Certain persons have been instanced to me as embodying certain generous qualities, and when I explain that the man who had not all these qualities in Altruria would be as exceptional as the man who has them is here, I have seen that people either did not believe me or did not understand me. The Americans honor such qualities as much as we do, and they appreciate gentleness, unselfishness, and neighborliness as much as we do, but they expect them only so far as they do not cross a man’s self-interest; when they do that, he is a very unusual man if he continues to indulge in them, or, as they say, he is not business. When I tell them that the man who does not indulge them in Altruria is not business they look blank, or suspect me of a joke. When I try to make them understand that in their sense we have no self-interest in Altruria, and that if they had our conditions they would have no self-interest, it alarms them; they have so long been accustomed to live upon one another that they cannot imagine living for one another; they think self-interest a very good thing, the best sort of thing, and they ask what merit has a man in being good if he is not good to his disadvantage; they cannot conceive that a man should have no merit in being good. As for Christ’s coming to do away with the old pagan economics as well as the old pagan ethics, they hoot at the notion.
I will not try, in this letter, to tell you just how all this can be; you will, in some sort conceive of its possibility from what you know of the competitive world at second hand, but I hope to make it clearer to you by and by. You must always account for a sort of bewilderment in me, inevitable in the presence of a state of things which is the complete inversion of our own, and in which I seem to get the same effect of life that boys sometimes get of the landscape by putting down their heads and looking at it between their legs.
Just at present there is no violent outbreak in the economic world, no bloody collision between labor and capital, no private war to be fought out in the face of the whole acquiescent nation till the inconvenience forces the government to interfere and put down the weaker party. But though there is now an interval of quiet, no one can say how long it will last, and many feel that there is even something ominous in it, that it is something like the calm in the heart of the cyclone. The cyclone is financial, if I may carry out the figure, and it began to blow, no one knows why or whence, several months ago. A great many weather-wiseacres pretended to know, and began to prophesy that if the export of gold to Europe could be stopped, and the coinage of silver could be arrested, and the enormous imposts could be removed, the ship of state would have plain sailing again. But the outflow of gold ceased without the slightest effect upon the cyclone; the mere threat of touching the tariff caused the closure of factories and foundries by the score, and the otiosation of workmen by the hundred thousand; with every prospect that the coinage of silver would be arrested, there were failures of banking-houses and business-houses on every hand. It remains to be seen what effect the actual demonetization of silver will have upon the situation, but the situation is so chaotic that no one among all the weather-wiseacres ventures to prophesy when the storm will cease to rage. Perhaps it has already ceased, but so far as the logic of events is concerned we might as well be in the heart of the cyclone, as I suggested.
I am afraid that with all your reading, and with all your special study of American conditions you would be dismayed if you could be confronted with the financial ruin which I find myself in the midst of, but which this extremely amiable and hopeful people do not seem to think so desperate. Like their bloody industrial wars, it is of such frequent recurrence that they have come to look upon it as in the order of nature. Probably they would tell you, if criticised from our point of view, that it was human nature to go to pieces about once in so often, and that this sort of disintegration was altogether preferable to any hard and fast system that held it together by the cohesion of moral principles. In fact their whole business world is a world of chance, where nothing happens according to law, but follows a loose order of accident, which any other order of accident may change. The question of money is the prime question of American life, and you would think that the issue of money would be one of the most carefully guarded functions of the government. But curiously enough, most of the money in the hands of the American people is not issued by the government at all, but consists of the promissory notes of a multitude of banks, as was the case with us in the old competitive days. The government bonds, which perpetuate the national debt, that their circulation may be based on them, are exempted from taxation as a sort of reward for the usurpation of the governmental function by the banks; and these banks are supposed to serve the community by supplying business men with the means of carrying on the commercial warfare. But they do this only at the heaviest rates of interest, and in times of general prosperity: at the first signs of adversity they withhold their favors. You might think that the government which secures their notes would also secure their deposits, but the government does nothing of the kind, and the man who trusts his money to their keeping does so wholly at his own risk. When they choose, or when they are unable, they may cease to pay it back to him, and he has no recourse whatever.
With a financial system resting upon such a basis as this, and with the perpetual gambling in values, nominal and real, and in every kind of produce and manufacture, which goes on throughout the whole country, you can hardly be surprised at the recurrence of the panics which follow each other at irregular intervals in the American business world. Indeed, the Americans are not surprised themselves; they regard them as something that always must be because they always have been, though they own that each successive panic spreads wider disaster and causes deeper suffering. Still, they expect them to come, and they do not dream of contriving a system like ours, in which they are no more possible than human sacrifices. They say, that is all very well for us Altrurians, but it would not do for Americans, and they really seem to believe that misery on so vast a scale as they have it in one of their financial convulsions is a sort of testimony to their national greatness. When they begin to drag themselves up out of the pit of ruin, bewildered and bemired by their fall, they begin to boast of the magnificent recuperative energies of the country. Still, I think that the old American maxim that it will all come out right in the end, has less and less acceptance. Some of them are beginning to fear that it will come out wrong in the end, if they go their old gait, or that it will at least come out Europe in the end. I would not venture to say how common this doubt was, but it certainly exists, and there is no question but that some of the thoughtfulest and best Americans are beginning to look toward Altruria as the only alternative from Europe.
Such Americans see that Europe is already upon them in the conditions of the very rich and the very poor. Poverty is here upon the European terms, and luxury is here upon the European terms. There is no longer the American workingman as he once was; he still gets better wages than the European workingman, but his economic and social status is exactly the same. He has accepted the situation for the present, but what he intends to do about it hereafter, no man knows; he, least of all men, knows. The American plutocrat has accepted the situation even more frankly than the proletarian. He perceives distinctly that there is no American life for the very rich American, and when he does not go abroad to live, as he increasingly does, he lives at home upon the same terms and to the same effect that the Continental noble lives in Europe; for the English noble is usefuller to his country than the rich American. Of course the vast majority of Americans are of the middle class, and with them you can still find the old American life, the old American ideals, the old American principles; and if the old America is ever to prevail, it must be in their love and honor of it. I do not mean to say the American middle class are as a general thing consciously American, but it is valuable that they are even unconsciously so. As a general thing they are simply and frankly bent upon providing for themselves and for their own; but some of them already see that they cannot realize even this low ideal, as things are, and that it will be more and mor
e difficult to do so hereafter. A panic like the present is a great object lesson to them, and teaches the essential insecurity of their system as nothing else could. It shows that no industry, no frugality, no sagacity can be proof against such a storm, and that when it conies, the prudent and the diligent must suffer from it like the imprudent and the indolent. At last some of them are asking themselves if there is not something wrong in the system itself, and if a system based upon self-seeking does not embody recurrent disaster and final defeat. They have heard of the Altrurian system, and they are inquiring whether the sole economic safety is not in some such system. You must not suppose their motive is so low as this makes it seem. They are people of fine courage, and they have accesses of a noble generosity, but they have been born and bred in the presence of the fact that each man can alone save himself and those dear to him, from want; and we must not blame them if they cannot first think of the beauty and the grandeur of saving others from want. For the present, we cannot expect that they will think of anything higher at first than the danger to themselves, respectively; when they grasp the notion of escape from that, they will think of the danger to others, and will be eager to Altrurianize, as they call it, for the sake of the common good as well as the personal good. I may be in error, through my zeal for Altrurian principles, but 1 think that the Altrurian idea has come to stay, as they say, with this class. At any rate, it is not the very rich or the very poor who are leading reform in our direction, but it is such of the comfortable middle class as have got the light. There is everything to hope from this fact, for it means that if the change comes at all, it will not come superficially and it will not come violently. The comfortable Americans are the most comfortable people in the world, and when they find themselves threatened in their comfort, they will deal with the danger seriously, deliberately, thoroughly.
But whatever the struggle is to be here, whether it will be a wild revolt of the poor against the rich, of laborer against capitalist, with all the sanguinary circumstance of such an outbreak, or whether it will be the quiet opposition of the old American instincts to the recent plutocratic order of things, ending in the overthrow of the pagan ideals and institutions, and the foundation of a commonwealth upon some such basis as ours, I am sure that some sort of conflict is coming. I may be unable to do the proletarians justice, but so far, I do not think they have shown great wisdom in their attitude. If you were here you would sympathize with them, as I do in their strikes; but I think that you too would feel that these were not the means to achieve the ends they seek, and that higher wages and fewer hours were not the solution. The solution is the complete control of the industries by the people, as we know, and the assurance to every man willing to work that he shall not want; yet I must confess that the workingmen in America have not often risen to the conception of this notion. It is from those who have not been forced to toil so exhaustively that they cannot think clearly; it is from the comfortable middle class, which sees itself more and more closely environed by the inimical factors of this so-called civilization that the good time is to come. It is by no means impossible, indeed, if things should now go on as they are going, and the proletarians should be more and more subjected to the plutocrats, that we should find the workingmen arrayed by their enemies against the only principles that can befriend them. This is to be seen already in the case of those small merchants and manufacturers whose business has been destroyed by the trusts and syndicates, but who have been received into the service of their destroyers; the plutocracy has no such faithful allies and followers. But it is not possible for all the small merchants and manufacturers to be disposed of in this way, and it is to such of these as perceive the fact, that the good cause can look for help. They have already fully imagined the situation, and some of them have imagined it actual. It is chiefly they, therefore, who are anxious to Altrurianize America, as the sole means of escape from their encompassing dangers. Their activity is very great and it is incessant; and they were able to shape and characterize the formless desires of a popular movement in the West, so that at the last presidential election twenty-two electoral votes were cast in favor of the Altrurian principles which formed the vital element of the uprising Nevertheless, as I have more than once suggested, I do not think any fundamental change is near. The Americans are a very conservative face, and much slower to move than the English, as the more intelligent English have often observed. The Altrurianization of England may take place first, but I do not think I am mistaken in believing that America will yet be entirely Altrurianized. Just at present the whole community is proletarianized, and is made to feel the poor man’s concern as to where the next day’s bread or the next day’s cake is to come from; if a man is used to having cake he will be as anxious to keep on having cake as the man who is used to having bread alone will be anxious to keep on having bread. In former times this experience would probably have been without definite significance or ultimate effect, but now I do not think it will be so. The friends of Altrurianization will be sure to press its lessons home; and the people have been so widely awakened to the possibility of escape from the evils of their system that they will not be so patient of them as they have been in former times.
You might infer from the apparently unbroken front that the Americans show on the side of competition in the great conflict dividing every nation into opposing canips, that there was no division amongst them. But there is very great division amongst them, and there is acceptance of one Altrurian principle or another to such a degree that there may be said to be almost a universal tendency toward Altrurianization, though, as a whole, the vast majority of Americans still regard the idea of human brotherhood with distrust and dislike. No doubt they will now patch up some sort of financial modus vivendi, and go on as before; in fact, there is no reason why they should not, in their conception of things. There was no reason why the panic should have come, and there is no reason why it should not go; but still, I do not think it will have come and gone without something more of question than former panics.
The friends of Altrurianization will not fail to bring before the American people some question of the very nature of money, and of the essential evil of it, as they understand money. They will try to show that accumulated money, as a means of providing against want, is always more or less a failure in private hands; that it does not do its office; that it evades the hardest clutch when its need is greatest. They will teach every man, from his own experience and conscience, that it is necessarily corrupting; that it is the source of most vices, and the incentive, direct or indirect, of almost every crime. They will prove that these are not the mere accidents of money, but are its essentials; and that a thing invented to create or to recognize economic inequality among men can never be otherwise than hurtful to them. They will preach the Altrurian notion of money, as the measure of work done and the warrant of need to be relieved, which in a civilized state can have no use but to issue from the commonwealth to the man who has worked, and return to the commonwealth from the man who has satisfied his wants with it. As yet, most Americans believe that money can be innocently gathered into one man’s hands by his cunning and his skill, and as innocently taken from another’s through his misfortune or his weakness. This primitive notion of money, which is known to us historically, is of actual effect among them; and though I was aware of the fact before I came to America, as you are now, I had no idea of the infernal variety of the evil.
In Altruria we cannot imagine a starving man in rags, passing the threshold of another man surfeited with every luxury and warranted in his opulence by the same law that dooms the beggar to destitution. But this is a spectacle so common in this great typical American city that no one would turn to look at it. In fact, both the beggar and the millionaire recognize the situation as something almost normal. Charity, the love of man and the fear of God, as the Americans know it, does not propose to equalize the monstrous conditions, or to do more than afford alleviation at the best, until the wretch in the gutter can so
mehow win from the wretch in the palace the chance to earn a miserable wage. This chance is regarded not as his right; it is his privilege, and it is accorded him usually at the cost of half a dozen other wretches, who are left outcast by it. It is money that creates this evil, and yet the Americans think that money is somehow a good thing; and they think they are the most prosperous people on earth, because they have more moneyed men among them than any other people.
I know, my dear Cyril, how strange all this will seem to you, how impossible, in spite of your study of American conditions. I remember how we used to talk of America together, before I planned my present visit, and how we disputed the general Altrurian notion of this country, as necessarily mistaken, because we said that such things could not be in a republic and a democracy. We had our dreams of a system different from ours, a system which vaunted itself the realization, above all others, of the individuality which we Altrurians prize more than everything else. We felt that our emissaries must have been hasty or mistaken in their observations, but you have only to visit this democratic republic, to understand that they have no such thing as individuality here, and that in conditions where one man depends upon another man for the chance of earning his bread, there can be no more liberty than there is equality.
The Americans still imagine that they have liberty, but as for the equality which we supposed the aim of their democracy, nobody any longer even pretends that it is, or that it can be. With the rich there is a cynical contempt of it; with the poor a cynical despair of it. The division into classes here is made as sharply as in any country of Europe, and the lines are passed only by the gain or the loss of money. I say only, but of course there are exceptions. The career is still open to the talents, and the plebeian rich here are glad to ally themselves with the patrician poor of Europe; but what I say holds good of the vast majority of cases. Every tendency of economic and social life is a tendency to greater and greater difference between the classes; and in New York, which is the most typical of American cities, the tendency is swifter and stronger than in other places.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 772