurian.
“Well,” said the banker, “you seem to have made it go. Nobody can deny that. But we couldn’t make it go here.”
“Why? I am very curious to know why our system seems so impossible to you.”
“Well, it is contrary to the American spirit. It is alien to our love of individuality.”
“But we prize individuality, too, and we think we secure it under our system. Under yours, it seems to me that while the individuality of the man who makes other men work for him is safe, except from itself, the individuality of the workers—”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 569