Address in Praise of Founders

"In Praise of the Founders By Dr. M. Stewart MacDonald, Prof. of Philosophy and Economics at U. N. B." The University Monthly  25, 7-8 (May-June 1906): 203-209. (UA Case 71)

Touching, as it does, the whole gamut of college activities, the address in praise of founders may deal with any topic that bears on the ends by reference to which a college education is shaped. It is not necessarily a eulogy of the men to whom we owe our existence as a university, for it may be that the highest praise we can give those men is an earnest attempt to determine and actualize the ideals which were the beacon of their endeavor.

Two widely differing ideals of life offer themselves to the educated man. He may, with the Epicureans, stand aside from life's struggle, playing the role of spectator, inactive and indifferent, careful not to imperil his peace of mind by being caught in the whirlpools and eddies of really living. Or he may, with Matthew Arnold, consider culture not merely as the endeavor to see and learn truth and justice, but as the endeavor to make them prevail.

Both these views of life have their advocates. The intellectual Epicurean justifies his attitude by perversion of the half-truth that knowledge is an end in itself, the fittest end for a rational being like man. The other view is based upon a belief that each must bear the other's burdens; that a man is his brother's keeper; to him to whom much is given much shall be required.

Today I shall praise our founders by urging upon you the adoption of the latter of these ideals. I shall speak briefly of the political responsibility of educated men, and endeavor to show that the obligation not merely to understand truth and justice, but to make them prevail is more binding now than at any other time during the past hundred years.

I shall rest my case on the fact that your entrance into real life is coincident with the initiation of a movement which promises to change the whole fabric of society. Mighty forces are at work which will issue in good or evil according as they are controlled by the honest and intelligent, by the well-meaning but incompetent, or by the fanatic, but the genius of the yellow press, the man with the muckrake.

That changes of great moment are impending is manifest to every close observer of current events. The press everywhere reports signs of serious disturbance and a spirit of growing discontent. The magazines have uncovered "The shame of the cities" and are now unmasking with a dangerous intemperance "The treason of the senate." W. R. Hearst is threatening capitalism with an assertion by the people of their right of eminent domain. Writers like Jack London avow their aim to be the toppling over of the whole social edifice and even President Roosevelt has startled us with an ultra socialistic advocacy of a progressive tax on large fortunes.

Though not due solely to a spread of socialism, the spirit of unrest is taking shape mainly as a radical and socialism wave. The London correspondent of one of our large dailies is of the opinion that "The next great fight in this country (England) should be a fight between socialism and the existing order of things": and a writer in the North American Review sees "looming like a might storm-cloud, in every civilized nation, the socialist movement."

The seeds of the present discontent were sown by the Industrial Revolution, which was well under weigh about the beginning of the nineteenth century. Up to that time production was conducted under the so-called domestic system. Manufactures were carried on by employees who did the work at home, and who often combined agricultural with manufacturing pursuits. Under this system the workmen were comparatively well off, possessing economic independence, and living for the most part in the country instead of being herded in stifling alleys and courts.

Suddenly, over night, as it were, this whole system was changed. In little more than twenty years all the great inventions of Watt, Arkwright and Boulton had been completed, steam had been complied to the new looms., and the modern factory system had fairly begun." Mechanical inventions and improvements followed one another rapidly until the productive power of labor was multiplied at least ten-fold.

Fully to appreciate the effects of this sudden increase in labor power let us regard it as a multiplication of the units of labor offering themselves to the employer. Let us suppose that to every workman there are added nine more, each able to perform with ease and accuracy tasks hopelessly beyond the power of the most skilled human labor. The nine new workmen are tireless, able to work twenty-four hours a day; cheaper than slave labor and incomparably more efficient; never complaining to their employer, knowing nothing of strikes--the quintessence of docility and servile fidelity.

It was impossible that the old laborer could stand before this competitor. Women and children began to do the work of men, and a fierce competition set in between the wage-earners themselves. There was a vast increase in national wealth, but the rights of private property diverted nearly whole of this increase to the capitalist or owner of machinery. The workmen lost at a stroke his economic independence, and with that loss began the exploitation of labor. Pauperism grew alarmingly, threatening, according to Mr. Giffen, to "break down the country half a century ago." Undeserved wealth and undeserved poverty were the legacy of the Industrial Revolution to society.

In attributing the popular disaffection to changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, we do not mean that the introduction of machinery would be itself have worked any harm to the wage earner. It is a commonplace of economics that increased productive power ought to give increased comfort if not increased employment. If more wealth is produced, clearly there is so much more to "go around." The new industrial system has bred misery and discontent because it was mechanically fitted out to the old social structure. No effective attempt was made to meet the great changes in the nature of production by compensatory changes in the laws regulating the rights of private property. The failure to adapt property rights to the changed conditions gave the owner of machinery a decided and unfair advantage as against the propertyless workman, allowing him to appropriate almost the entire increase of wealth which resulted from the multiplication of labor-power.

Assuming what everyone will admit, that the basis of private property rights is public utility, it is obvious that a restriction of those rights was necessary when, under changed industrial conditions, they facilitated the plunder of the public.

But instead of that needed modification of property rights we have today individualism run mad. The corporations are given a free hand in bleeding the consumer; with a supineness that is almost criminal we have given away public franchises for the mere asking; we have permitted railway directorships, and the dozen other aids to the crushing of competition by brute force.

These are the things which have made undeserved wealth and undeserved poverty the legacy of the Industrial Revolution to society. The resulting discontent is not based upon the fallacy that the poor are growing poorer as the rich are growing richer, but upon a conviction that in the division of the product of industry the masses are not given a fair deal.

That there are real grievances behind the spirit of unrest no impartial observer can doubt. Unbiased investigators furnish the appalling facts. Booth tells us that "from twenty-five to thirty per cent of the town population of the United Kingdom are living in poverty." Robert Hunter estimates the number in the United States at upwards of 12,000,000. And Mr. Spahr concludes that "seven-eights of the families in the United States hold but one-eighth of the national wealth, while but one per cent of the remaining families hold more than the remaining 99 per cent." Thousands of children under fifteen are toiling in mines and workshops, and 5,000,000 women in the United States must work to live, half of them in the demoralizing atmosphere of the mill and factory.

Dominating our whole industrial life is a greed of gain, a consuming desire for profits, which has lowered the estimate placed on the value of human beings. The manufacturer and the landlord oppose sanitation on the ground of cost. The result is that this year in New York city alone from 20,000 to 25,000 will die because perfect sanitary measures have not been put into effect.  10,000,000 Americans now living will die of tuberculosis because lack of mean makes prevention impossible. Many of the deaths will mean the loss of a family bread-winner, and the sinking into pauperism of those whom, in the bitter words of the wage-earner, death has been unkind enough to spare.

The railways, too, will add to their list of killed and maimed employees. And in their treatment of the travelling public they will not forget that "it costs $6,400 to kill a passenger and $32,000, or five times as much, to prevent it." Expenses must be kept down and dividends paid, and no economical management will spend $32,000 when it can escape with a disbursement of only $6,400.

The shame of it all is that those crimes are preventable and the conditions which create them remediable. The shame is yours and mine, the shame of unfaithfulness in the discharge of our public duty. We may, I think we must, agree with investigators like Hunter, Steffens, and Prof.  Giddings in assigning political corruption as the main cause of the evils which are not voicing themselves in socialistic attacks on the existing industrial system.

But political corruption is possible only because men have buried their talent of honesty and intelligence. It is absurd to say that thieves outnumber honest men. The heart of morality and religion never beat so strong as it does today, and when the public temporarily shook off its lethargy some months ago. Folk routed the forces of graft in Missouri, Weaver smashed the machine in Philadelphia, and Mark Fagan illumined with the spirit of Christ, the civic council of Jersey City.

To condense in to a few words the result of our rapid survey of the present social unrest: we may say that it is the consequence of evils which owe their existence largely to the political inactivity of honest and intelligent men.  Intensified by recent exposures and by magazines and newspaper articles, the discontent is rapidly assuming the form of a great popular movement. Important social changes must occur, and the nature of these changes will depend upon the character of the men bringing them about.

Social unrest is a double potentiality, which may either bless or curse. It offers a golden opportunity to the agitator to the crafty and venal, who will not scruple to appeal to the worst elements in human nature. Nor is it only when the unscrupulous direct a popular movement that the promised blessings of social reform may turn to dust and ashes in our hands. Ignorant honesty carries the same peril as intelligent viciousness, astute vice has never failed to make in virtue its catspaw and ally. Social salvation cannot be worked out through the fantastic conceptions and misguided efforts of men who are as incompetent and gullible as they are honest.

That Canada must bear the burden of political and industrial evils follow as a matter of course from the sum greater development to which we confidently look forward. Indeed, they are already with us, so the press affirms; and Mr F. Page Wilson asserts that "the blindness of the bat is as nothing compared with the blindness of the Canadian who says that these things may be of the United States but not of ourselves." While Mr. Wilson's words can scarcely be called moderate, some justification of his opinion may be found in certain matters which are at present giving the Canadian people an uneasy feeling that all is not well in the conduct of the public affairs. To refer to one question only, and that of a non-partizan character, we might well view with apprehension the easy unconcern with which defenders of the increased indemnity put to us the old question of Boss Tweed,--"What are you going to do about it?"

A more real menace to Canada than civic wrong-doing is the growing tendency to accustom the public to imputations of political corruption which are neither substantial nor shown to be unfounded. President Roosevelt has warned us against the danger attaching to reiterated charges of robbery. If we are not to have an electorate polluted with conviction that graft is inevitable and had better be accepted as a matter of course, we must foster a public opinion that will hold equally guilty those who make unfounded charges and those who hinder the full investigation of transactions which are open to reasonable doubt.

Another evil consequent on the indiscriminate abuse of public men is shown in the reactionary effects of President Roosevelt's well-deserved rebuke to the yellow press of the United States. Nothing more unfortunate, nothing more harmful to the cause of social amenoration could have occurred than the frenzied criminations which warranted Mr. Roosevelt's famous muck-rake speech. Justifiable as that speech was it has worked incalculable injury to the cause of real reform. The pirates of high finance hailed it as a heaven-sent shelter from the indignation of an aroused public; and the respectable senators blessed Mammon that he had given them an effective means of discrediting legitimate exposure of their treason.

The muck-rake speech will for a time at least, paralyze honest efforts to right social wrongs. It will array popular sympathy on the side of graft and plunder, and disarm the earnest reformer by a striking epithet which classes him with the agitator and demagogue. Then the man who attacks corruption will be stigmatised as a muck-raker and attempts will be made to stifle criticism by branding it as the excesses of a yellow press.

In the face of all this the men must be strong indeed who will not only understand truth and justice, but make them prevail.

I have confined myself to general statements on the subject of civic responsibility and I have tried to avoid the presumption of making specific suggestions with regard to the solution of present-day problems. It is enough that enlightened citizens become aware of these questions, and interest themselves in their settlement. That done, we may rest assured that out of the clash of honest opinions and the efforts of unpurchasable  men there will come social betterment and a glorious culmination of the great movement now under way.

I must, however, though proposing no definite plan of public action, give categorical expression to my opinion on a point of especial importance. Modern life being what it is, I believe that the man who does not read the daily paper cannot be regarded as an educated man.

Education implies more than the development of our faculties; it is the training of men and women for real life, involving an obligation to apply to the improvement of present conditions a mind rich with the past experience of the race. A study of the humanities undoubtedly good in and for itself, and it is valuable just in proportion as it cannot be embodied in commercial utilities, but appeals to the man that it in us. But we cannot rest with even the highest development of our own powers; we must not only understand truth and justice, but make them prevail; and to make them prevail we must have that knowledge of actual conditions which the press alone can give.

You may say that other worldliness provides an antidote to the dominant commercialism; that the gospel of the spirit must not lose itself in the sordid details of current events. But efforts that lose touch with the conditions they would change must necessarily be futile. Adaptation is the price of survival; and if the idealist would secure adaptation for his views he must feel the heart-throbs of the day he lives in; he must know through and through the world on which he would shed the light of the spirit.

In conclusion let me say that my emphasis of the practical side of education must not be taken to imply that utility is the measure of worth. I feel, instead, that the commercial spirit is at the basis of the evils which have generated the present social unrest. It is the spirit which places profit above the welfare of a people. It is the spirit which threatens to run parliaments into the battle ground of lobbyists, and legislators into betrayers of the public trust. It is throwing its shadow over our intellectual life, converting our universities into machine shops and making our technical students impatient of any study that does not suggest the swing of the hammer or the dollar-sounding clink of steel on steel.

This intense commercialism we would deprecate, not encourage. We urge the practical only that the waxy may be prepared for something higher. We cannot preach the spiritual while man is fighting, often unsuccessfully for bread--a beast absorbed in a struggle against the pangs of hunger. The toiler cannot find the spiritual in the whirlwind of materialistic conflict nor in the earthquake of discontent. Only when he has food and raiment, only in the hush of industrial calm, can he hear the still small voice wherein is God.

That is why I ask you not only to understand truth and justice, but to make them prevail; to lift the burdens of labor, whose lot, in the words of Carlyle is "to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-broken, weary." it is because of this economic slavery, because of this perversion of individualism, that I would speak of your political responsibility, and carry to you the socialist's plea that men be given "time for reading, time for art, time for God."