Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/66



Questions of the Day

he human race is progressive, but each generation is conservative. One of the great obstructions to any discussion of political or social problems is the instinctive prejudice of the average individual against any change in the existing order of things.

People generally dread new and untried experiments, believing it is better to bear the ills we have than fly to those we know not of: but I consider it most essential to insist as a preliminary upon a clear recognition of the truth that change will come whether we like it or not. It is impossible to hold the existing conditions unchanged. The United States is not the government it was one hundred years ago. States are no longer sovereign, slavery has been abolished, colonial dependencies acquired. Election of Senators and of the President by popular vote is foreshadowed. The world is not the world it was five hundred years ago. In religion, politics and economics it is different. Let us assume, therefore, that our institutions are not eternal, hut will change.

The next inquiry is what institutions seem most the object of assault and most subject to change. We should expect to find them to be those institutions which are most connected with the production of wealth, because, though it is true wealth does not bring happiness, it is equally true that there is no possibility of happiness where the actual necessaries of life are gained only in meagre proportion by the most laborious efforts. The facts bear out this theory.

We find the assaults to come directly or indirectlv from the laboring masses, or in their behalf, and that they are directed against the sources of wealth — Railroads. Trusts, Mines. Landownership, etc. We find an increasing number who, while not actually starved in any one day, yet live shortened lives because of the wretched economic environment into which they, are born. And we also find a stupendously in creasing wealth in the hands of a very low: a wealth which is so great it convinces us it cannot be the just reward of brains or effort, because no brains or no effort could in a few years amass such wealth were there not some special privileges which directed the labor or the gains of the many into the channels leading to the few. There is a more or less blind feeling among the people that there is something wrong in the economic institutions which make it possible for the wealth of the whole people to be in the hands of a very few — far beyond the just reward for the greatest possible human ability. Certain of the people envy and hate or fear individuals such as Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Morgan or Mr. Carnegie. More intelligent and just minds see that the individual is rather to be commended for his use of existing institutions, and it is the institution which is to be blamed. Stones are to be hurled, if at all, at the wrongful institution, not at the man who has profited by it.

I shall assume at this point that everyone recognizes that human institutions have been changing since the creation, just as the world, the sun, the moon and stars are changing; that it is as impossible for us to hold our institutions fixed and permanent as it was for the institutions of Pericles, Caesar, Charles I and Louis XV to remain to this day.

If we conclude change will come in spite of us, the next speculation is as to what will be the character of the