Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

E >> Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895

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"THE DEBTOR CLASS"

A Washington correspondent, describing, the other day, the motives
which animated the majority in Congress in its performances on
the currency question, said, and we believe truly, that most of
the inflationists in that body knew very well what the evils of
paper-money were, so that argument on that point was wasted on them.
But they knew also that large issues of irredeemable paper would
make it easier for debtors to pay off their creditors, and came to
the conclusion that as the number of debtors in the country was
greater than the number of creditors, it was wise policy for a
politician to curry favor with the former by helping them to cheat
the persons who had lent them money or sold them goods. This
explanation of the conduct of the majority may be a startling and
sad one, but that it is highly probable nobody can deny. All the
debates help to confirm it. In every speech, made either in
opposition to resumption or in favor of inflation, a portion of the
community known as "the debtor class" has appeared as the object of
the orator's tenderest solicitude. The great reason for not
returning to specie payments hitherto has been the fear that
contraction would press hard on "the debtor class;" it is for "the
debtor class" we need more paper "_per capita_;" and indeed, no
matter what proposal we make in the direction of financial reform,
we are met by pictures of the frightful effects which will be
produced by it on the "debtor class." Moreover, in listening to its
champions, a foreigner might conclude that in America debtors either
all live together in a particular part of the country, or worse, a
particular costume, like mediaeval Jews, and are divided from the
rest of the community by tastes and habits, so that it would be
proper for an American to put "debtor" or "creditor" on his card as
a description of his social status. He might, too, not unnaturally
begin to mourn over the negligence of the framers of the
Constitution in not recognizing this marked distribution of American
society. Truly, he would say, the debtors ought to have
representatives in the Senate and House to look after their special
interests; these unfortunate and helpless men ought not to be left
to the charitable care of volunteers like Messrs. Morton, and Logan,
and Kelly. The great sham and pretence with which America has so
long tried to impose on Europe, that there were no classes in the
United States, ought at last to be formally swept away, and proper
legal provision made for the protection of a body of men which has
been in all ages the object of atrocious oppression, and seems in
America, strange to say, to constitute the larger portion of the
community. In travelling through the country, too, he would be
constantly on the lookout for the debtors. He would ask in the
cities for the "debtors' quarter," and when introduced to a
gentleman in the cars or in the hotels, would inquire privately
whether he was a debtor or a creditor, so as to avoid hurting his
feelings by indiscreet allusion to specie or contraction. His
amazement would be very great on learning that there was no way of
telling whether an American citizen was either debtor or creditor;
that the "debtor class" was not to be found, as such, in any part of
the country, or, indeed, anywhere but in the brains of the Logans
and Mortons, and was introduced into the debates simply as a John
Doe or Richard Roe, to give a little vividness to the speaker's
railings against property.

Now, as in every civilized society, the vast majority of the
population of this country are in debt, to some slight degree. It is
only paupers, criminals, and lunatics who owe absolutely nothing.
The day-laborer is pretty sure to have a small bill at the grocer's,
and all his neighbors, in the ascending grades of commercial
respectability, no matter how prompt and accurate they may be in the
discharge of their obligations, are sure to owe the butcher and
baker and milkman a greater or less amount. In fact the conduct of
life on a cash basis would be impossible or intolerable. Of course,
too, there are scattered all over the country men who owe a great
deal of money and to whom little is due, and whose interest it would
be to have the coinage adulterated. But then the number of these
persons is very small, and they are mostly great speculators, who
pass for rich men, and whose interests Congress is in reality not in
the least desirous of protecting. Poor men, as a rule, are hardly
ever greatly in debt, because nobody will trust them. We suspect
that the number of those in this city who could borrow fifty dollars
without security would not be found to be over one-twentieth of the
population. The persons to whom loans are made by banks, insurance
companies, and other institutions are almost all men of wealth or
men who have the conduct of great enterprises, and do not need
legislation to help them to take care of themselves. They are great
merchants, or manufacturers, or brokers, or contractors, or
railroad-builders. In fact, in so far as the debtors can be called a
class, they form a very small class, and a class of remarkable
shrewdness and of enormous power, over whom it is ludicrous for the
Government to exercise a fatherly care.

The bulk of the population in this, as in every moderately
prosperous community in the western world is composed of creditors.
The creditor class, in other words, contains the great body of the
American people, and any legislation intended to enable debtors to
cheat is aimed at nineteen-twentieths, at the very least, of
American citizens. Any mail who remains very long in the position of
a debtor simply, and acquires no footing as a creditor, disappears
from the surface of society. Bankruptcy or the house of correction
is pretty sure to overtake him. It would be well-nigh impossible in
this large city or in any other to find a man who had no pecuniary
claims on someone else. The humblest hod-carrier becomes a creditor
every day after making his first ascent of the ladder, and remains
so until Saturday night, and continually replaces himself in "the
creditor class," as long as life and health remain to him; and the
same phenomenon presents itself in all fields of industry. Every
sewing-girl and maid-servant is looking forward to a payment of
earned money, and has the strongest interest in knowing for certain
what its purchasing power will be.

All depositors in savings-banks, and their number in New York City
is greater than that of the voters, belong to the creditor class;
all holders of policies of insurances, all owners of government
bonds and State and bank stocks, belong to it also. The Western
farmers and house-owners who have borrowed money at the East on bond
and mortgage, who probably make as near an approach to a debtor
class as any other body or persons in the community, and whom
Congressional demagogues probably hoped to serve by enabling them to
outwit their creditors, even these are not simply or mainly debtors.
Any man who is carrying on his business with borrowed money, on
which he pays eight or ten per cent., must be every week putting
other people in debt to him or he would speedily be ruined. The
means of paying those who have trusted him is acquired by his
trusting others. Either he is selling goods on credit, or entering
into contracts, or rendering services which give him the position of
a creditor, and make it of the last importance to him that the value
of money and the state of the public mind about money should not be
materially different six months hence from what they are now.

Of course there is more than one way of defining the term
"self-interest." There is one sense in which it is used by children,
savages, and thieves, and which makes it mean immediate
gratification, and this appears to be the sense in which it is used
by the inflationists in Congress, in considering what is for the
good of those Western men who owe money at the East. In that sense,
it is a good thing for a man to lie, cheat, steal, and embezzle
whenever it shall appear that by so doing he will satisfy his
appetites or put money in his pockets. But civilized and commercial,
to say nothing of Christian, society is founded on the theory that
men look forward and expect to carry on business for several years,
and to lay up money for their old age, and establish their children
in life, and that they recognize the necessity of self-restraint and
loyalty to engagements. The doctrines, on the other hand, which are
preached in Congress about the best mode of dealing with debts--that
is, with other people's money--have never before been heard in a
civilized legislature, or anywhere outside of a council of
buccaneers, and, if acted on by the community, would produce
anarchy. The fact that Morton and Butler, who preach them and get
them embodied in forms of words called "acts," are legislators,
disguises, but ought not to disguise, the other fact, that these two
men are simply playing the part of receivers or "fences." There
probably never was a more striking illustration of the immorality in
which, as it was long ago remarked, any principle of government is
sure to land people if pushed to its last extreme, than the theory
which is now urged on our attention--that superiority of numbers
will justify fraud; or, in other words, that if the number of those
who borrow should happen to be greater than the number of those who
lend, "a vote" is all that is needed to wipe out the debts, either
openly or by payment in bits of paper or pebbles. Of course, the
converse of this would also be true--that if the lenders were in a
majority, they would be justified in reducing the debtors to
slavery. If the question of humanity or brotherhood were raised as
an objection, that, too, could be settled by a ballot. We laugh at
the poor African who consults his wooden fetish before he takes any
step in the business of his wretched and darkened life; but when a
Caucasian demagogue tries to show us that the springs of justice and
truth are to be found in a comparison of ten thousand bits of paper
with nine thousand similar bits, we listen with gravity, and are
half inclined to believe that there is something in it.

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION

It is quite evident that with, the multiplication of colleges, which
is very rapid, it will, before long, become impossible for the
newspapers to furnish the reports of the proceedings in and about
commencement which they now lay before their readers with such
profuseness. The long letters describing with wearisome minuteness
what has been described already fifty times will undoubtedly before
long be given up. So also, we fancy, will the reports of the
"baccalaureate sermons," if these addresses are to retain their
value as pieces of parting advice to young men. There is nothing in
the newspaper literature, on the whole, less edifying, and sometimes
more amusing, than the reporter's _precis_ of pulpit discourses,
so thoroughly does he deprive them of force find vigor and point,
and often of intelligibility. The ordinary sermon addressed on Sunday
to the ordinary congregation deals with a great variety of topics,
and from many different points of view, and with more or less
diversity of method. The baccalaureate sermon, on the other hand,
consists, from the necessity of the case, in the main of advice to
youths at their entrance on life, and the substance of such discourses
can, in the nature of things, undergo no great change from year to
year, and must be strikingly similar in all the colleges. Any
freshness they may have they must owe to the rhetorical powers of
particular preachers, and even these cannot greatly vary in dealing
with so familiar a theme. What the old man has to say to the young man,
the teacher to the pupil, the father to the son, at the moment when
the gates of the great world are flung open to the college graduate,
has undergone but little modification in a thousand years, and has
become very well known to all collegians long before they take their
degree. To make the parting words of warning and encouragement tell
on ears that are now eager for other and louder sounds, everything
that can be done needs to be done to preserve their freshness and
their pathos, and certainly nothing could do as much to deprive them
of both one and the other as hashing them up annually in a slovenly
report as part of the news of the day.

It is not, however, the advice contained in baccalaureate sermons,
but all advice to young men, that needs in our time to be dealt out
with greater circumspection and economy. Authority has within the
last hundred or even fifty years undergone a serious loss of power,
and this loss of power has shown itself nowhere more markedly than
in the work of education. It has indeed almost completely changed
the relation of parents and children, and teachers and scholars, so
that it is now almost as necessary to prove the reasonableness and
utility of any course of action which is required of boys as of
mature men. Persuasion has, in other words, taken the place of
command, and there is nobody left whose dictum owes much of its
weight to his years or his office. Boys as well as their elders now
expect advice to be based on personal experience, and do not listen
with any great seriousness or deference to admonitions the value of
which the utterer has not himself personally tested.

It follows, therefore, that the persons whom the young men of our
time hear most readily on the conduct of life are those who have had
practical acquaintance with the difficulties of living up to the
ideals which are so eloquently painted in the college chapel, and
who have found out in their own persons what it costs to be pure and
upright, and faithful and industrious, and persistent in the
struggle that goes on in the various callings which lie outside the
college walls. For this reason, probably, no addresses at
commencement have the value of those which are delivered now and
then by men who have come back for a brief day to tell the next
generation of the way life looks to those who for years have been
wrestling with its problems, and have had actual experience of the
virtues and defects of that early equipment and training on which
such enormous sums are now spent in this country. The more advice
from this quarter young men get the better. Nobody can talk so
effectively to them at the moment when they are about to face the
world on their own responsibility as the lawyers and merchants and
ministers and politicians who have been facing it for twenty-five or
thirty years with all the outward signs of success. If it were
possible for every college in the country to get one such man at
commencement whose powers of expression would do justice to his
experience, and who for this one day in the year would without fear
or favor tell what he thought about success and about the conditions
of success--about the kind of troubles which beset men in the
callings with which he is most familiar--we should probably soon
have a body of advice so impressive and fruitful that it would serve
the needs and excite the interest of more than one generation. The
young have been told to be good until they have grown weary of
hearing it, particularly as it is always represented to them as a
comparatively simple matter, and when they go out in the world and
find what a hard and complex thing duty is they are very apt to look
back to the ethical instruction of their college as when in college
they looked back to the admonitions of the nursery, and return to
their alma mater in later years with much the feeling with which a
man visits a kindly old grandmother.

But commencements certainly draw forth nothing so curious as the
newspaper article addressed to the graduating class, and which now
seems to be a regular part of the summer's editorial work. It seems
to have one object in view, and only one, and that is preventing the
graduate from thinking much of his education and his degree, or
supposing that they will be of any particular use to him in his
entrance on life, or make him any more acceptable to the community.
He is warned that they will raise him in nobody's estimation, and
prove rather a hinderance than a help to him in getting a living,
and that it will be well for him to begin his career by trying to
forget that he has ever been in college at all. Not unfrequently the
discourse closes with a suggestion or hint that the best university
is, after all, the office of "a great daily," and that the kindest
thing a fond father could do for a promising boy would be to start
him as a local reporter and make him get his first experience of
life in the collection of "city items." There is in all this the
expression, though in a somewhat grotesque form, of a widespread
popular feeling that nothing is worthy of the name of education
which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly and dexterously.
Considering with how large a proportion of the human race the mere
feeding and clothing of the body is the first and hardest of tasks,
there is nothing at all surprising in this view. But the
preservation and growth of civilization in any country depends much
on the extent to which it is able out of its surplus production to
provide some at least of its people with the means of cherishing and
satisfying nobler appetites than hunger and thirst. The immense sum
which is now spent every year on colleges--misspent though much of
it may be--and the increasing number of students who throng to them,
regardless of the fact that the training they get may make them at
first feel a little strange and helpless in the fierce struggle for
meat and drink, show that the increasing wealth of the nation is
accompanied by an increasing recognition of the fact that life,
after all, is not all living, that there are gains which cannot be
entered in any ledger, and that a man may carry about with him,
through a long and it may be outwardly unfortunate career, sources
of pleasure and consolation which are none the less precious for
being unsalable and invisible.

"ORGANS"

The untimely decease of the _Republic_, the paper which was set up
some months ago to express in a semi-official way the views of the
Administration and its immediate adherents on public questions, has
a good deal that is tragic about it, as far as its principal
conductor is concerned. That a man of as much experience of politics
and of newspapers as Mr. Norvell, the editor, had, should have
supposed it possible to start a daily morning paper in this city at
a time when a successful daily is worth millions, and when there are
four already in possession of the field, without any other claims on
popular attention than its being the mouth-piece of the leading
politicians of the party in power, and with a capital which in his
dreams only reached $500,000, and in fact only $40,000, is a curious
though sad illustration of the power of the press over the
imagination even of persons long familiar with it. The failure of
the enterprise, however distressing in some of its aspects, is
valuable as establishing more conspicuously and firmly than ever two
facts of considerable importance in relation to journalism. One is,
that when politicians so deeply desire an organ as to be willing to
set one up for the exclusive use of the party, it is a sure sign
that the party is in serious danger of extinction. The other is,
that the public mind is so fully made up that the position of a
newspaper ought to be a judicial one, that all attempts to make a
paper avowedly partisan can only be saved from commercial failure by
large capital, extraordinary ability, and well-established prestige.

"Organs" took their rise when the sole use of a newspaper was to
communicate intelligence, and when men in power found it convenient
to have a channel through which they could let out certain things
which they wished to be spread abroad. Out of this kind of relation
to the Government a small paper, which did not object to the humble
_role_ of a sort of official gazette, from which the earlier
newspapers indeed differed but little, could, of course, always get
a livelihood, and perhaps a little of the dignity which comes from
having or being supposed to have state secrets to keep. But the
gradual addition to the "news-letter" of the sermon known as a
"leader" or "editorial article" made the relation more and more
difficult and finally impossible. The more pompous, portentous, and
prophetic in their character the editor's comments on public affairs
became, the less disposed was the public to allow him to retain the
position of a paid agent of the State. It began to feel toward him
as it would have felt toward the town-crier if he had put on a gown
and bands, and insisted on accompanying his announcement of thefts
and losses with homilies on the vanity of life and the right use of
opportunities. The editor had, in short, to conduct his business in
a manner befitting his newly assumed duties as a prophet, and to
pretend at least that his utterances were wholly independent and
were due simply to a desire for the public good, as a prophet's
ought to be. It is now very rare indeed that a government is able to
induce a well-established newspaper of the first class to act as its
organ in the proper sense of that term, except by working on the
vanity of editors. Almost all editors are a little sensitive about
the imputation of being mere commentators or critics, and a little
desirous of being thought "practical men," by those engaged in the
actual working of political machinery. The "old editor" in this
country in fact preferred to be thought a working politician, and
liked to use his paper as a piece of political machinery for
producing solid party gains, and in this way to be received into the
circle of "workers" and "managers" as one of themselves; and to
retain this position he was always willing to "write up" any view
they suggested. His successor, though he cares less about being "a
worker," and is able to secure the attendance of politicians at his
office without running after them, is, nevertheless, more or less
flattered by the confidences of men in power, and it often takes
only a small amount of these confidences to make him surrender the
judicial position and accept that of an advocate, and stand by them
through thick and thin. But no leading journal has ever tried this
position in our day very long without being forced out of it by the
demand of the public for impartiality and the consequent difficulty
of avoiding giving offence in official quarters. Every
administration does things either through its chief or subordinates
which will not bear defence, and which its judicious friends prefer
to pass over in silence. But a journalist cannot keep silent. The
Government may require him to hold his tongue, but the reader
demands that he shall speak; and as the public supplies the sinews
of war, and pays for the prophet's robes, he is sooner or later
compelled to break with the Government and to reproach it for not
listening to the advice of its friends in time.

Moreover, in a country in which the press is free and newspapers
abound, a party which contains a majority of the people cannot fail
to have the support of a large and influential portion of the press.
Its conductors, though prophets, do not wear camel's hair, nor is
their diet locusts and wild honey. They form part of the community,
live among the voters, and share, to a greater or less extent, their
prejudices and expectations and sympathies. Every party, therefore,
is sure, as long as it has a strong hold on the public, of having a
strong hold on the press, and of having a considerable number of the
most influential editors among its defenders. One of the sure signs
that it is losing its hold on the public is the defection of the
press or its growing lukewarmness. Newspapers cannot, perhaps, build
a party up or pull one down, but when you see the newspapers
deserting a party it is all but proof that the agencies which
dissolve a political organization are at work. The successful
editors may have no originating power or no organizing power, and no
capacity for legislation, and may even want the prophetic instinct;
but a certain intuitive sense of the direction in which the tide of
popular feeling is running is the principal condition of their
success, and an anxious politician may therefore always safely
credit them with possessing it. If they had not had it, their papers
would not have succeeded.

If the incident or its lessons should result in establishing better
relations between political men and the press, the sacrifice of the
unfortunate projector of the _Republic_ will, however, be a small
price to pay for a great gain. We do not, as our readers know, set
up to be champions of the press, and have certainly never shown any
disposition to underrate its defects or shortcomings. But there is
one thing which no candid and careful observer can avoid seeing,
and that is that the press of the country, as an instrument of
discussion and popular education, has undergone within twenty years
an improvement nothing analogous to which is to be found in the
class of politicians. The newspapers are now, in the vast majority
of cases in all our leading cities, conducted by men who are
familiar with the leading ideas of our time and with the latest
advances in science and the art, including the art of government,
and who write under the influence of these ideas and these advances,
and who have consequently got a standard of efficiency in
legislative administration which has not yet made its way into the
political class. The result is that, after making all possible
allowance for the carelessness and recklessness and dishonesty of
reporters, and the personal biases and enmities of editors, the men
who carry on the Government, excepting a few experts, have become
objects of criticism on the part of the daily press, the
depreciatory tone of which is not wholly unjustifiable or unnatural,
and politicians repay this contempt with a hatred which is none the
less fierce for having no adequate means of expression.

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