Is Commercialism in Disgrace?

IT must be admitted that a certain ignominy rests upon “ Commercialism ” as that term is commonly used. It is not merely that, in the recent months, we have witnessed something like a national outburst of mingled indignation and cynicism because the poker mask has been torn from certain giddy schemes of the “ high finance.” Such obloquy as exists dates from days older than Christianity. Neither Plato nor Cicero conceals his scorn of the trader. So long as the heroic energies of the race were given to war, it was inevitable that some odium should be associated with mercantile pursuits. These obscure callings then brought no splendor of social distinction. They were honestly believed to be squalid occupations. Every enlarged privilege of the trader had to be gained by cunning, by bribes, or by slavish importunities. There is quite enough humiliating economic history in our own civil war to make this clear. A man of science in the employ of the Government went to Mr. Lincoln, in 1863, to tell him how the large contractors were debauching our politicians and fleecing the Government. Mr. Lincoln heard his story, but at its end surprised the visitor by saying, “ Mr. -, I know all that and a good deal more, but to stop this thieving would stop the war.”

Every gluttonous passion for gain had so instantly allied itself with the desperate practical needs to which war gives rise, that to stop the looting was to imperil the work of the army in the field. The financial orgies connected with modern wars in Russia, France, and England are well known. Even of the German war of 1870, a Berlin banker has said that the secret history of supplying the army at that time would, if allowed to be published, shock the whole Fatherland. If this be true to-day, it is easy to understand how business methods must have suffered in ages that were prevailingly military.

It is less clear why the reproach should appear among the scholastic economists who had come to disapprove of war and to recognize the social service of trade. Yet a world of proof is at hand that the trader had a sorry task to account for himself morally. The ethical censure was severest against those whose main occupation it was to take interest on moneys, and it was long before usury was distinguished from interest. In spite of civil laws, as late as the fourteenth century the church prohibited usury on moral grounds. Aquinas condemns it as against nature and all precepts of religion, while Dante in the Inferno has the usurers in his low seventh circle of Hell. One might charge interest to an enemy as a means of punishing him, —

If the military era be thought to characterize race effort until the modern industrial régime fairly begins, this would go far to account for these earlier disgraces of money-getting as a primary occupation. It is the soldier in Napoleon that taunts England with being a nation of shopkeepers. It was meant in derision, and was taken in the polite world as an insult. Even Ruskin delights to hold up the soldier as a gallant figure, in comparison with which the trader is but a shabby creature.

Yet this conflict between military and industrial ideals but partially explains the aversion to commercialism. Other hostilities have arisen which, in their origin, are quite apart from this tradition of war versus peace. Three terms are now in current use : “ industrialism,” “ capitalism,” commercialism.” While a literature of vituperation has appeared against capitalism and commercialism, there is rarely a word of abuse for industrialism, probably because it stands popularly for the quieter and better behaved processes of wealth production. This inoffensive term represents, however, the principles applicable to industry as now organized and carried on. Yet it goes scot free, while capitalism and commercialism take their scathing. As the one term is taken at its best, the other two are taken at their worst.

One could fill an encyclopædia with picturesque and vehement denunciation of commercialism from the pulpit, from men of letters, from social and political reformers, and especially from the whole world of art. We hear a great deal about the commercializing of the church ; the exclusion of the poor by the money standard of high pew rents, and the undue influence there of rich men. From political reformers we hear no less incessantly about the impudent disregard of every civic decency, if only franchises or legislative immunities are required. It is against these dangers to our political health and well-being that the moral revolt culminates. Yet neck to neck in this tilt against commercialism, everywhere may be found the artist. It is the artist in Morris, in Zola, in Ibsen, that flames out against “ the sordidness of our huckster age.” In Carlyle, in Ruskin, in Tolstoi, one is uncertain whether the anger springs first from the moralist or first from the artist.

The moral reproach is directed largely against the passion for gain when it becomes an end in itself. Once the amplest competence has been won, why, it is asked, should the fever and the strain go on until the victim has no other joy left but this accumulating for its own sake ? In one of his later essays Max Müller maintained that this disease was under our control. His remedy took the form of an appeal, to those who had gained this competence, to quit work, not merely for their own sake, but to open the way for younger men. There appears to be no eagerness to take this counsel so long as the “disease” is there. It is precisely this unnatural stimulus to mass unnecessary gains which has brought against our competitive system the most convincing ethical reproach. Commercialism, in its current bad sense, has come to stand for all this abnormal overdoing, as well as for the incidental frauds that may accompany it.

It was Ruskin’s opinion that we should not become a civilized people until men went into business to serve their fellows. Men with genuine spiritual elevation go into the church under the influence of this motive. Why, asks Ruskin, should we not take up business with the express object of doing good ? I once heard this view stated before a group of business men of the better sort. It was taken first as a sally of humor. When the speaker grew serious about it, the audience still regarded it as food for merriment. It was like telling a soldier that he was in the army for the purpose of forgiving his enemies. Men go to business with the very distinct aim of making money. Multitudes of them have high and unselfish motives about the use to which the money shall be put when gained. First, and most general, is the support and education of the family. The affections which centre there are the spring of much of the hardest work men do in business. Nor is money ever used to better purpose. Others, obviously in considerable numbers, are moved by the hope of enriching the community life by gifts. For beauty, health, recreation, educational opportunity, several hundred millions have been given to our people in the last generation.

To say that men go to business solely for money conceals more truth than it discloses. It is true that the first object is not to do good, but to get money, and it is this primary and engrossing aim which brings it into conflict with those who are striving first for other ideals. An architect, if he have the serious passion of the artist, insists first upon the fitness, symmetry, and beauty of his design. To say that he thinks first of money is to say that he is not first an artist. To the business man who employs the architect, the controlling aim is likely to be the return upon his investment. “ Fitness ” to him and to the designer is not the same word. Symmetry and beauty must take their chances. They are subservient and secondary to other purposes. There is no sphere of art, science, politics, or religion in which this conflict is not felt. So long as the money motive acts on its own plane, it is without offense; but let it once invade the field of other arts, conflict arises so far as it essays to dominate there. It is this attempted domination against which all those who are loyal to other ideals enter protest.

The very existence of the Arts and Crafts Societies is owing to the rude ascendency of commercialism in a sphere where it should serve and not rule. Quantity, and not quality, will be the business aim ; specialization will separate the designer from the craftsman, and every art value will become accidental. The heroic effort of these associations to keep the designer and craftsman together, to give the conditions and leisure for perfect workmanship, to safeguard the utmost freedom of the artistic impulse, is a valiant attempt to keep the enemy at bay. The more definite form which the enemy takes in this special field is the machine. It is the body, of which commercialism may be called the soul.

The embittered diatribes of Ruskin against this monster are now seen to be whimsical in their extravagance. In its place the machine, like commercialism, is as much a part of civilization as a statue, a symphony, or the Stones of Venice. It is only when machinery is allowed to enslave us, or is set to tasks for which its automatic character forever unfits it, that objection is raised. The artist must have structure and raw material on which to work. The imprint which the pliant spirit of his genius leaves on this material is art. Those who deserve the name of artist fret and are jealous when the machine is out of place. They feel, and feel rightly, that, out of place, its results are mischievous. In no sphere better than that of the artist can one see that the contest is not against the proper service of the machine, or the business spirit that works through it, but against specific perversities traceable to man’s ignorance and greed. The artists are, however, not alone in this crusade.

Three men of such splendid equipment as John Stuart Mill, Professor F. A. Lange, and Herbert Spencer would class awkwardly as artists, yet each writes himself down among the sharpest censors of commercialism. Though the displeasure of the socialist is primarily against capitalism, because the world’s machinery is so narrowly owned that it turns interest, rent, and profits into the private purse, rather than into the common treasury, yet socialists never weary of defaming the mercantile spirit. To make things for profit and gain, rather than for use, is a sin they never allow us to forget. We read, without surprise, in Belfort Bax: “ In the commercial relation, as such, the moral relation is abolished. . . . Conscience, which has its ground in social union, can have no part nor lot with commerce which has its ground in anti-social greed.” No one, indeed, quite matches the thorough-going socialist in damnatory phrases. Yet if our social destinies ever fall under collectivist control, trade and commerce, with political management, would still go on. They assure us that capitalism would cease, as the mechanism of production — railways, banks, mills, mines — slowly passes to public ownership.

The formidable task that socialism sets itself is to do the world’s work directly by the community, without the help of the individual money lender and profit maker. The community, as community, is to furnish the capital and the management, and is, therefore, to retain the fruits of both. If only the community (city and state) could do this effectively, capitalism, as now understood, would cease. Commercialism in some sense must go on. The socialist’s easy answer to a hard question helps us in this inquiry. He assures us that every fang of commercialism would be drawn if it were once freed from certain abuses. With this the sturdiest individualist agrees, only he would fix upon another order of abuses as the chief source of danger. To him, the first and supreme difficulty is neither in the “incubus of the three rents,” nor in the private control of machinery. So far as these are evil, they are secondary and not primary. Thus, when Spencer, the “ High Priest of individualism,” criticises trade, he is of more help to us than Mr. Bax.

It is Spencer who has made the great plea of our time in favor of industrialism as against the military spirit. He is the doughtiest individualist in the arena, yet in his Morals of Trade he writes : “ On all sides we have found the result of long personal experience to be the conviction that trade is essentially corrupt. . . . To live in the commercial world it appears necessary to adopt its ethical code : neither exceeding nor falling short of it, — neither being less honest nor more honest. Those who sink below its standard are expelled ; while those who rise above it are either pulled down to it or ruined. As, in self-defense, the civilized man becomes savage among savages; so, it seems that, in self-defense, the scrupulous trader is obliged to become as little scrupulous as his competitors. It has been said that the law of the animal creation is — Eat and be eaten ; and of our trading community it may similarly be said that its law is — Cheat or be cheated. A system of keen competition, carried on, as it is, without adequate moral restraint, is very much a system of commercial cannibalism. Its alternatives are — Use the same weapons as your antagonists, or be conquered and devoured.”

This essay was written nearly a half century ago, when the position of a tradesman in England was something better than that of a lackey. No son of the great Argyle yet sold tea, nor had the scions of stately houses begun to flock to city markets with the express object of making money in trade. They do not thus far take gayly to retailinguseful commodities, but they take almost greedily to various forms of money lending; though, in the hands of Jews, this was thought by Christians, for centuries, to be but a scurvy pursuit. This knightly approval of the hitherto vulgar has much to encourage us, though it may not wholly rescue the higgling of the market from its knaveries.

Of the tart comments of Lange and Mill on commercial practices, it may be said confidently that their own writings show that they were dealing with the abuses of trade, and not with its uses. The cheating and the buccaneering connected with trade sting Spencer into indiscriminate protests that seem an impeachment of the entire industrial and trade process, which is commercialism, unless we choose arbitrarily to apply this word to whatever is evil in our industrial life. The products which constitute wealth must in some way be exchanged, and the methods of these exchanges must be organized. What names shall we give to those trade functions ? Shall we invent a new word, or shall we retain commercialism, with the knowledge that it must, like other race forces, include the evil with the good ?

After writing the words “ trade is essentially corrupt,” Spencer shows us that he does n’t quite mean it. He not only speaks of “the large amount of honest dealing,” but adds, “There is no good reason for believing that the trading classes are intrinsically worse than other classes.” He then straightway exposes with much skill the frailties in other professions. Nor does he fall into the error of many socialists, who would have us believe that, if it were not for our present business régime, all other callings, like medicine, letters, law, and politics would forthwith be clean and disinterested.

By no torturing of the word can commercialism be made to bear so heavy a burden. Average human nature, with its undisciplined hungers, underlies this and all other ways of winning power. It has come about that no symbol of what man desires has quite the fascination that attaches to money. With neither question nor delay, it exchanges for all other forms of wealth. As no other, it opens the way to every satisfaction, save the rarest and highest, for which ordinary folk do not agonize. To possess this medium of exchange a part of the race will sacrifice most other values.

Because the most dazzling prizes in this kind are connected with the market and trade, ambitious men flock thither and play the game according to their character, as they play all other games, — love, war, or politics. Even in the excesses of these “ men of the market,” they usually act with the consent of the community in which they live. A corporation wants a franchise for a street railway, and it wants it at the earliest possible date. The bolder officials say plainly, that, if it is to be done in business fashion, legislatures or city councils must be manipulated.

Now it happens that the whole community wants quickness, as the business man wants it. Society is impatient for speedy and imposing results. This is the atmosphere in which our hardiest business men live in common with most of their neighbors. If there is a twist in the character of the petty retailer, he plays the game just as disreputably as the most rakish millionaire. Blood sister to these is the woman who, with more or less indirection, lies her pretty things through the Custom House in known violation of the law of her own land. Of the same kin is that multitude of those whose delight is in extremes of cheapness that are a direct premium on dishonesty, or inconsistent with a living wage to the workers, as in the sweat-shop, or in the many uses of child labor.

While low-priced commodities are as much a boon to people of small resources as are higher wages, there are countless forms of cheapness under which dishonesty is organized with deliberate intent to trick the public. They may take shape in arbitrary rebates to favored persons, or in a “ cut-price ” drug store, where articles known for their genuineness and excellence are advertised at cost. If one asks in these jugglers’ shops for the honest article, the main occupation behind the counter is to persuade the customer that some adulterated article, at half the price, is quite as good. This succeeds often enough to make the imposition profitable. Necessity, ignorance, or greed on the part of the customer gives enormous scope to these humbug wiles.

It is again the very essence of the whole gambling spirit, and the protean shapes it takes in the community, to get an advantage without an equivalent. Yet from top to bottom, this temper permeates society. It may be nearly as common among factory operatives as in a club of the idle rich. Newsboys, miners, and dagos may do far more gambling in proportion to their means than any class of the well-to-do, as it is almost a primary occupation among many primitive peoples who have no commercialism whatever.

Admitting, then, to the full the dreary list of sinister facts that are a part of trade, there is no namable class among us that has not its deliberate share in a common guilt. Most of us directly or indirectly are “ in it,” and give continuance to the ills by our own easy acquiescence in accepting the fruits.

I have often heard a literary man in a fine frenzy of resentment against commercialism, although at regular intervals he went into deliberate partnership with the object of his scorn. I have heard a clergyman very eloquent against trade abuses upon which much of his church and charitable work directly depended, and still more indirectly depended. I have known an Arts and Crafts Society many of whose members were very superior in their belief that commercialism was the best synonym for general degeneracy, yet this admirable association, as it got to work, became definitely commercial. One of the leaders told me, “ The truth is, we can’t do any work as an organization, without adopting trade principles.”

This was said apologetically and with regret, yet the society was justified from its own point of view. It was in no sense primarily a money-making institution. This would have been its defeat. Its controlling aim was the artistic education of the community. That a market had to be organized, and trade relations established to connect the worker and the buyer ; that the society came to act as middleman, taking a profit on articles sold, was commercial, but it was this wholly freed from abuses.

I have known a society to fail and close its doors because it would not compromise even to this extent, and its failure was deserved. It was trying to meet a problem by running away from it. Trade alliances may be formed that are as honorable as any of life’s activities. Our first plain duty is to stop telling lies about trade as a whole. By far the larger part of business is carried on in decent and uneventful ways, with open competition on every hand. Innumerable shops, mills, stores, — even the department caravansaries, — are so pitted against one another in unfenced fields, that their very existence is conditioned on serving the public with better and cheaper products. They rest solidly upon a credit system that assumes the competence and general integrity of those in control. Much more than three fourths of our wealthmaking and distributing is of this character.

The so-called trust touches hardly ten per cent of our commodities. No class that can be named has, upon the whole, more readiness and ability for good citizenship than that of those who have gained their moral strength by carrying business burdens. Proofs of this are at hand in most communities where hard and unpaid service to the public is given by business men. It is as unfair to say that the trade activities which engage these men are in disgrace, as to say that religion, education, or law is in disgrace. There are men who direct science and invention to evil objects. To this degree, such persons are, or ought to be, under ban. In no other sense should commercialism be under condemnation. The use of its mechanism to further huge schemes has set its ugly stamp on so many shady ventures, that we confuse this occasional use with the incalculably greater service which organized industry renders.

It is these excesses of the “ dramatic tenth of business ” which justly excite our pessimistic humors. The winners in this game often have the gamblers’ vices. They riot in showy expenditures. Their pleasures must have the glare and spice of extravagance. Order and restraint become as intolerable to them as to a prostitute. Yet the very glitter and loudness of their lives fix upon them a degree of attention grotesquely out of proportion to their real share in our national life. They are as exceptional as purposed fraud is exceptional in the entire volume of business. Seen upon the background of the whole, it is partial and occasional, rather than uniform and organic.

The world’s first and most imperious concern is to get its living. The methods through which this is accomplished cannot always bear the seal of the later and the higher virtues. Practical exigencies are first in order, and will long remain so. Though, for the most part, bereft of beauty, they are not necessarily immoral. The exchange of commodities by the help of money, or by primitive swapping, may carry, and usually does carry, an advantage to both parties. If it were not generally so it could not go on.

Ills enough are here, as in every walk of life, but they are evils to be distinguished from things not evil. Immense energy is devoted to the art of healing, but shameless quackeries are practiced every day by armies of men and women who play upon the elemental fears and superstitions of the race. To this extent an excellent profession is in disgrace. Except by a belated theologian here and there, we no longer hear science anathematized. The dignity and universality of its service are conceded, yet it, too, is in disgrace precisely as commercialism is in disgrace. As electricity may light either a brothel or a village library, science may have many perverse uses. It enables trained men to use their skill in adulterating foods, medicines, drinks, knowing that lying labels will be attached with express intent to deceive the buyer. A stigma so far rests upon science, or, more strictly, upon the men who use it basely. In no other sense can commercialism be brought to judgment. There is this large difference. Into trade and commerce the main energies of our people are poured. It is overwhelmingly the occupation of the many and of the strong. In bulk and intensity it is supreme. In proportion to this mass of effort, has it more abuses than chemistry ? Has the average business man more or subtler temptations than the doctor, the lawyer, or the clergyman ? I do not believe it, different as the temptations may be. It is, moreover, by this yielding to temptation that the case is to be judged in every calling. It is in each case the man we are criticising, and not the field in which he works. We do not say that electricity is good or bad, farther than men direct it to social hurt or to social welfare. Politics is in disgrace enough, yet no jot or tittle farther than men demean themselves in working it. In the hand of the gamester, commercialism may turn to piracy or petty pilfering, but it is against him and his kind that the gravamen always holds.

Nor is much bettering likely to come, faster than the intellectual and moral recognition of this fact. President Hadley is right when he asks that business turpitude be met by social ostracism. It must be met, too, not by easy and safe abstractions, but definitely and personally. In a social club, I once saw a man not only refuse to shake the proffered hand of a well-known financier, but deliberately turn his back upon him. The reason was given to me thus : “ He gives regularly the largest amounts in my ward to corrupt members of the city government. He has done it systematically for years, because he wants to break certain ordinances, or get an extension of franchises for a corporation in which he is a heavy owner. When I charged him with this, he got mad and said, ‘ Well, do you think me fool enough to want what you call honest men there ? ’ I cut him for that, and shall never recognize him socially or personally again.”

This gentleman had large interests of his own, and ran some risks because of this uncompromising act. Yet the strongholds of ill-doing are never taken, and the area of social morality extended, by any other means. A hundred men in that club knew this freebooter’s character as well as the man who cut him. Most of them would have been very lofty and severe with a rogue in fustian, but before this well-groomed financier, with power, a palace, and costly toys, there was general and smiling deference. There is no knavish ruse in trade so dangerous as this humiliating fact of our common cowardice. Nor is there any cure apart from its cure in ourselves. As long as the fleshpots of utmost attainable wealth are desired above all things, we shall be speciously busy in framing excuses why we should not show the mettle of this gentleman at the club.

Given in any community men and women enough of his moral valor, and the most scandalous practices of commercialism would begin to diminish. It is true, they would have to be scandalous in the sense of being conspicuously and provably evil, — an evil as definite and heinous as that of using company funds to purchase walking delegates; of promoting combinations known from the start to be fraudulent, or, as in the case just cited, in which dignified officials permit the use of corporation resources to strengthen the political party from which it expects to get lawless privileges.

We are very squeamish about such unpleasant words as boycott. It is associated with insolent perversities, yet there is about as much social morality in any community as there is boycotting of persons definitely known to be evil. The eminent and telling service which a small group of plucky men has rendered to cleaner politics in Chicago has been through the boycotting of men found on examination to be personally unfit for office. It is to a Philadelphian that we owe the sentence, “ Until we get moral stamina enough to begin to boycott certain very influential persons in our city and state, we shall retain our distinction of being the worst governed city in the country.”

This by no means denies the need of many legal and administrative reforms: some approach to equity in taxation ; an extension of community power over the franchises and values that are distinctly social in their origin, and the utmost furtherance of the non-partisan conception of municipal politics. These, and many other practical duties, are still undone. They are measures, every one, that strike at private privilege in its most dangerous form. Many outer changes must go hand in hand with the transformation of our inner temper, purpose, and aim in life. There is, nevertheless, no darker delusion from which we suffer than this : that we are abject and helpless until the external and administrative reforms have been effected.

It would be but the fool’s paradise to cozen ourselves with the hope that the evils of commercialism will much abate until we desire other objects more eagerly than we desire what the overdoing of commercialism gives us, — that is, the too long list of our materialistic excesses ; the unnatural lust for bigness, glare, intensity, display, strain, and needless complication. In coming days, when the national heart, perhaps from very surfeit, sickens of all this, and looks for peace and health in simpler and less distracted ways, it may then be that our span can be lived out with new capacity for achievement more consistent with serenity, repose, and gladness.

John Graham Brooks .