Causes of Discontent | Page 5

Froude, fresh from a
sight of the misery of industrial England, and borne straight on toward
Australia over a vast ocean, through calm and storm, by a great
steamer,--horses of fire yoked to a sea-chariot,--exclaims: "What, after
all, have these wonderful achievements done to elevate human nature?
Human nature remains as it was. Science grows, but morality is
stationary, and art is vulgarized. Not here lie the 'things necessary to
salvation,' not the things which can give to human life grace, or beauty,
or dignity."
In the United States, with its open opportunities, abundant land, where
the condition of the laboring class is better actually and in possibility

than it ever was in history, and where there is little poverty except that
which is inevitably the accompaniment of human weakness and crime,
the prevailing discontent seems groundless. But of course an agitation
so widespread, so much in earnest, so capable of evoking sacrifice,
even to the verge of starvation and the risk of life, must have some
reason in human nature. Even an illusion--and men are as ready to die
for an illusion as for a reality--cannot exist without a cause.
Now, content does not depend so much upon a man's actual as his
relative condition. Often it is not so much what I need, as what others
have that disturbs me. I should be content to walk from Boston to New
York, and be a fortnight on the way, if everybody else was obliged to
walk who made that journey. It becomes a hardship when my neighbor
is whisked over the route in six hours and I have to walk. It would still
be a hardship if he attained the ability to go in an hour, when I was only
able to accomplish the distance in six hours. While there has been a
tremendous uplift all along the line of material conditions, and the
laboring man who is sober and industrious has comforts and privileges
in his daily life which the rich man who was sober and industrious did
not enjoy a hundred years ago, the relative position of the rich man and
the poor man has not greatly changed. It is true, especially in the
United States, that the poor have become rich and the rich poor, but
inequality of condition is about as marked as it was before the
invention of labor- saving machinery, and though workingmen are
better off in many ways, the accumulation of vast fortunes, acquired
often in brutal disregard of humanity, marks the contrast of conditions
perhaps more emphatically than it ever appeared before. That this
inequality should continue in an era of universal education, universal
suffrage, universal locomotion, universal emancipation from nearly all
tradition, is a surprise, and a perfectly comprehensible cause of
discontent. It is axiomatic that all men are created equal. But, somehow,
the problem does not work out in the desired actual equality of
conditions. Perhaps it can be forced to the right conclusion by violence.
It ought to be said, as to the United States, that a very considerable part
of the discontent is imported, it is not native, nor based on any actual
state of things existing here. Agitation has become a business. A great
many men and some women, to whom work of any sort is distasteful,
live by it. Some of them are refugees from military or political

despotism, some are refugees from justice, some from the lowest
conditions of industrial slavery. When they come here, they assume
that the hardships they have come away to escape exist here, and they
begin agitating against them. Their business is to so mix the real
wrongs of our social life with imaginary hardships, and to heighten the
whole with illusory and often debasing theories, that discontent will be
engendered. For it is by means of that only that they live. It requires
usually a great deal of labor, of organization, of oratory to work up this
discontent so that it is profitable. The solid workingmen of America
who know the value of industry and thrift, and have confidence in the
relief to be obtained from all relievable wrongs by legitimate political
or other sedate action, have no time to give to the leadership of
agitations which require them to quit work, and destroy industries, and
attack the social order upon which they depend. The whole case, you
may remember, was embodied thousands of years ago in a parable,
which Jotham, standing on the top of Mount Gerizim, spoke to the men
of Shechem:
"The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they
said unto the olive-tree, 'Reign thou over us.'
"But the olive-tree said unto them, 'Should I leave my fatness
wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be