Commercialism

IT is the habit of the politician who desires to put on an appearance of patriotism to denounce greed and commercialism as if they were synonymous terms, and to hold up for emulation the career of the soldier as one of highest merit and renown. It is the custom of the preacher who has little knowledge of affairs to denounce commercialism as of “ the world, the flesh, and the devil,” and to hold up the man who gives away all that he gets in charity, as if that were the best use of wealth, — the world, the flesh, and the devil being held by the preacher to be alike evil. The man who devotes himself to trade is called upon to separate religion and life by giving his Sundays to devout purposes so as to atone for the pursuit of gain during the week days. He is asked to prepare for a future life in the next world, in which it is assumed that there will be no work to do, by discrediting his work in this world. The emblem of perfection put before him is the cherub, with head and wings, but without any organs of digestion, and without any conceivable way of sitting down for a quiet rest, therefore possessing no material wants to be supplied by trade.

What is this commercialism which is so often held up to present scorn as if the pursuit of wealth had not been the motive of action in former days ? The effort of autocrats, the motive of feudalism and of militarism, the motive of the modern jingo and of the warfare which he promotes upon feeble states by strong and aggressive nations, is the pursuit of gain by force or fraud. Commercialism is the pursuit of gain by service and fair methods in the conduct of commerce. What is commerce? Is it not the method by which human wants are supplied ? What are these wants ? Are they not a supply of food, clothing, shelter, light, heat, and, in another field, music, pictures, gardens, flowers, and all that makes for beauty in the world as we know it ? This world is the only one that we can know. If the power that makes for righteousness has placed man in this world for maleficent purposes, then mankind may only consent to be damned under protest, if he has not instinct or reason enough to condemn such a conception of a dishonest God as the meanest work of man. But if the purpose of life in this world is to make the most of a world that is filled with the means of human welfare, of beauty and of happiness, then man may work out his own salvation from poverty and want, and may develop his mental and spiritual capacity in so doing.

Now, since the mental endowments of men vary and are unequal, it follows, as President George Harris has so clearly proved, that inequality and progress must be reconciled, as they are by the facts of life. Mental energy is the prime factor in all material progress. It gives the power of directing the forces of nature to the increasing welfare of man. “Captains of industry ” are few in number but rare in ability. They render service to those who must do the physical and manual work, by the application of science and invention to the arts of life. When such men are true to their functions, the dollars of their wealth are but so many tokens of the service that they have rendered to their fellow men, and yet they themselves may be unaware of their true place in the great organism which we call society, and may not justify even to themselves the work that they do.

What is the motive of commerce ? Is it not mutual service for mutual benefit ? How else does commerce exist and continue on its way ? The merchant who cheats his customers is a fool. The manufacturer who debases his product, and who tries to put off goods and wares upon the public which are not what they seem to be, is a knave. Such men are relatively few in number. They usually fail, or, if they secure riches, they are marked men whom society distrusts, even though they pile up dollars by their evil practices. The abatement of this class is only a question of time and intelligence. The makers and venders of quack medicines, of beverages purporting to promote temperance but which are merely alcoholic stimulants in disguise, will be unable to cheat the community even in a prohibitory town or state when common education is a little further advanced. The stock gambler who uses loaded dice on the exchange and rigs the market waits only for the progress of better commercial education to be abated as a common nuisance. The transactions of this noxious kind are, however, but a small fraction of the great trade of the world in which men and nations supply each other’s wants.

There are two principles or fundamental rules of action which are based on human nature, that are hinted at but have never, within the limited book knowledge of the writer, been fully developed in any of the standard works upon political economy or social science.

1. No one is paid for his work, mental, manual, or mechanical, nor is any one entitled to be paid, by the measure of the work which he does either in hours of labor, in the intensity of the physical effort, or by the quantity or kind of work done. He is paid by the measure, consciously or unconsciously estimated, of the work or the effort which he saves to the man by whom he is paid.

2. The cost of each man to the community is only what he and those immediately dependent upon him consume, whether his income be a dollar or a thousand dollars per day. He can eat, drink, and wear only what he consumes. What he eats, drinks, and wears is his share of the annual product. He can occupy only a limited amount of space in his dwelling-house or his office, and that constitutes his share of the means of shelter. What he spends is a part of the distribution of products, by which those among whom he spends his income procure their own food, clothing, and shelter. All that any one can get in or out of life, in a material sense, is his board and clothing, and what each one costs is what he consumes for board, clothing, and shelter.

Under the arduous conditions of a century ago men and women were compelled to do their own work in providing themselves with food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. In the present age, especially since manual training has been taught in the schools, well-grown boys and girls and well-bred men and women might supply their wants with less work than their grandfathers did, thus making themselves independent of society. Why do they not supply their own wants by their own work ? We could all have learned how to spin and weave, how to tan and work leather, how to raise hogs, cattle, and grain, and salt down the meat for winter, how to build log cabins, and cut wood for fuel. There is cleared land now reverting to pasture and woodland which has once been occupied by selfsustaining people of this type, and which could be recovered and used with less effort or cost of labor than was necessary a century ago to provide homes for the people and to support them in those homes, especially in New England. What influence forbids recourse to the arduous and narrow lives, sometimes sordid and squalid, of a former generation ? Is it not the influence of commerce making for mutual benefit, — is it not commercialism, in fact? Why does the adult reader buy his shoes when he may make a clumsy but useful pair, as perhaps his own grandfather did? Does he measure the time and effort of the shoemaker or manufacturer when he decides to buy a pair of shoes ? Does any such computation enter his mind and does he say to himself, The man who made these shoes spent so much time and so much labor upon them, and by that measure I think he ought to be paid about three dollars? Not a bit. The buyer does not know the man, and can never have a personal interest in him. It does not matter to him whether that man worked eight hours or ten hours a day. Consciously or unconsciously he sets the price which he will pay for the shoes by what he saves of his own time and effort in order that he may apply it to more useful purposes, so far as he is concerned, than making shoes. As it is in respect to shoes, so is it in all the exchanges of material products which constitute commerce, and commerce is nothing else than exchange for mutual service. Such is commercialism.

It follows that the unthinking persons who condemn commercialism from the pulpit or the rostrum merely expose their own ignorance of the true function and the interdependence of the merchant, the manufacturer, the workman, and the laborer, by whom the modern conditions of society have been evolved. Commerce stands for all that is good in modern society, and in the progress of human welfare so far as human welfare rests upon the supply of physical wants. War stands for all that is brutal and barbarous in modern society, however necessary it may have been in the past in making way for the present commercial age.

Napoleon denounced the English as a nation of shopkeepers, but by the very strength of their commerce they developed the power by which he was beaten and suppressed. Spain, in her day the greatest military power of Europe, tried to conquer Holland, but by the force of their commerce and industries the Dutch developed yet greater power, enabling them to defeat their oppressors.

In every age of recorded history from the time of the Phœnicians to the present date, the states in which commerce has been most fully developed have been those which have excelled not only in the common welfare of the people, but also in art and literature. The progress of law is indicated by its very name, jurisprudence, the science of rights. The barbarism and brutality of war have been expressed by the common phrase, “Inter arma silent leges.” In war the merchant possesses no rights which the commerce destroyer is bound to respect.

Among the nations this country stands almost alone in the freedom of its commerce on a continental scale, with a greater number of civilized people than ever enjoyed its benefits before.

If this is an age in which commercialism rules, we may well be thankful. If the generals of armies will be forced to give way to the captains of industry, if the admiral in the navy has become the subordinate of the engineer, if the line officers of the army have been forced into the ranks with the privates in order to be saved from the sharpshooters, whom skilled mechanics working solely for profit have supplied with guns of which the discharge can neither be seen nor heard, — then we may be well assured that the peaceful forces of commerce will suppress the barbarity of war. May we not also be well assured that as commercialism more and more governs the thought and directs the acts of an intelligent community, a war of tariffs will become as absurd and out of date as a war of weapons has always been brutal and noxious?

It follows that both the preacher and the politician must mend their ways if they are again to become leaders in thought and in social progress. Instead of making an effort to discredit a condition which marks the highest point in the progress of humanity yet reached, and in place of misapprehending the commercialism of the new century, let them direct their thoughts to the dominant power of commerce, joining with men of affairs in developing it, until every man and every nation shall be free to serve another’s wants without the perversion of the power of public taxation to purposes of private gain under the pretext of protection to domestic industry.

It is doubtless true that yet for a short period a naval armament must be maintained upon the sea for the protection of commerce. This necessity will exist so long as there are brutal nations endeavoring to extend their commerce by conquest, and to annex colonies or dependencies without any regard to the rights of their inhabitants. The name of “commerce destroyers ” has already become a term of obloquy and of contempt in its application to naval vessels. In respect to armaments upon the land, standing armies are already in disrepute. Volunteers of sufficient intelligence each to fight on his own judgment have proved to be better fighting machines than regulars in any equal contest. Again, volunteers must be men of intelligence who think before they fight, but in regular armies thinking is not consistent with discipline.

It may not be long before other states will follow the good example of the Dominion of Canada, which has no standing army, but which maintains an effective national police, being protected on its long border line and on the Great Lakes by the common interest, and by the commercialism which controls both the government of Canada and of the United States, in spite of the absurd obstruction of tariffs which now stand in the way of the greater mutual service which each might render to the other. Canada is protected upon the Great Lakes by the simple agreement, entered into at the instance of John Quincy Adams after the last war with Great Britain, by President Monroe and the British Cabinet, to the effect that “in order to avoid collision and to save expense ” no armed naval force should be permitted by either nation upon these interior waters, over which a commerce vastly greater than that of the Mediterranean Sea or of the Suez Canal now passes peacefully, to the benefit of all and to the injury of none.

When Great Britain and the United States propose to neutralize an ocean ferry-way from port to port in either land, and give notice to other states that their united navies forbid any interference with their commerce in such neutral seas, every other state in Europe will ask to join in the agreement; then “the ships that pass from thy land to that shall be like the shuttle of the loom, weaving the web of concord among the nations.”

The first half of the nineteenth century was marked by brutal wars engendered in ignorance of what constitutes the true wealth of nations and in efforts of rulers to suppress commercialism. The privileged rulers, holding power which they used as if the common people of the nations had no rights which rulers were bound to respect, mortgaged the future, and put upon present generations the greater part of an enormous debt, which is now a chief cause of pauperism even in Great Britain; the taxes for interest being diffused and paid by consumers in proportion to their consumption wherever they are first put, taking from the very poorest a part of the product which is necessary to their existence, and paying it over to others who live on the interest of debts incurred for destructive wars.

In the second half of the nineteenth century yet more brutal wars were engendered in “blood and iron ” for the purpose of promoting a separation of races and states, establishing artificial boundaries, and enacting tariffs which forbid mutual service. This policy has ended in requiring armies for the maintenance of these tariff barriers which cost more than the amount of the revenue from duties on imports. These wars, engendered in brutality, greed, and ignorance of economic science, have spent their active force, but have so retarded the progress of commercialism as to have brought disease upon multitudes for lack of sufficient food.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was marked by little wars of great nations upon weak states, discreditable if not dishonorable to the countries by whom they were permitted.

But the standard of common intelligence has passed or is passing beyond the stage in which the barbarity of war has been tolerated and justified, at least in this country, and we may hope in others. Commercialism has been established with greater power and influence in the United States than in any other nation. Under its influence, in spite of the temporary aberration from the works of peace, order, and industry, the United States has become a world power among the nations, and will maintain this power only so far as the people develop commercialism and suppress militarism.

Edward Atkinson.