The Unpopular Review | Page 3

lightened of the profits from property put to
an anti-social use. But the property will still continue in such use, and
profits from it will still accrue to someone with a soul to lose or to save.
In her fascinating book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Miss Jane
Addams tells of a visit to a western state where she had invested a sum
of money in farm mortgages. "I was horrified," she says, "by the
wretched conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long
period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my
mind.... The farmer's wife [was] a picture of despair, as she stood in the
door of the bare, crude house, and the two children behind her, whom
she vainly tried to keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their
faces, almost covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their
little bare feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust, that
they looked like flattened hoofs. The children could not be compared to
anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but half-human. It

seemed to me quite impossible to receive interest from mortgages upon
farms which might at any season be reduced to such conditions, and
with great inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to
the farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment." And
thereby made the supply of money for such farmers that much less and
consequently that much dearer. This is quite a fair example of much
current philanthropy.
We may safely assume that, however much this action may have
lightened Miss Addams's conscience, it did not lighten the burden of
debt upon the farmer, or make the periodic interest payments less
painful, and it certainly did put them to the trouble and contingent
expenses of a new mortgage. The moral burden was shifted, to the ease
of the philanthropist, and this seems to exhaust the sum of the good
results of one well intentioned deed. Do they outweigh the bad ones?
So, doubtless, there are among our friends persons who, upon proof
that factories in which they have been interested pay starvation wages,
have withdrawn their investments. And others who, stumbling upon a
state legislature among the productive assets of a railway corporation,
have sold their bonds and invested the proceeds elsewhere. It is a
modern way of obeying the injunction, "Sell all thou hast and follow
me." And not a very painful way, since the irreproachable investments
pay almost, if not quite, as well as those that are suspect.
It is not, however, impossible to conceive of a property owner driven
from one position to another, in order to satisfy this new requirement of
the social conscience, without ever finding peace. Miss Addams put the
money withdrawn from those hideous farm mortgages into a flock of
"innocent looking sheep." Alas, they were not so innocent as they
seemed. "The sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each
was not reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A
fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool and farm enabled the partners
to end the enterprise without loss." Sales of mutton? Let us hope those
eight hundred infected hoofs are well printed on the butcher's
conscience.
And the net result of all these moral strivings? The evil investments
still continue to be evil, and still yield profits. Doubtless they rest, in
the end, upon less sensitive consciences. Marvellous moral gain!
IV

We are bound to the wheel, say the sociological fatalists. All our efforts
are of no avail; the Wheel revolves as it was destined. Not so. Our
strivings for purity in investments, puny as may be their results in the
individual instance, may compose a sum that is imposing in its
effectiveness. How their influence may be exerted will best appear
from an analogy.
It is a settled conviction among Americans of Puritan antecedents, and
among all other Americans, native born or alien, that have come under
Puritan influence, that the dispensing of alcoholic beverages is a
degrading function. This conviction has not, to be sure, notably
impaired the performance of the function. But it has none the less
produced a striking effect. It has set apart for the function in question
those elements in the population that place the lowest valuation upon
the esteem of the public, and that are, on the whole, least worthy of it.
In consequence the American saloon is, by common consent, the very
worst institution of its kind in the world. Such is the immediate result
of good intentions working by the method of excommunication of a
trade.
This degradation of the personnel and the institution proceeds at an
accelerated rate as public opinion grows more bitter. In the end the evil
becomes