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Page 38
This essentially personal character of wealth must affect the views of
those who would attack what are called the inordinate fortunes. I hold no
brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In many cases I believe his
wealth is as personal, assimilated and legitimate as is the average
moderate fortune. In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is
in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent
unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes,
I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general
programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the
common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would
reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent
enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which
are founded and supported by great wealth. In our time The Rockefeller
Institute will have stamped out that slow plague of the south, the hook
worm. To the obvious retort that the government ought to do this sort of
thing, the reply is equally obvious, that historically governments have
not done this sort of thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown
the way. Our prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich
in particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the socialist
indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires a statute of
limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more trouble than the
possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts, interest, and grudges cannot be
indefinitely accumulated and extended. It is the entire disregard of this
simple and generally admitted principle that has marred the socialist
propaganda from the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred
between classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary
legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may be
clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman see clearly
what his actual grievance and expectancy of redress are in his own day and
time.
With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very rich will
have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire's evident utility as the milch
cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even of the anti-capitalistic
stamp, to waver at the point where the cow threatens to dry up from
over-milking. If the case, then, for utterly despoiling the harmful rich,
is by no means clear, the prospect for the harmless rich may be regarded
as fairly favorable. For the moment, caught between the headiness of
working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate
activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable.
But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy,
cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling
rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be
better.
LECTURING AT CHAUTAUQUA
To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly, I must
approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of view. Others,
more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the Institution, have written
the history of its development from small beginnings to its present
impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have
expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the
middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the
scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list
already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of
Chautauqua was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a
surprised and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien
thrust suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and,
if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some sense of
the human significance of this summer seat of earnest recreation may be
suggested by a mere record of my individual reactions.
I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer morning, I
suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at the Institution. I
was a little disconcerted at the moment, because I was enjoying an
amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was inclined to shudder at the
thought of putting on a collar in July; but, after an hour or two, I
managed to imagine that telegram as a Summons from the Great Unknown, and
it was in a proper spirit of adventure that I flung together a few books,
and climbed into the only available upper berth on a discomfortable train
that rushed me westward.
In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out at Westfield, on
Lake Erie,--a town that looked like the back-yard of civilization, with
weeds growing in it. Thence a trolley car, climbing over heightening hills
that became progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the
entrance of what the cynical conductor called "The Holy City." A fence of
insurmountable palings stretched away on either hand; and, at the little
station, there were turn-stiles, through which pilgrims passed within.
Most people pay money to obtain admittance; but I was met by a very
affable young man from Dartmouth, whose business it was to welcome invited
visitors, and by him I was steered officially through unopposing gates. I
liked this young man for his cheerful clothes and smiling countenance; but
I was rather appalled by the agglomeration of ram-shackle cottages through
which we passed on our way to the hotel.
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