Causes of Discontent | Page 9

not to suggest remedies, but only to
review some of the causes of discontent, I will only say, as to this
double problem, that I see no remedy so long as the popular notion

prevails that the greatest good of life is to make money rapidly, and
while it is denied that all men who contribute to prosperity ought to
share equitably in it. The employed must recognize the necessity of an
accumulated fund of capital, and on the other hand the employer must
be as anxious to have about him a contented, prosperous community, as
to heap up money beyond any reasonable use for it. The demand seems
to be reasonable that the employer in a prosperous year ought to share
with the workmen the profits beyond a limit that capital, risk, enterprise,
and superior skill can legitimately claim; and that on the other hand the
workmen should stand by the employer in hard times.
Discontent, then, arises from absurd notions of equality, from natural
conditions of inequality, from false notions of education, and from the
very patent fact, in this age, that men have been educated into wants
much more rapidly than social conditions have been adjusted, or
perhaps ever can be adjusted, to satisfy those wants. Beyond all the
actual hardship and suffering, there is an immense mental discontent
which has to be reckoned with.
This leads me to what I chiefly wanted to say in this paper, to the cause
of discontent which seems to me altogether the most serious, altogether
the most difficult to deal with. We may arrive at some conception of it,
if we consider what it is that the well-to-do, the prosperous, the rich,
the educated and cultivated portions of society, most value just now.
If, to take an illustration which is sufficiently remote to give us the
necessary perspective, if the political economists, the manufacturers,
the traders and aristocracy of England had had chiefly in mind the
development of the laboring people of England into a fine type of men
and women, full of health and physical vigor, with minds capable of
expansion and enjoyment, the creation of decent, happy, and contented
homes, would they have reared the industrial fabric we now see there?
If they had not put the accumulation of wealth above the good of
individual humanity, would they have turned England into a grimy and
smoky workshop, commanding the markets of the world by cheap labor,
condemning the mass of the people to unrelieved toil and the most
squalid and degraded conditions of life in towns, while the land is more
and more set apart for the parks and pleasure grounds of the rich? The
policy pursued has made England the richest of countries, a land of the
highest refinement and luxury for the upper classes, and of the most

misery for the great mass of common people. On this point we have but
to read the testimony of English writers themselves. It is not necessary
to suppose that the political economists were inhuman. They no doubt
believed that if England attained this commanding position, the
accumulated wealth would raise all classes into better conditions. Their
mistake is that of all peoples who have made money their first object.
Looked at merely on the material side, you would think that what a
philanthropic statesman would desire, who wished a vigorous,
prosperous nation, would be a strong and virile population, thrifty and
industrious, and not mere slaves of mines and mills, degenerating in
their children, year by year, physically and morally. But apparently
they have gone upon the theory that it is money, not man, that makes a
state.
In the United States, under totally different conditions, and under an
economic theory that, whatever its defects on paper, has nevertheless
insisted more upon the worth of the individual man, we have had, all
the same, a distinctly material development. When foreign critics have
commented upon this, upon our superficiality, our commonplaceness,
what they are pleased to call the weary level of our mediocrity, upon
the raging unrest and race for fortune, and upon the tremendous pace of
American life, we have said that this is incident to a new country and
the necessity of controlling physical conditions, and of fitting our
heterogeneous population to their environment. It is hardly to be
expected, we have said, until, we have the leisure that comes from easy
circumstances and accumulated wealth, that we should show the graces
of the highest civilization, in intellectual pursuits. Much of this
criticism is ignorant, and to say the best of it, ungracious, considering
what we have done in the way of substantial appliances for education,
in the field of science, in vast charities, and missionary enterprises, and
what we have to show in the diffused refinements of life.