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Page 36
The general harmlessness of the wealth of this class rests upon the fact
that it is in small part inherited, but mostly earned by individual
effort, while such effort has usually been honestly and efficiently
rendered and paid for at a moderate rate. In fact the amount of capacity
that can be hired for the slightest rewards is simply amazing. It is the
distinction of this class as compared both with the wage earning and the
capitalist class--both of which agree in overvaluing their services and
extorting payment on their own terms--that it respects its work more than
it regards rewards. Consider the amount of general education and special
training that go to make a capable school superintendent, or college
professor; a good country doctor or clergyman--and it will be felt that no
money is more honestly earned. This is equally true of many lawyers and
magistrates, who are wise counsellors for an entire country side. It is no
less true of hosts of small manufacturers who make a superior product with
conscience. For the wealth, small enough it usually is, that is thus
gained in positions of especial skill and confidence, absolutely no
apology need be made. I sometimes wish that the Socialists for whom any
degree of wealth means spoliation, would go a day's round with a country
doctor, would take the pains to learn of the cases he treats for half his
fee, for a nominal sum, or for nothing; would candidly reckon his normal
fee against the long years of college, medical school and hospital, and
against the service itself; would then deduct the actual expenses of the
day, as represented by apparatus, motor, or horse service--I can only say
that if such an investigator could in any way conceive that physician as a
spoliator, because he earned twice as much as a master brick-layer or five
times as much as a ditch digger--if, I say, before the actual fact, our
Socialist investigator in any way grudges that day's earnings, his mental
and emotional confusion is beyond ordinary remedy. And such a physician's
earnings are merely typical of those of an entire class of devoted
professional men.
We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in the
country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most laborious means,
and accumulated and transmitted by self-sacrificing thrift. A rich person
in nine cases out of ten is merely a capable, careful, saving person,
often, too, a person who conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of
personal honor and a high standard of social obligation. We are too much
dazzled by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by
steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who plays
equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the sensational
clergyman who has made full coinage of his charlatanism. All these types
exist, and all are highly exceptional. Most rich persons are
self-respecting, have given ample value received for their wealth, and
have less reason to apologize for it than most poor folks have to
apologize for their poverty.
Furthermore: for the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human
virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently
remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a
bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to
make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities makes for charm
and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities produces an enormous
amount of human waste among the wage earners and the aristocrats
impartially. The great body of self-controlled, that is of reasonably
socialized people, must be sought between these two extremes. In short the
building up of ideals of discipline and of habits of efficiency and of
good manners and of human respect is very largely the task of the middle
classes. Whereas the breaking down of such ideals is, in the present
posture of society, the avowed or unavowed intention of a considerable
portion of laboring men and aristocrats. The scornful retort of the
Socialist is at hand: "Of course the middle classes are shrewd enough to
practice the virtues that pay." Into this familiar moral bog that there
are as many kinds of morality as there are economic conditions of mankind,
I do not consent to plunge. I need only say that the so-called middle
class virtues would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a
bourgeois. Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the
calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication that the
_bourgeoisie_ has selfishly tried to keep its virtues to itself. On the
contrary there is positive rejoicing in the middle classes over a workman
who deigns to keep a contract, and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of
paying a debt. In fine we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of
our highly unpicturesque virtues than we are of our inconspicuous wealth.
So far from being in danger of suppression, we middling rich people are
likely to last longer than the capitalists who exploit us in practice, and
the workmen who exploit us on principle. Theoretically, and perhaps
practically, the very rich are in danger of expropriation. Theoretically
the course of invention may limit or almost abolish all but the higher
grades of labor. The need of the more skilful sort of service in the
professions, in manufacture, in agency of all sorts, is sure to persist.
The socialists expect to get such service for much less than it at present
brings, that is to make us poor and yet keep us working. Such a scheme
must break down, not through the refusal of the middling rich to keep at
work;--for I think there is loyalty enough to the work itself to keep most
necessary activities going after a fashion, even under the most untoward
conditions;--but because to make us poor is to destroy the conditions
under which we can efficiently render a somewhat exceptional service. Our
wealth is not an extraneous thing that can be readily added or taken away.
It is our possibility of self-education and of professional improvement,
it is the medium in which we can work, it is our hope of children. To take
away our wealth is to maim us. There is nothing humiliating in such an
avowal. It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one's life and work.
As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to face the threat of a
proletarian revolution as we harmless rich. It is the class that produces
generals, explorers, inventors, statesmen. A social revolution with its
stern attendant regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively
undisciplined class of working people. The disciplined class of the
middling rich is better prepared to meet such an eventuality. Accordingly
it is no mere selfishness or complacency that leads the middling rich to
oppose the pretensions of proletarianism on one side and of capitalism on
the other. It is rather the assertion of sound middle class morality
against two opposite yet somewhat allied forms of social immorality--the
strength that exaggerates its claims, and the weakness that claims all the
privileges of strength.
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