: The Unpopular Review Volume II Number 3 by Various - American periodicals The Unpopular Review

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

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Unsocial Investments A.S. Johnson A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism The Editor An Experiment in Syndicalism Hugh H. Lusk Labor: "True Demand" and Immigrant Supply Arthur J. Todd The Way to Flatland Fabian Franklin The Disfranchisement of Property David McGregor Means Railway Junctions Clayton Hamilton Minor Uses of the Middling Rich F.J. Mather, Jr. Lecturing at Chautauqua Clayton Hamilton Academic Leadership Paul Elmer More Hypnotism, Telepathy, and Dreams The Editor The Muses on the Hearth Mrs F.G. Allinson The Land of the Sleepless Watchdog David Starr Jordan En Casserole Special to our Readers--Philosophy in Fly Time--Setting Bounds to Laughter --A Post-Graduate School for Academic Donors --A Suggestion Regarding Vacations--Advertisement--Simplified Spelling

UNSOCIAL INVESTMENTS

It is virtually never true, however, that the workers are fighting for their "living." Contrary to Marx's exploded "iron law" they probably had that and more before the trouble began. But of course we would not wish to restrict them to a living, if they can produce more, and want all who can't produce that much to be provided with it--and something more at the expense of others.

It may be urged that the employer's profits also represent the livings of a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays for a reactionary view. "We stand for man as against the dollar." If you say that the "dollar" is metonymy for "the man possessed of a dollar," with rights to defend, and reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict yourself of reaction. "These gentry" "suppose themselves to be discussing the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights of stockholders." The true view, the progressive view, is obviously that the possessors of the dollar, the recipients of profits and dividends, are excluded from the communion of humanity. Labor is mankind.

The present instance is of course not the only instance in human history of the substitution of class criteria of judgment for social criteria. Such manifestations of class conscience are doubtless justified in the large economy of human affairs; an individual must often claim all in order to gain anything, and the same may be true of a class. Besides, the ultimate arbitration of the claims of the classes is not a matter for the rational judgment. What is subject to rational analysis, however, are the methods of gaining its ends proposed by the new social conscience. Of these methods one of wide acceptance is that of fixing odium upon certain property interests, with a view to depriving them immediately of the respect still granted to property interests in general, and ultimately of the protection of the laws. It is with the rationality of what may be called the excommunication and outlawing of special property interests, that the present paper is concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property interests--or property owners--insists with equal vehemence upon absolving the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts. The Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him for his misdeeds, but we can make him an object of public reproach; expel him from social intercourse ; fasten his iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

In the country at large the property interests involved in the production and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The unreformed "best society" may still tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would a well organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant. "These tenements must go." Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, will be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for excommunication. Pillars of society and the church have already been seen tottering on account of revelations of working conditions in factories from which they receive dividends. Property "affected by a public use," that is, investments in the instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a compromising possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the personal integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. "Enriched by unearned increment"--who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that the delegates and their constituencies--all honest lovers of mankind--will refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land.

The existence of categories of property interests resting under a growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer's acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a cancellation of the liquor dealer's lease. This they refused to do, on the ground that the building in question is, by location, eminently suited to its present use, but very ill suited to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee would immediately reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to their partner's desire would therefore result in a reduction of their own profits, but would advance the public welfare not one whit. Disheartened by her partners' obstinacy, my friend is seeking to dispose of her interest in the building. As she is willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in order to get rid of her complicity in what she considers an unholy business, the transfer will doubtless soon be made. Her soul will be 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.

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!

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