Are We a Plutocracy?

Author(s): W. D. Howells
Source: The North American Review , Feb., 1894, Vol. 158, No. 447 (Feb., 1894), pp. 185-
196
Published by: University of Northern Iowa

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY ?
BY W. D. HOWELLS.

The god from whom the supremacy of the moneyed class

has its modern name was said by the Greeks, who in
vented him, to be " blind and lame, injudicious, and mighty
timorous. He is lame because large estates come slowly," they
said. " He is fearful and timorous, because rich men watch
their estates with a great deal of fear and care." He is in lineage
only a half-god, or a three-quarters god at most, and some think
him little better than an allegory. There are others who hold
that this Plutus is the same as Pluto, who rules in Hades; but
this is probably an error of those who do not understand the real
nature of capital. It is no doubt through some such error that
his name has hitherto been used to stigmatize, but it is not too
late to ask that it should be used to characterize. At any rate,
it seems to me that one may inquire without offence whether the
term plutocrat will justly characterize not only all the rich
people, but the infinitely greater number of the poor people in
this republic.
I.
I know that some will object to the word, and scent in it a
certain odor of incivism, but I do not know why it should ag
grieve any one who is not ashamed of making money. I do not
say earning money, for that is a very different thing; and to the
few among us who feel it right to earn money, but wrong to make
it, I might well offer my excuses if I called them plutocrats or
imagined them willingly consenting to a plutocracy. None
others need be afflicted either by,the name or the notion, unless
they are at heart afflicted by the thing, or have dimly or distinct
ly a bad conscience in it. The question for each one to answer

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186 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
himself, before he rejects or accepts the name or the notion of
plutocracy, is whether it is just for him to profit by another man's
labor, or, in other words, to pay another man a wage for doing
or making a thing which shall be less than the value of the thing
done or made, that he may have some margin of gain for himself
from it, without having helped do it or make it.
I am aware that this is the whole question of private capital
ism, but I am not for the present dealing with it except as a
test of plutocracy. The man who follows a trade or practises an
art, does so to make a living ; the man who goes into business,
does so to make money. These are broad distinctions, and they
do not give all the colors of motive in either case; but their gen
eral truth cannot be gainsaid. No one makes money at a trade, or
in the same sense at an art; properly speaking, money is not
made at all in the trades or in the arts, though in the arts a great
deal more money may sometimes be earned than is made in busi
ness. But business is the only means of making money, and in
these days it may be fairly said that no man gets rich by his own
labor, that no man gets rich except by the labor of others.
Whether he gets rich or not, however, the man who pays wages
with the hope of profit to himself is a plutocrat, and the man who
takes wages upon such terms, believing them right, is in principle
a plutocrat; for both approve of the gain of money which is not
earned, and agree to the sole arrangement by which the great
fortunes are won or the worship of wealth is perpetuated. I am
not saying that the worship of wealth is wrong, or that the love
of money is the root of ail evil, or that the rich man shall hardly
enter into the kingdom of heaven, or any of those things : I am
merely trying to find out whether this cult is not so common
among us that our state is not rather a plutocracy than a
democracy. The fact of any man's plutocracy is not affected by
his having the worst of the bargain, and it is not affected by his
failure to turn it to account if he has the best. The ninety-five
men who fail in business and get poor are as much plutocrats as
the other five who prosper and get rich, for the ninety-five meant
to get rich, with as worshipful a mind for Mammon as the five
had, and they believe in Mammon quite as devoutly. So I think
it unjust to devote certain millionaires among us, or all million
aires, to the popular hate, and to bemoan the immense mass of
would-be millionaires who failed in the same conditions that the

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY f 187
others prospered in. One may indeed blame the conditions
which mean failure for so many and success for so few, but one
can no more blame the good luck of the few than one can blame
the bad luck of the many.
II.
For much the same reason only a qualified compassion can be
given to the wage-takers so far as they believe that it is right for
the wage-givers to get rich on their wages, while they themselves
remain poor on them. A great deal of sympathy is asked, and a
great deal more is offered unasked, in their behalf, which might
better be kept and used in the cooler form of reason. If the
wage-taker believes the system is wrong, that it is wrong for him
to work for any employer but the state, which cannot allow it
self to exploit him or make a profit on his wages, one may, of
course, call him a miscreant or a fanatic, but one cannot deny
him a logic which is lacking to the others in their discontent.
Any other sort of wage-taker is ready at the first chance to be
come a wage-giver, and to prosper as far as he can upon a mar
gin in the value of the thing he gets some one else to make be
yond the wage he gives for making it; and with this hope in his
heart, he is as thoroughly a plutocrat as any present millionaire
of them all. Perhaps he is even more a plutocrat, for it is said
that great riches of tener inspire great loathing of riches in those
who have them than in those who have them not.
Since I believe that the vast mass of our wage-takers, either
because they have thought about it or because they have not, are
in this position, and so are potential moneyed men and potential
millionaires, I find it hard to be of their side always in their
struggles with the actual wage-givers. I have, indeed, always a
crude preference for the man who wants to make a better living,
over the man who wants to make more money ; but when I begin
to scrutinize my preference, I begin to distinguish. I begin to ask
myself why I should be in the wage-takers' camp, rather than
the wage-givers', if they are themselves ready to go over to the
enemy ^.s soon as they have money enough. This question saves
me from much intense feeling concerning strikes, which I might
otherwise wish to see carried by the wage-takers. At the end of
the ends, the wage-payers seem to be doing only what the wage
takers would do if they had the chance, and I do not see why I

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 188 TBE NORTB AMERICAN REVIEW.
should espouse their cause, simply because I know that the great
multitude of them will never have the chance. A strike for
higher wages does not at all reach the plutocratic principle and is
never against it. If the wage-takers do not like the plutocratic
principle, if they do not like the chances of the fight which must
go on under this principle, why do they perpetuate the fight ?
In asking the question, I am not saying that the fight is
wrong. I know too well that a multitude of my fellow-citizens,
so great that it is hardly worth while to count the few others,
think that the fight is a holy war, and that, if it does not make
for virtue, it makes at least for character, and if not for blessed
ness at least for manliness. I believe it is recommended on this
account to the working classes, who are invited to consider
whether, if they gave up their chances of getting worsted
in the fight, they might not have to give up the fight itself;
and these classes, for the present, seem unwilling to forego their
peculiar disadvantages, though by this time they must know that
in the actual conditions it will be with them to the end as it has
been from the beginning. In the mean time it is interesting
to consider how long the great mass of the American people
have constituted the American nation a plutocracy and not a
democracy.
III.
This, after a vast deal of talking, is still a very nice ques
tion, which one cannot handle too delicately or too diffi
dently. On the economic side, unless we are the more de
ceived by appearances, one might say that there was really no
such question, and never had been; but that here as everywhere
else, the conditions always forbade a democratic management.
Up to the present moment no business enterprise in the United
States seems to have been carried on by universal suffrage, any
more than in Russia, or the other parts of Christendom where
universal suffrage is unknown. Our wage-takers are in pre
cisely the case of wage-takers all over the world, and have not
only not a controlling voice in the management of affairs that
concern them far more vitally than they concern our wage-givers,
but they have no voice at all. This may be right, or it may
be wrong, but it is certain that financially, industrially,
economically, we are not a nation, a people, a solidarity, but a

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY? 189
congeries of " infinitely repellent particles." Politically, w
stand before the world as Americans against England, or Franc
or Spain, whichever threatens our pride or our prosperity
but economically we are all at war one with another, quit
as ruthlessly as we are at war with Englishmen, Frenchme
Spaniards. Politically, we can agree upon what is to our adv
tage by a popular vote, but economically we can never agree b
that means, because politically our advantage is always individ
ual, and economically it is always several. The fact does no
need illustration; it illustrates itself from every man's experien
to every man's reason. It is clear that business can never b
democratically transacted, but must always fall to the control
one strong head, or long head, in the present economic co
ditions. Every private business is at war not only with eve
like private business, but it is at war within itself between th
employer and the employee, the wage-giver and the wage-taker
and this state of double warfare can only be despotically main
tained. If the employees were suffered to canvass any project th
might find that their advantage lay apart from their employer
with the employees of some other employer, and they can no mo
be suffered to do this or to vote upon such a canvass than the s
ordinates of an army could be suffered to reason and to act up
their reason in the presence of an enemy, with the chances of
final fraternization.

IV.
The question that remains is, How far has business characte
ized our politics ? Has business come into control of the go
ernment, or is the government still in the hands of the people
Do parties or persons bribe voters in New Hampshire or N
York ? Do firms or corporations corrupt legislatures ? Ha
United States Senators bought seats in the most august assemb
in the world ? Have trusts and syndicates darkened counsel in
the judiciary ? Have large contributors to election funds receiv
high office from the executive ? Have contractors even tempte
aldermen, and have the bpsses behind the thrones found their
count in tacitly growing rich in a private station ?
I affirm none of these things, and until I have found some
journalist who admits the guilt of his own party while accusin
his esteemed contemporary's, or some boss who confesses that h

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 190 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
is not so poor as his affluence makes him appear, I do not think it
would be safe to do so. The proof in all such cases has as little
weight with the impartial mind as the overwhelming evidence, say,
that there are veridical phantoms. Still, it must be owned that
there are vast numbers of people who believe that these things
are so ; not so vast as the number that believe in ghosts : but a
majority of the Americans so great that their vote would not
leave a single elector to the partisans of an opposite theory in
a presidential election. It is hard to believe that there is no
truth in them, just as it is hard to believe that the spirits of the
departed have not upon some emergent occasions revisited the
earth. I can account for their acceptance by supposing that the
minds of the whole people have been poisoned by bad men, who
have instilled into them a suspicion of guilt in others which every
American knows himself personally incapable of.
Or is there here and there an American who secretly, and
quite within the fastnesses of his heart, realizes that, being per
plexed and wrought upon in the extreme, he would give or take
a bribe ? Or, if not quite that, is there some American who is
conscious that, as a matter of business merely, he might apply
business principles to politics ? We all know how very common
business principles are with us, and the thing is not so wholly
impossible. We need not inquire very nicely what business
principles are; some business men will do what other business men
will not do; but if the popular notion that business is business be
correct, and if in this sense business is a thing not wholly indis
tinct from righteousness, it can be easily seen that the passage
from an axiom to an action need traverse no great moral space.
If we once admit that business principles have been applied in
procuring statutes, decisions, contracts, and appointments, as
most Americans believe, then it might certainly be said that we
have a plutocracy, and not a democracy.
In certain forms, indeed, we have grown more democratic.
We have no longer that distinctly plutocratic form, the property
qualification of the suffrage. But if votes are bought and sold,
the spirit of money-making, of plutocracy, arrives in our politics
all the same ; and if there is a change in the motive of those who
seek public office, if men have come to desire it for the profit
rather than the honor, we are more plutocratic than we were
when we were less democratic. For a plutocracy is not so much,

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY? 191
or not so merely, the rule of the moneyed class as it is the p
cal embodiment of the money-making ideal; and the mass w
have no money at all may cling as fondly and worshipfully to
ideal as the class who have millions of money. In fact, if
have ceased to be a democracy and have become a plutocra
it is because the immense majority of the American pe
have no god before Mammon; though they may have go
besides him, he is the first. If we have really come to the p
in election, legislation, and administration that so many bel
we have reached, we have come to it not because any lim
number of men have pushed us on, but because the way that
were mostly going led to it. We may plead that our opportu
of prosperity, transcending any prosperity known before, tempt
us beyond our strength ; but if the student of our status is to sy
pathize with any one of us rather than with any other, it mus
through that humanity which commiserates misfortune bec
it is misfortune, and will not ask itself whether it may not
merited misfortune. To this humanity riches may be pitiabl
too, and a millionaire may inspire as tender a compassion
pauper. Perhaps too little has been made of the suffering
the rich ; no one but they can know how hard the life of luxu
the life of satiety, or even the life of fashion may be.
V.
The mere absence of statistics on such a point will not keep
us from speculating as to the truth in the case; and a certain
obscurity attending this whole inquiry piques rather than blunts
the curiosity. It cannot be supposed that a great people would
have voluntarily become a plutocracy without finding their ac
count in it, and it would be very interesting to know what this
is. If a plutocracy is a decline * from a democracy, the study of
the fact will have something of the pathetic and poignant charm
that clings to ruin. If it is a rise, the contemplation of it must
stir the patriotic heart with pride, and impress the alien with the
grandeur of the spectacle.
In either case, when did we begin to pass from the democratic
to the plutocratic stage of our existence as a people ? There was
no dramatic moment which history could lay her finger upon
with confidence, and the transition was not the effect of any con
scious purpose. But I suppose the impulse toward it was always

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192 TBE NORTB AMERICAN REVIEW.
latent in us, not perhaps more tightly coiled than the same spring
in any other nation, but having more effect because from the
first hour of our national life the business spirit was supreme
with us. We came into being at a time in the world's life when
this spirit was entering upon its dominion, and there was no tra
dition or institution to hinder it or to hamper it with us. We had
neither prince, nor priest, nor patrician to stand against the
trader, the manufacturer, the business man, and it was only a
question of very little time when these should rule. Of course,
no one clearly foresaw this, and even in the retrospect there are
appearances that cloud a perfect vision. The chief men in the
new state were apparently the statesmen, and for a long time nearly
all men were so poor in it that it seemed destined forever to be
the free domain of an equal manhood. The poet, when he
imagined that
*' God said : I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more,"

figured him further as proclaiming :

" I will divide my goods ;
Call in the wretch and slave:
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.
" I will have never a noble,
No lineage counted great;
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state."

But when it came down to business, as our phrase is, and

there was a call to go and " cut down trees in the forest, and trim
the straightest boughs " for the wooden house which was to be the
capitol of the new state, not only the digger in the harvest-field
was summoned, not only the hireling, but " him that hires," too ;
and, without doubt, the business man, the moneyed man, the
capitalist, was early on the ground to charge the market price
for the timber used, and bid off the contract for building the
temple of our liberties. Even at that day he must have be
gun to feel himself a public benefactor because he "made
work" for the choppers and ploughmen at wages which se
cured him a handsome profit. He was theftrst-born of Lais
sez-faire, and as an eldest son he took over the whole property, so
that he should be able to provide for the brood of artisans, opera
tives, miners, stokers, sailors, stevedores, laborers, who came

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY? 193
after him. These little brothers of his, though they hate h
envy him his power of using their work to his advantage,
would mostly like to be in his place. They declare that h
never provided fairly for them, but they conceive nothing b
than the part he plays in civilization ; and I venture to say
if I were to speak lightly of him I should seem to most of
fellow-citizens, of all classes and callings, little better than o
the wicked. But I have no wish to speak lightly of him or
wise than historically, or, at the worst, analytically ; and I
that I may say, without offence, that during the whole peri
our generous youth, before the triumphant close of the great ci
war gave us our full growth and solidified and hardened us
was comparatively in abeyance. There was still thought
some good, which, if we had not a very definite vision of it,
better good than the material good which he sought a
supreme blessing. There were always, of course, mighty
before Agamemnon, but before the war the large fortunes
such as would have seemed little fortunes after the war
greatest crimes against the suffrage, the legislature, the judi
would have seemed small crimes, and political life was not y
low in the popular esteem that a high-minded man might
make it his career without the misgiving of his friends. It
still ennobled by the question of slavery, by the highest in
that ever divided a people, or parted the just from the un
When that question had its answer in the last reason of
and passed from our politics, our politics lost the motive tha
carried them upward and onward. They became, in a se
business affairs, with no question but the minor question of
service reform to engage the idealist's fancy or the moralist
science. After the war we had, as no other people had in
world, the chance of devoting ourselves strictly to busines
buying cheap and selling dear, and of marketing our wa
home and abroad.

VI.
I need not tell the tale of our material achievements: it is so
familiar and, upon the whole, it is so tedious. With us, Plutus
may have remained blind, but if he remained lame he has
proved himself a very active cripple. He has gone far and he has
gone fast; but there are those who doubt whether he has arrived
YOL. clyiii.?no. 447. 13

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194 TBE NORTB AMERICAN REVIEW.
everywhere. They say that the defects of our advantages are so
terrible that the wealth we have heaped us is like witch's gold in
its malign and mocking effects. If we have built many railroads,
we have wrecked many; and those vast transcontinental lines,
which, with such a tremendous expenditure of competitive force,
we placed in the control of monopolies, have mostly passed into the
hands of receivers, the agents of an unconscious state socialism.
The tramps walk the land like the squalid spectres of the laborers
who once tilled it. The miners have swarmed up out of their
pits, to starve in the open air. In our paradise of toil, myriads
of workingmen want work ; the water is shut off in the factory,
the fires are cold in the foundries. The public domain, where in
some sort the poor might have provided for themselves, has been
lavished upon corporations, and its millions of acres have melted
away as if they had been a like area of summer clouds.
It is true that we still have the trusts, the syndicates, the
combinations of roads, mines, and markets, the whole apparatus.
If there is much cold and hunger, the price of food and fuel is yet so
high as to afford a margin to the operators in coal and grain and
meat. The great fortunes in almost undiminished splendor, re
main the monuments of a victory that would otherwise look a
good deal like defeat, and they will be an incentive to the young
in the hour of our returning prosperity. The present adversity
cannot last forever ; and if there are many thousands of men and
women who cannot outlast it, or live to see the good time which
is coming back, this has been the order of events from the begin
ning of the world, and we must not shut our eyes to the gain
because it involves a great deal of loss.
If the owners of these great fortunes are often, or sometimes,
men of low civic ideals and small civic uses, it must be allowed, on
the other hand, that men of no fortune at all are often, or some
times, no better. Whether a close scrutiny of their respective
qualities and characters would tell more for the rich, or more for
the poor, in the regard of the moralist, is by no means certain,
and is perhaps beside the main question. But there is no doubt
that they imply one another; that in our system they must both
exist, that neither can exist without the other. There must
always be this contrast, it appears, for it is said by the statisti
cians, by the ready reckoners whose figures cannot lie, that
if all the wealth of the nation were equally divided, we should

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 ARE WE A PLUTOCRACY? 195
none of us have above six hundred dollars; and it ought to
be plain how much better it is that one should have twelv
hundred, and another none; or one should have several millions
and several millions should have none. Such points need n
argument with any man who has money?say, money enough t
buy this copy of the Review ; to the man who has not mon
enough for that purpose, I cannot suppose that I am addressing
myself, and I cannot stay to convince him. If I must addre
him, I would rather spend the time in persuading him that it
he and such as he who are responsible, or chiefly responsible, fo
the perpetuation of a plutocracy among us, if we have a pl
tocracy.
I should be ashamed to use the word to stigmatize any class of
my fellow-citizens, even the poorer class whom no one need be
afraid of offending, but I wish to use it only to characterize, as I
said in the beginning. In this truer use, indeed, it will charac
terize the status in the whole civilized world ; and perhaps it
will characterize the status with us only a little more strictly, a
little more closely. The plutocratic spirit is a bond uniting all
the modern nations, otherwise so discordant and antipathetic :
Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Americans, we are
alike brothers in that solidarity. Bat with some of the peoples
whom it joins, it seems not to be the first thing. Even England,
so long the chief, and still the first, to make the plutocratic
principle in the industries a cult and a creed, has shown of late
a shrinking from the full effect of its logic. It may strike the
reader as rather a droll notion that the English should be thought
the earliest to acknowledge the opposite principle of humanity,
but a little study of the facts will make it look less grotesque.
It is among the inventors of Laissez-faire that the inhuman
ity of Laissez-faire has repeatedly met its severest rebukes.
It is the English who have finally realized, in the forms
of law or in legal usage, the wrong of paying the workman
the least he will take for his work, and in their imperial
contracts have stipulated that the contractor shall pay his hands
the trades-union rates of wages; while the War Office has adopted
the eight-hour rate without decrease of pay. It is the English
who have rejected the contract system altogether in some of their
municipal dealings with labor, and have gone directly to the
workingmen for the work that they wanted done. It is the

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196 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
English who have built decent public tenements where the poor
may be housed at cost, and need not pay landlords ten, and twenty,
and a hundred per cent, for shelter in dens and styes. It is
English public opinion which has recognized the principle that
the miner's wages must never go below a certain sum, no matter
how low the price of coal may fall. These things are the effect
of a larger humanity than is yet active among us, and are a con
fession that business is not the supreme English ideal. Is
business, is money-making, the supreme American ideal ?
VII.
If the poor American does not like it, or if he does
not prefer a plutocracy to a democracy, he has the affair in his
own hands, for he has an overwhelming majority of the votes.
At the end, as in the beginning, it is he who is responsible, and
if he thinks himself unfairly used, it is quite for him to see that
he is used fairly ; for, slowly or swiftly, it is he who ultimately
makes and unmakes the laws, by political methods which, if still
somewhat clumsy, he can promptly improve. It is time, in fine,
that he should leave off railing at the rich, who are no more to
blame than he, who are perhaps not so much to blame, since they
are infinitely fewer than the poor, and have but a vote apiece, un
less the poor sell them more. If we have a plutocracy, it may be
partly because the rich want it, but it is infinitely more because
the poor choose it or allow it.
W. D. Howells.

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