53. The Passing of the Frontier

BY THOMAS B. MACAULAY1

Despots plunder their subjects, though history tells them that, by prematurely exacting the means of profusion, they are in fact devouring the seed-corn from which the future harvest is to spring. Why, then, should we suppose that people will be deterred from procuring immediate relief and enjoyment by the fear of calamities that may not be fully felt till the times of their grandchildren?

The case of the United States is not in point. In a country where the necessities of life are cheap and the wages of labor high, where a man who has no capital but his legs and arms may expect to become rich by industry and frugality, it is not very decidedly even for the immediate advantage of the poor to plunder the rich. But in countries where the great majority live from hand to mouth, and in which vast masses of wealth have been accumulated by a comparatively small number, the case is widely different. The immediate want is at particular seasons imperious, irresistible. In our own time it has steeled men to the fear of the gallows, and urged them on to the point of the bayonet. And, if these men had at their command that gallows, and those bayonets which now scarcely restrain them, what is to be expected? The better the government, the greater is the inequality of conditions; and the greater the inequality of conditions, the stronger are the motives which impel the populace to spoliation. As for America, we appeal to the twentieth century.

BY JAMES BRYCE17

America, in her swift, onward progress, sees, looming on the horizon, and now no longer distant, a time of mists and shadows, wherein dangers may be concealed whose form and magnitude she can scarcely yet conjecture. As she fills up her western regions with inhabitants, she sees the time approach when all the best land will have been occupied, and when the land under cultivation will have been so far exhausted as to yield scantier crops even to more extensive culture. Although transportation may also then have become cheaper, the price of food will rise; farms will be less easily obtained and will need more capital to work them with profit; the struggle for existence will become more severe. And while the outlet which the West now provides for the overflow of the great cities will have become less available, the cities will have become immensely

16

10 Adapted from the essay on Mill on Government (1828).

"Adapted from The American Commonwealth, 1st ed., III, 662 (1888).

more populous; pauperism, now confined to six or seven of the greatest, will be more widely spread; wages will probably sink and work will be less abundant. In fact, the chronic evils and problems of the old societies and crowded countries, such as we see them in Europe today, will have reappeared on this new soil.

BY PETER FINLEY DUNNE

"Opporchunity," says Mr. Dooley, "knocks at iv'ry man's dure wanst. On some men's dures it hammers till it breaks down th' dure, an' then it goes in an' wakes him up if he's asleep, an' afterwards it worrucks f'r him as a nightwatchman. On some men's dures it knocks an' runs away, an' on th' dures iv some men it knocks an' whin they come out it hits thim over th' head with an axe. But iv'ry wan has an opporchunity."

54. The New Issues18

BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN

The twentieth century is upon us. Americans are beginning to find themselves confronted with the questions which have already long beset older and more crowded countries. We can hardly doubt that certain new public issues which within the last two or three years have come very swiftly to the front have come to stay. We are not yet an old society, or a crowded country. But-the frontier is gone. We are in the situation of a man who, though still very young, has nevertheless reached maturity and come into full possession of his estate; of an estate vast, but yet of a vastness no longer incalculable, no longer uncalculated, and which is also appreciably impaired by the waste and extravagance of his youth.

We face, therefore, the responsibility of maturity, of a more careful development and husbandry of our great demesne. The time of boundless anticipation is past. We have instead a sure sense of strength, but with it comes also at last the sense that even our strength, and our capacity for growth, have their limits. There is as yet no real pinch, no severe pressure or congestion; far from it. But the certainty that these things are in the future is at last borne in upon us by facts and warnings. That is enough to change our mood. We are taking up, and ought to be taking up, certain of the problems of "old societies and crowded countries," and the coming of these new problems has somewhat changed the aspect of certain others which, even with us, are old.

18

"Adapted from The New Politics and Other Papers, 6-28. Copyright by Eugene L. Brown. Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (1914).

The new issues all have this much in common: They are all at bottom economic, and economic in a very strict derivative sense of the word all questions of national housekeeping, of the safeguarding, the development, and the distribution of our immense national inheritance. The rapid and revolutionary development of transportation has transformed bewilderingly the entire field with which economic legislation must deal. It is not merely that we are approaching the problems of older societies. These problems have taken on for us new aspects, aspects hardly known elsewhere, and a truly American vastness of range. We can and should profit by a close study of European experience. But the guidance we can get from older countries, however valuable, is limited. There are things which we must work out for ourselves; for the new industry is much farther advanced with us, and much more firmly established, than with the older peoples.

The particular new issue on which we can get the most guidance from Europe, and which is therefore the simplest of all, is that of conservation. To call that issue a question would be a misnomer. The only question should be of ways and means, and concerning these it will be some time before we exhaust the enlightenment to be got from European experience. In the matter of the national conservation of the use of water-power, we have in the example of Switzerland an admirable object-lesson.

Concerning this there is hardly a question; but there is an issue; there is a conflict, a struggle; and the violence and magnitude and difficulty of it are greater than anywhere else in the world. That is so because nowhere else are private interests so well organized or so powerful, and nowhere else have they such opportunities to acquire control of the various means of wealth. There is thus an issue between the permanent public weal and the selfishness of individuals and groups. For there has come about a massing of great and little accumulations, and an organization of capital and industry under a few heads; so that the struggle is on behalf of the people against the combinations. To take an instance, the lumber kings were not. slow to see how rapidly the country was being deforested. They looked ahead and bought timber lands everywhere. And it can hardly be questioned that, law and usage remaining what they are, the same forces which have made for monopoly and against competition in other things will monopolize the country's water-power as well.

The swift and universal rise in prices should serve to awaken us to the actual state of industry and exchange among us. Our awakening to the necessity of economy is still but a part of the greater awakening to the true extent of the changes which have come about in our industrial life. The field is so vast that only a superficial glance at the main features of the new order is here possible.

The most striking and important fact-a fact which is in a way inclusive of the whole matter-is this: Competition, as we have known it in the past, the kind of competition on whose existence and continuance our law and usage concerning industry and property are largely based, is breaking down. Take any one of the dozens of articles in general consumption, and thorough investigation will very likely disclose that real and vital competition no longer prevails in its production or distribution. A combination of manufacturers makes it, a combination of common carriers fixes the charges of transporting it to market, and the original combination names the terms upon which the retail dealers may handle it. If investigations in prices go far enough I am sure they will also disclose such combinations in the smaller communities as well. The dependence of the ordinary shopkeepers on the trusts for supplies is so widespread that the old law of competition has been in large measure nullified. The consumers, in fact, seem to be the only industrial group which has so far failed to combine. It is impossible not to feel that the tendency is so universal as to mean unmistakably a new industrial order.

What does this change mean for the individual as a part and member, an industrial unit, of the new order? Clearly, it means, and it must continue to mean until the system is somewhat modified in his interests, less independence, a narrower range of opportunity. There is no reason to believe that it means on the whole less comfort or a lowered standard of living. The contrary is more probably true. Neither does the change mean that the man of ability and ambition cannot rise. He can. A policy of promotions for merit is plainly to the interest of every great business. That great combinations have adopted that policy is the principal reason why they are so well served. But these things do not rid us of the fact that the coming of the new order has meant a loss of independence, of industrial freedom to the great mass of individuals. Their chance to rise is but one way-by obedience to the laws of the system to which they belong; and in the making of these laws they have not

voice. There is real independence only at the top; and to reach the top is beyond the hopes of all but a very few. Clearly the new system is less democratic than the old.

But to get a fuller conception of the change, we must go to the source of initiative and control in business, to the men who direct the capital of the country. For the principle of combination has made it possible for a few great capitalists to get control of the accumulated savings of hundreds of thousands of people of smali means. A single great banking concern is charged with the direction of some six billion dollars variously invested, in manufacturing, in banking, in transportation, in mines, in many other ways. Such power could go far to corrupt the press. Less power has already corrupted legislatures; has suborned executives; has reached even. the courts.

Here is but the merest glance at the new conditions. But it may, I think, be sufficient to enable us to formulate the new issues. We are confronted with adapting the democratic principle to conditions that did not exist when American democracy arose: that is to say, to a field no longer unlimited, to opportunities no longer boundless, and to an industrial order in which competition is no longer the controlling principle, an industrial order which is, therefore, no longer democratic, but increasingly oligarchical. To save itself politically, democracy must therefore extend itself into this field. Plainly, therefore, laissez-faire can no longer be its watchword. That was the watchword of the régime of competition. Democracy's task is twofold. It must secure for the people some kind of effective, ultimate control over the natural sources of all wealth; and it must also secure, in an industrial system, no longer controlled by competition, protection and opportunity for the individual.

The ancient warfare of democracy and privilege must be begun. all over again, and with new tactics, new strategy. In the presence of the new issues many of the old issues will be altered. The old struggle over the tariff will be less a matter of sectional issues, less a matter of contrary economic theories, and more a phase of the great struggle between democracy and privilege. The old constitutional questions, thought forever settled, will reappear in new forms. The rights and powers of both the states and the nation must be scrutinized afresh. Before the end we may have to go still farther back and find for the common law itself, if not new principles, at any rate, new formulas. For I doubt if we shall end before we have revised many of what we thought our fundamental conceptions of property and of human rights.