‘I spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don’t forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy.
‘But after all, wealth in itself is not the real power; it is the means of power, and power is governmental. Who controls the Government today? The proletariat with its twenty millions engaged in occupations? Even you laugh at the idea. Does the middle class, with its eight million occupied members? No more than the proletariat. Who, then, controls the Government? The Plutocracy, with its paltry quarter of a million of occupied members. But this quarter of a million does not control the Government, though it renders yeoman service. It is the brain of the Plutocracy that controls the Government, and this brain consists of seven7 small and powerful groups of men. And do not forget that these groups are working today practically in unison.
‘Let me point out the power of but one of them, the railroad group. It employs forty thousand lawyers to defeat the people in the courts. It issues countless thousands of free passes to judges, bankers, editors, ministers, university men, members of state legislatures, and of Congress. It maintains luxurious lobbies8 at every state capital, and at the national capital; and in all the cities and towns of the land it employs an immense army of pettifoggers and small politicians whose business is to attend primaries, pack conventions, get on juries, bribe judges, and in every way to work for its interests.9
‘Gentlemen, I have merely sketched the power of one of the seven groups that constitute the brain of the Plutocracy.10
Your twenty-four billions of wealth does not give you twenty-five cents’ worth of governmental power. It is an empty shell, and soon even the empty shell will be taken away from you. The Plutocracy has all power in its hands today. It today makes the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, a and the state legislatures. And not only that. Behind law must be force to execute the law. Today the Plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the law it has at its beck and call the police, the army, the navy, and, lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of us.’
Little discussion took place after this, and the dinner soon broke up. All were quiet and subdued, and leave-taking was done with low voices. It seemed almost that they were scared by the vision of the times they had seen.
‘The situation is, indeed, serious,’ Mr Calvin said to Ernest. ‘I have little quarrel with the way you have depicted it. Only I disagree with you about the doom of the middle class. We shall survive, and we shall overthrow the trusts.’
‘And return to the ways of your fathers,’ Ernest finished for him.
‘Even so,’ Mr Calvin answered gravely. ‘I know it’s a sort of machine-breaking, and that it is absurd. But then life seems absurd today, what of the machinations of the Plutocracy. And at any rate, our sort of machine-breaking is at least practical and possible, which your dream is not. Your socialistic dream is…well, a dream. We cannot follow you.’
‘I only wish you fellows knew a little something about evolution and sociology,’ Ernest said wistfully as they shook hands. ‘We would be saved so much trouble if you did.’
1 Everhard here clearly develops the cause of all the labour troubles of that time. In the division of the joint-product, capital wanted all it could get, and labour wanted all it could get. This quarrel over the division was irreconcilable. So long as the system of capitalistic production existed, labour and capital continued to quarrel over the division of the joint-product. It is a ludicrous spectacle to us, but we must not forget that we have seven centuries’ advantage over those that lived in that time.
2 Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States a few years prior to this time, made the following public declaration: ‘A more liberal and extensive reciprocity in the purchase and sale of commodities is necessary, so that the over-production of the United States can be satisfactorily disposed of to foreign countries.’ Of course, this over-production he mentions was the profits of the capitalistic system over and beyond the consuming power of the capitalists. It was at this time that Senator Mark Hanna said: ”The production of wealth in the United States is one-third larger annually than its consumption.’ Also a fellow-Senator, Chauncey Depew, said: ‘The American people produce annually two billions more wealth than they consume.’
3 Karl Marx—the great intellectual hero of socialism: A German Jew of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of John Stuart Mill. It seems incredible to us that whole generations should have elapsed after the enunciation of Marx’s economic discoveries, in which time he was sneered at by the world’s accepted thinkers and scholars. Because of his discoveries he was banished from his native country, and he died an exile in England.
4 The earliest known use of that name to designate the Oligarchy.
5 This division of society made by Everhard is in accordance with that made by Lucien Sanial, one of the statistical authorities of that time. His calculation of the membership of these divisions by occupations, from the United States Census of 1900, is as follows: Plutocratic class, 250,251; Middle class, 8,429,845; and Proletariat class, 20,393,137.
6 Standard Oil and Rockefeller—see footnote on page 108.
7 Even as late as 1907, it was considered that eleven groups dominated the country, but this number was reduced by the amalgamation of the five railroad groups into a supreme combination of all the railroads. These five groups so amalgamated, along with their financial and political allies, were (1) James J. Hill with his control of the North-west; (2) the Pennsylvania railway group, Schiff financial manager, with big banking firms of Philadelphia and New York; (3) Harriman, with Frick for counsel and Odell as political lieutenant, controlling the central continental, Southwestern and Southern Pacific Coast lines of transportation; (4) the Gould family railway interests; and (5) Moore, Reid, and Leeds, known as the ‘Rock Island crowd.’ These strong oligarchs arose out of the conflict of competition and travelled the inevitable road towards combination.
8 Lobby—a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and corrupting the legislators who were supposed to represent the people’s interests.
9 A decade before this speech of Everhard’s the New York Board of Trade issued a report from which the following is quoted: ‘The railroads control absolutely the legislatures of a majority of the states of the Union; they make and unmake United States’ Senators, congressmen, and governors, and are practically dictators of the governmental policy of the United States.’
10 Rockefeller began as a member of the proletariat and through thrift and cunning succeeded in developing the first perfect trust, namely, that known as Standard Oil. We cannot forbear giving the following remarkable page from the history of the times, to show how the need for reinvestment of the Standard Oil surplus crushed out small capitalists and hastened the breakdown of the capitalist system. David Graham Phillips was a Radical writer of the period, and the quotation, by him, is taken from a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, dated October 4, A.D. 1902. This is the only copy of this publication that has come down to us, and yet, from its appearance and content, we cannot but conclude that it was one of the popular periodicals with a large circulation. The quotation here follows:
‘About ten years ago Rockefeller’s income was given as thirty millions by an excellent authority. He had reached the limit of profitable investment of profits in the oil industry. Here, then, were these enormous sums in cash pouring in—more than $2,000,000 a month for John Davison Rockefeller alone. The problem of reinvestment became more serious. It became a nightmare. The oil income was swelling, swelling, and the number of sound investments limited, even more limited than it is now. It was through no special eagerness for more gains that the Rockefellers began to branch out from oil into other things. They were forced, swept on by this inrolling tide of wealth which their monopoly magnet irresistibly attracted. They developed a staff of investment seekers and investigators. It is said that the chief of this staff has a salary of $125,000 a year.