in turn connote a more or less highly developed level of intelligence. Moreover, nobody can fail to see that an industrial organization based merely on money relationships is not necessarily permanent, flexible, or sound. It is quite likely to degenerate into what Carlyle called the Cash-nexus, a state of pseudo-liberty, of that impersonality which thing bears to thing, but which robs and cheats man of his humanity. We are free to imagine that in the past as in the present the characteristic anonymity of money might serve equally well the fool and the wise man, Belial and the saint. 1 Schmoller, Grundriss der Volkswirtschaft, ii, 659. CHAPTER XII CAPITAL To what extent may increase in wealth, in the form of productive capital, be considered the measure and the means of progress? It is unquestionable that mankind took an enormous inventive stride forward when our primitive forbears learned the art of saving, of storing up food, seed, capital, of discounting the present in favor of the future. How this habit was learned it is difficult to say. We are prone to affirm off-hand that experience teaches. But just what experience? Many of the North American Indians within the past fifty years had not yet learned from experience, and sad experience, to lay up stores for a rainy day. In Colonial New England only the most skillful finesse of the Indian women saved the seed corn from the heedless bellies of their lords. Periodic famines and starvation occur in many contemporary retarded peoples, yet, great as their suffering is, they apparently are unable to put two and two together for the initial lesson in the mathematics of prudence. The aborigines of Tasmania are a characteristically improvident race, "For although dependent almost entirely upon their hunting for subsistence, yet they will slaughter indiscriminately, long after they have supplied themselves with sufficient for their present use." 1 Father Le Jeune related of the Canadian Indians: 1 Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, 48. "I told them that they did not manage well, and that it would be better to reserve these feasts for future days, and in doing this they would not be so pressed with hunger. They laughed at me. 'To-morrow (they said) we shall make another feast with what we shall capture.' Yes, but more often they captured only cold and wind." 1 Of course, some individuals and some groups must have learned prudence and self-restraint or we should not be here to tell the tale. Hence we are not surprised to find that the Wanika of East Africa consider the destruction of a cocoa palm matricide, for it gives them food like a mother. The palm was early protected by a sort of inter-tribal law. A sidelight on the frugality and farsightedness of the Hopi is shown by their storage of a reserve supply of corn for two years. The aborigines of Victoria take great care of bird nests, sink wells, and protect the natural water holes against the encroachments of animals. Suffice it to say that there was no conscious prudential education, and only the crudest technical methods of preserving to-day's surplus of food and capital for to-morrow's needs. Only rarely do we encounter in savagery anything that could be called a warehouse or storeroom. But once they were devised, and once the concept of saving was grasped and sanctioned by the folkways, these ideas, like any tool, wrought a wonderful economy of time and strength. We are so used to the pantry or the corner grocery that it is almost inconceivable, unless we have roughed it or been a castaway on some desert island, how large a share of one's working hours can go into 1 Jesuit Relations, vi., 283. Cf. Curr, Australian Race, i, 82; von Rosenberg, Geelvinkbaii, p. 88; Hoffman, on the Menomini Indians, Rep. Amer. Bur. Ethnology, 14: 287; Turner, on the Eskimo, Rep. Amer. Bur. Ethnology, 11: 240; Niblock, on Haidah Indians, Smithsonian Report, 1888, p. 277; Carr, Mounds of Mississippi, 522; Fothergill, Five Years in the Sudan, 64–5. 2 Lippert, Kulturgeschichte, i, 247, 249; Rohlfs, Afrikanische Reisen, 70; Hough, American Anthropologist, 10: 35; Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i, the bare process of satisfying the belly. Let any one try a two days' diet of roots or shell-fish or tiny grass seeds, which he must himself dig or winnow, and he will soon grasp the limitations of a mere household or consumption economy. He will understand Father Baegert's remark on the Lower California Indians: "The time of these people is chiefly taken up by the search for food and its preparation; and if their physical wants are supplied, they abandon themselves entirely to lounging, chattering, and sleep." 1 We may admit, I suppose, that such forms of wealth. spelled freedom to primitive men and released them from bondage to the dreadful uncertainties and vicissitudes of raw nature, without committing ourselves to the view that all increase of wealth is an unmixed blessing and a force for progress, or falling afoul of the poets and philosophers who describe conditions "where wealth accumulates and men decay." This will become evident if we enumerate some of the social effects of growth in wealth. Among the most obvious are the creation of new social classes, the breakdown of birth-castes, shifting the incidence of political power from the military or noble class to the property owners and capitalist-producers. With these changes comes a redistribution of function between classes, for example, in the army: the soldiers are now drawn from the lower classes to fight battles for their wealthy overlords.2 New standards of morality and law grow up, property becomes sacred, and government a policeman to protect property; the virtues of order, saving, and thrift are preached and lauded. Leisure for the arts is released, for "conspicuous waste" hits upon the æsthetic as means for displaying itself. Mr. 1 Nachrichten, translated for Smithsonian Report, 1863, p. 363. Murdle cultivates the arts by patronizing the jewelers whose wares he spreads out on Mrs. Murdle's broad bosom to convince all the world that he is a success. Unless these vulgarities or excrescences of wealth are too obvious, religion and popular philosophy are likely to be acquiescent and superficially optimistic.1 It should be perfectly apparent from this list that the distinction we made between social change and progress was valid and not mere hair splitting. For many of the social effects of wealth just noted — for instance, the new codes of morals, law, and religion - are changes which may or may not be for the better: they may even give a distinct set-back to real social progress. The generalization that growth in wealth is a social good requires extensive qualification. Indeed one is almost inclined to the cynical statement of the opposite extreme, that "nothing fails like success," and that no race or civilization has hitherto been able to survive luxury. Job intimated that it was a grave danger to have made gold one's hope or to have said to the fine gold, thou art my confidence. Here, of course, enters once more the question of the costs of progress. President Wilson in his first inaugural address intimated that the United States has been paying too heavy costs for a too rapid growth in wealth. It is time, he urged, to slow up and look after the producers of wealth and the conditions under which it is produced. (Achievement is not progress: not mere increase of wealth but increased socialization of wealth (well-being) is desirable.) Or, as a young Progressive puts it, what the people demand is not a trebled production of coal, not more smoke, not more ashes, but more heat; not a statistical demonstration of rising national wealth, but distributed wealth, more economic satisfactions more widely distributed.2 1 Cf. Ross, Foundations of Sociology, 217 ff. 2 Walter Weyl, The New Democracy, 145. |