The American Journal of Sociology/Volume 01/Number 3/Private Business is a Public Trust

by Albion Woodbury Small

PRIVATE BUSINESS IS A PUBLIC TRUST.

There is strife in every civilized country today between men who declare that justice demands social reorganization, and men who maintain that present order is essentially good. Neither of these parties is wholly right or wholly wrong. To a certain extent social order is deliberately invented as the expression of men's intelligence about social needs. Until human needs become stationary and invariable it can hardly be expected that knowledge about perfect methods will quite catch up with the demand. Assertions about perfect systems of social order are meanwhile largely gratuitous. We may nevertheless look in the direction of improvement by taking account of any neglected factor in the problem of social arrangement.

Without inquiring now what further tests are necessary, I shall point out two principles which men must learn to apply more precisely before there can be approximately stable social order. The present social system, or the reorganizations that may follow each other in its place, will be justified or condemned according to their success in providing for at least these two postulates of human association.

The first of these principles is the essential similarity of all human beings in capacity for happiness. Equality of capacity is not alleged. It is not asserted that men are alike in the assortment of their desires, or in the methods of seeking satisfaction. It is asserted, however, that there is no principle of desire potent in prince or plutocrat that is not latent in pauper or peasant. Abnormal children are born in palace and in hovel alike—children who could not be developed into symmetrical maturity in any environment which we know how to arrange. On the other hand, thousands of people are surrounded by influences which make the development of normal infancy into all-round manhood well nigh impossible, while other thousands are encompassed from birth by circumstances the most favorable to every kind of growth and excellence. The fact that people enjoying these latter advantages become strong in body, mind and estate, the fact that they are high-spirited and sensitive and self-assertive, is no evidence that they are essentially superior to or different from their brethren who, under contrasted conditions, fail to achieve like results.

Few people in a democratic country venture today to put a different doctrine in plain words; but democratic institutions are still so crude that it is impossible to analyze the social situation, and to conclude that democratic principles, as thus far realized, exhibit the final type of society, without basing the inference in part upon tacit denial of the similarity just claimed. We are getting familiar with differences of social conditions which can be contemplated tranquilly only on the implied presumption that some of us are made from finer clay than the rest.

We accuse ourselves of no fault when we decline to provide for our domestic animals the same kind of intellectual and moral or even physical advantages which we secure for our sons and daughters. We assume that the wants and capacities of puppies and kittens are radically different from those of children, and we act accordingly. But some of us are in conditions so different from those surrounding many of our fellows that equanimity in view of the situation can be justified only by resort to a similar presumption with reference to them.

Residents in every large city know that thousands of children are growing up in their vicinity in a physical environment unfit for cattle. These thousands see nothing of the ordinary refinements of family life. They are almost entire strangers to primary education. They remain outside the pale of moral and religious influence and they presently recruit the army of the unemployed. They prey peacefully or violently upon the industry and the morality of the community, and sooner or later they fill the workhouse, the jail, the charity hospital and the potter's field.

It is not this large class alone which gives ocular proof that, whatever be the creed of men or of schools or of churches, our civilization does not believe in the essential similarity of all normal human beings in potency of happiness. Millions of earnest and honest men are today doing their part of the world's work as well as they can, living within their income, trying to save something for a rainy day, but absolutely without guarantee of a chance to earn a living if others should take their present place.

This fact has been pointed out over and over again by men who use harsh and unjust language; men who call themselves by party names that prejudice whatever truth they have to utter; men who advertise schemes so fantastic that everything they say is summarily presumed to be absurd. But the time cometh and now is when some men of all industrial and social classes are bound to put their prejudices under arrest, and to examine with candor the basis of complaint. This will be done without confounding the capitalistic system with the personal character of rich men. It will distinguish the economic and social function of corporate organizations from particular acts of specified corporations. It will keep the discovery of real anomalies among social conditions sharply distinct from proposed programmes of rearrangement.

I hold no brief for any party or school of social complainants, and I shall not try to represent any body's diagnosis of present conditions but my own. My personal belief is that social improvement in assimilation of this principle is not only sorely needed, but certain to be accomplished. It is no more likely to come however from the accusers of the responsible elements in present society than from the accused. The active agents of present industrial and social order are not the enemies but the friends of human progress. The conditions within which we are working today are not the invention of men deliberately hostile to their fellows. They are the result of enterprise on the part of every sort of human beings, in all of whom, up to date, self-interest is the law of last resort. We have, accordingly, a social order which favors one kind of interest to the hurt of others. Our civilization makes property more sacred and secure than personality. This fact no more brands the organizers of modern business as enemies of humanity than the fact that Washington owned slaves impeached his character as a patriot and friend of mankind.

My argument is with men who are able to see that if there are wrongs in our social system they are wrongs of ignorance and inattention as well as of willfulness. Such men must see too that the world has achieved a communism of responsibility for these wrongs. These men cannot have failed to perceive further that with all the obvious advantages of our present order there is at this moment the fatal offset of accelerated motion toward the industrial independence of a diminishing few, and the industrial dependence of the increasing many. This is something entirely different from the assertion that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. The two statements do not stand or fall together. We are passing through a social transition in which the power of a few men to control opportunities for employment is enormous, and the liberty of many men to defy the caprice of employers is correspondingly reduced. From the standpoint of a right thinking and of a right feeling man such contrast is intolerable. So far as it exists in any class of cases, it means nothing else than the subversion of the freedom of the dependent parties, and their retrogression into a unique and refined order of servitude. It is possible to consider such relationship a permanent feature of human society only on the assumption that the exercise of freedom, which is necessary to some men, is no part of the natural function of other men.

It will possibly be news to many men, who look from the calm heights of professional position upon the struggles of organized wage-earners, that only those children who inherit a title to land or its use are born into a legally protected right to earn a living. Other children may inherit money or equivalent personal property, and so long as it lasts the law will protect them in its use. Then they must apply, with the crowd born without inheritance, to those who possess the land, for the privilege of working in further support of life. They have no legal right to the pursuit of the occupation in which they have previously tried to bear their share of the world's work, nor to any of the revenues of that occupation. Our institutions guarantee them no right to be men; they simply enforce a claim to a share of paupers' dole. True, only comparatively few men suffer in their purse from this condition. Neither did the Southern slaves as a rule endure physical privations in excess of those which they have borne since emancipation. As in the case between the American colonies and Great Britain, however, it is not the money cost but the manhood cost of submission that makes the relation oppressive. A quickened social consciousness is calling for reconsideration of this phase of our social order. Impeachment of our industrial organization is meanwhile not an attack upon men, but judgment of a system.

A civilization in which one man's access to a station above that of pauperism is in any degree dependent upon the arbitrary personal will of other men is, by so much, repugnant to the principle of the radical similarity of all men in title to the franchise of manhood. Dives and Lazarus are no more alike in craving food and drink when hungry and thirsty, than they are in the ambition of each to stand erect and be a man. In many cases the modern Lazarus knows better than Dives how to appraise the relative worth of material and spiritual goods. The keen sting of modern social contrasts is not in the fact that Dives may bathe in champagne while the men who sweat for his dividends can hardly bathe at all. The sting is in the fact that, from his secure financial position, the rich man, even though he be incapable of comprehending the refinements of a sensitive man's moral wants, may ride roughshod over the personal dignity of the unattached proletarian, who, with only plain living, may be capable of high thinking. The vulnerable point in our present society is not its permission of large wealth to some of its members, but its maintenance of institutions which, in the last analysis, make some men's opportunity to work for wealth under any conditions dependent upon the arbitrary will of other men.

In so far as agitators for social changes squint toward the notion of equal reward for unequal work, or equal division of the products of industry, they seem to me covetous not only of the impossible, but of the unjust, the unreasonable, and consequently of the altogether undesirable. So long as men contend for such extravagancies the real vice of our civilization will be obscured. A social svstem which incorporates the assumption that a portion of society may righteously monopolize the productive forces of nature, so that other men must ask the permission of the monopolists to draw on the resources of nature, practically denies to the unprivileged class not merely a rightful share of goods, but an intrinsic claim to any share at all. In other words it establishes at least two castes among men, the caste of the propertied and the caste of the pauperized.

Failure to perceive the literal truth of these propositions is due to sheer weakness of imagination. We all understand that if a farmer is forced from his land, the law allows him no claim to any other land except a life lease of a place at the poor farm. We understand that if a weaver or a switchman loses his job no law compels another employer to hire him. Few men outside the wage-earning class have fairly taken in the meaning of this familiar situation. If a bookkeeper, or salesman, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or minister be thrown out of employment, with no title to land, and no property in stocks controlling natural agencies, he is literally a man without a country. Whatever his personal ability to extract the supply of his wants from nature's resources, the opportunity is closed. He has no stock in nature. The resources of the world are divided up among the members of the propertied caste, and the remainder of men depend upon the members of this caste for permission to get a share of nature by labor in improving nature.

The improbability that the propertied caste will try to get along without the services of the pauperized caste, makes many of the latter indifferent to the terms of the tenure under which they occupy a place in the world. The dependence of many of them upon the caprice of their fellows is less direct than that of the wage-earner whose employment is subject to the will of a single person. Yet if the minister lose his charge, or the lawyer his clients, or the doctor his patients, or the teacher his pupils, neither his skill, nor his learning, nor his need gives him any legal claim upon a chance to work worthily of his manhood in his own support. He is in a world that is parcelled out among others. The world has the same attractions for him that it has for them. He might put the world to as worthy uses as they, but other men have bonded it to themselves. If our pauperized pariah will join them in satisfying any of his desires he must first surrender the dearest desire of every man, the integrity of independent selfhood, and so obtain the concession of others like himself to be henceforth less than they.

Equal revenues from unequal services is an immoral conception. Desire for such a condition deserves no sympathy from honest men. Desire for equality in title to a place in the world where happiness may be pursued without power of veto by any other human being is an outcropping of our common humanity. Civilization is so far inhuman until men have learned to live together upon terms which insure gratification of this desire. The equal claim of men to this satisfaction cannot rightfully be denied to any normal man. It may be forfeited, but of the fact of forfeiture impersonal not personal tribunals should render judgment.

The social problem—if for simplicity we may speak as though social tasks were one—is how to socialize ourselves to such degree that, without bankrupting all, each may have a secure lien upon a minimum share of nature's endowment for satisfying common human wants. Security of right to be on the earth and to use the full measure of personal power to gain happiness, is not yet completely assured in human society. Every human being who belongs in society at all belongs there as a citizen, not as a suppliant.

But, as its title indicates, this paper purposes to emphasize particularly the second of the two principles which I have called essential in right society; namely, that not merely public office but private business is a public trust.

The economists have taught in so many ways the dependence of civilization upon division of labor that their failure to reach this larger perception is remarkable. The fundamental assumption upon which civilized society rests is that each member of society is doing something to make the general conditions of life easier for society as a whole. If there were no such thing as society this would not be the case. If the world were divided up among a population of hermits, each home would practically be a world by itself, having nothing to do with other homes. Since the world is the home of people who have complicated dealings with each other, it has come to pass that each gets tolerated by the other in seeking his own personal ends solely upon the implied condition that each will be an agent to do some sort of work for his fellows.

It has been the fashion for a long time to pour indiscriminate ridicule upon the theory of Rousseau's Social Contract, yet Rousseau started with a perfectly valid premise, viz., "Social order is a sacred right which serves us as a basis for all others. But this right does not come from nature, it is founded upon conventions."^[1]

The various vagaries which Rousseau made this principle endorse should not prevent recognition of its real import. Wherever a collection of human beings begins to resolve itself into a society, the process involves a tacit agreement that some of the persons in the collection will attend to certain work needed by the society, while others will look after the remainder. If a hundred farmers should happen to buy land in the same township remote from other settlements, these farmers would sooner or later illustrate the change that has gone on with difference of detail, in the development of every civilization or part of civilization. It would be a process of division of labor resting upon a common understanding, never put into codified form, to be sure, that the farmer's work, from which a part of the community withdraw, will still be carried on by the rest; and, on the other hand, that terms of reciprocal advantage will put the work of those who cease to be farmers at the disposal of those who continue to till the soil. The smith, the carpenter, the miller, the tanner, the cobbler are enabled to live without procuring their own food supply directly from the soil, by becoming agents of the farmers in doing needed work of which the farmers are thus relieved. On the other hand the farmers fall into line with the necessity of industriously extracting from the soil a supply of food sufficient for the whole community, as the condition cf getting the use of other men's skill.

We look in vain for a time in ancient history when an uncivilized community suddenly saw a great economic light, held a convention, drew up a contract containing these provisions, and passed a resolution to make these terms a sovereign law. None the less men become parties to such a contract by adjusting themselves to the method of cooperation which division of labor involves. If carpenter, or smith, or tanner, or cobbler wants food, he must do some useful work which is wanted by the farmer or by another man who has a claim on the farmer. In the same way if the farmer wants a cart, or an axe, or harness, or shoes, he must produce food for the worker in wood, or iron, or leather. The alternatives are abstinence, self-supply, beggary or theft. In either case the proper processes of civilization are adjourned so far as the non-cooperating individual is concerned, and he becomes a negative or a positive enemy of society.

Whenever it becomes evident that an individual or a class is plainly evading the obligation of social service, society always claims a right to redress the injury. Let us suppose that all the farmers in the United States should resolve to become consistent political and industrial anarchists; i. e., that each should determine to live from his farm and to raise only what his family would consume. Politics never made stranger bedfellows than would straightway consort together in compelling these anarchists to resume allegiance to society. In the face of a common peril, proletarians would forget their jealousy of capital, and employer and employed, railroad manager and railroad operative, banker, merchant, walking-delegate and contractor would join forces against a species of monopoly menacing to all alike. The view which nations take of refusal by a people to continue trade relations with other peoples is sanctioned by the same tacit assumption.

The fundamental grievance of classes against other classes in modern society is that the supposed offenders are violators of this primal law of reciprocity. Criticisms of institutions or of the persons operating them resolve themselves into charges that whereas the parties in question are presumed to be useful social agencies, they are in reality using their social office for the subordination of public weal to private gain. This is at bottom the charge of the dissatisfied proletarian of all classes against employers, capitalists, corporations, trusts, monopolies, legislators and administrators. This is also in large part the implied countercharge against organized labor. The most serious count in the wage-earner's indictment of other classes is not primarily that these classes draw too much pay, but that they are not doing the work that their revenues are supposed to represent. They are exploiting their fellows instead of serving them. The question of the amount of pay which the alleged delinquents should draw, if their presumed service were actually performed, is logically a secondary consideration. The just grievance of the poor man is not so much that another man's income is a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million a year, as that either figure is more than its possessor earns.

Back of all formal contracts or statutes or institutions, therefore, is this unwritten law of civilization that every citizen shall be a public servant. The cycles of social growth, arrest, decay, have always illustrated in turn observance, neglect and violation of this law. Men and institutions have begun by serving their day and generation in a socially needful way. They have sometimes ended by making their day and generation serve them in a socially harmful way. Then has come social condemnation, rejection, substitution.

Such an institution as feudalism, for example, served its purpose as a division of labor between warriors and magistrates on the one hand, and tillers of the soil on the other. When the world grew more compact, when causes of war affected larger populations in common, when peaceful intercourse rather than perpetual feud was the obvious interest of great peoples, the feudal machinery became first cumbrous, then obstructive, then oppressive. The occupation of the lords was gone. Work for different kinds of social agents had appeared. In the long struggle to rid themselves of the burden men almost let go the memory that it had ever been a blessing.

Every class, occupation and institution, past or present, is a specific application or perversion of this unwritten law of reciprocal human agency. The presumption behind our political, industrial, civil, educational and ecclesiastical order is that it is the best arrangement at present practicable to secure from each member of society the quality and quantity of work which each is best fitted to render, in return for the services of society as a whole.

To be specific, the man who clears land and brings it under cultivation, or the man who improves land so that it offers good locations for homes, fulfills the letter and the spirit of the unwritten law of public service, and he deserves his pay. So of the men who promote industry by operating banks; who build mills or railroads; who seek markets for produce, or who watch the legality of transactions involved in all these activities. But suspicion is rife that society is bearing an enormous load because some men are inventing and the remainder are tolerating pretenses of performing these functions and of deserving their revenues, when in reality they are dead weights or worse upon industry.

The men who cleared parts of Manhattan Island a hundred or more years ago deserved generous returns for their labor. If any of their remote grandchildren are collecting large ground rents from the success of the family in compelling other people to go out of their way and improve less desirable land, the legality of their claim may be undisputed, but its justice is more than doubtful. I should be much surprised to learn of an economist today so mortgaged to tradition as to believe that our present system of landed proprietorship corresponds with the largest interpretation of equity. It is defended simply as a lesser evil.

Again, there is no valid complaint against the man who sees that a railroad or a street-car line would supply a public need, and who makes himself rich from legitimate returns for building and operating. There is reason, however, for denying that we are acting like intelligent beings when we tolerate such betrayal of trust that the public is burdened with fabulous fictitious capitalization of the improvement; or when we make ourselves perpetually tributary to the unborn heirs of the original benefactor. The time will come when men will perceive that it is as monstrous for a father to bequeath to his son a controlling interest in a factory or a railroad, as it would now appear for a President of the United States to offer his daughter the city of New York as a dowry.

Once more, it is well for all that some men have genius to organize capital, and labor, and natural resources for manufacture on an enormous scale. It is a very stupid man who would begrudge to such organizers large rewards for their work. But men are beginning to see that the merits of the organizers of industry, as well as of the inferior laborers, are frequently credited to stockholders. The claims of stockholders to surplus values, after market rates of interest, and rent, and wages are paid, may possibly represent a presumed service to society which stockholders as such do not perform. There is no more reason, in the nature of things, why laborers should pay a bonus to stockholders for the privilege of making property productive, than there is for demanding that policemen shall pay those stockholders for the privilege of protecting the property from burglars.

In my very early years a military company evolved itself among the boys in the school which I attended. The biggest boys appointed themselves officers, and the smaller boys obeyed their orders. After a time it was announced that there would be a "camp" in the school yard the next Saturday afternoon, and each boy was told to bring from home as many potatoes as he could confiscate, to provision the troops. At the appointed time the big boys, with numerous friends, appeared at the school yard, provided with a large tent. Work was at once found for the privates. Some were detailed to pitch the big tent. Others were dispatched after fuel for a bonfire. Others were posted as guards over the yard and its approaches, while a few, for whom no other employment could be found, were formed in a squad and the officers took turns in putting them through all the evolutions which their ingenuity could invent.

Meanwhile the bonfire had been encouraged till hot ashes were abundant and potatoes could be roasted in approved fashion. Then there was more work for the privates. One squad was commissioned to fetch water and cups from neighboring houses; another to preside at the fire and serve potatoes on demand; the sentinels were exhorted to guard their posts with redoubled faithfulness, and the officers, with their guests, retired to the tent.

Presently one of them reappeared and with loud voice commanded: "Potatoes for the Captain's tent!" Forthwith the fire was opened, and a squad of privates ran with smoking tubers to the official mess. Then the cooks cooked and the carriers carried and the guards guarded—all with a solemnity that grew more serious as the good cheer at headquarters waxed audibly and confidently gay. Anon the commissary sergeant reappeared at the tent door with the ominous command: "More potatoes for the Captain's tent!" Again and again military discipline triumphed. The Captain and his suite consumed potatoes till the ashes no longer yielded more. At that point the purposes of the campaign would seem to have been accomplished. Word was given to break camp, and the privates, weary, hungry, thirsty and worldly-wiser sought their homes.

It will not be utterly irrelevant to add that thirty years later I was casually in court, and heard sentence to state's prison pronounced upon a felon whom I gratefully identified as the boy who had issued the orders: "More potatoes for the Captain's tent!"

Let the incident be an allegory. The unrest of our society today is due, in large measure, to suspicion that men are falling more and more into the position of toilers for other men who are evading the law of reciprocal service. Dissatisfaction is fed by belief that many occupations, needful in themselves, are becoming less and less a social benefaction and more and more a means of levying tribute over and above the value of the service. Successful and arrogant individualism seems to defy the law of mutualism that must reign in right society.

If it were our duty to believe that the thing which now is must always be, it would be treason to describe desirable things not yet achieved. If, before pointing out possibilities of improvement, it were necessary to know the whole process by which the actual may be changed into the rational, hope would be forever dumb. If approach to completer justice in future society involved resort to ameliorative injustice in present society, we might well distrust prophecies of progress.

It is both weak and wrong to refuse recognition of a principle on the ground that we cannot forsee the method of its application. Right thought and right feeling make right action easier. The most dismal and impotent pessimism is the hopelessness that dares not admit the need of change. Adoption of the principles just cited into commanding rank in our standards of social action will assure steady approach to more worthy conditions. The details of progressive adjustment must come from experiments, just as in the case of improvements in printing presses or in dynamos.

Albion W. Small.

The University of Chicago.

1. Social Contract, Bk. I., ch. i.