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THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD

CHAPTER 4

WASHINGTON  AND   LINCOLN

Let Us To-day Do as They Did and Practice What They Preached

THERE is nothing sillier and more mischievous than to dull the conscience with lofty sentiments which cloak ignoble failure to perform duty; or to praise the great men of the past for what they did in the past and yet refuse to act in similar fashion in the present.

Lip loyalty to Washington and Lincoln costs nothing and is worth just exactly what it costs. What counts is the application of their principles to the conditions of to-day. Whoever is too proud to fight, whoever believes that there are times when it is not well to arouse the spirit of patriotism, whoever demands peace without victory, whoever regards the demand for ample preparedness as hysterical, whoever attacks conscription and the draft or fails to uphold universal, obligatory, military service, is false to the teachings and lives of Washington and Lincoln. Whoever seeks office, or upholds a candidate for office, on the ground that he "kept us out of war," without regard to whether the honor and vital interests of the nation and of mankind demand the war, is treacherous to the principles of Washington and Lincoln; they did not "keep us out of war," and they never sought or accepted office on a platform which they cynically repudiated when once they had secured office. The professional pacifist, who exalts peace above righteousness, is not only a traitor to the memory of the two greatest Americans, but has no claim to have any part in governing or in voting in the nation which one founded and the other preserved.

Washington's career, taken as a whole, and Considering all that he did as soldier and statesman during his twenty years of leadership in American public life, probably placed him on an even higher level of great achievement than Lincoln. But he lacked Lincoln's marvelous power of expression. In his case it is the deeds alone to which we must generally look. In Lincoln's case we consider both the deeds and the winged and deathless words which he translated into deeds.

Yet, just because Washington never spoke a word which he did not make good by an act, and always acted with serene, far-sighted wisdom and entire fearlessness, there are teachings of his which should be forever engraved on our hearts. No American should ever forget Washington's insistence upon the absolute necessity of preserving the Union; his appeals to our people that they should cherish the American nationality as something indestructible from within and as separating us in clear-cut manner from all other nations; his stern refusal to yield to the tyranny of either an individual or a mob, and his demand that we seek both liberty and order as indispensable to the life of a democratic republic; and his unwearied persistence in preaching the great truth that military preparedness is essential to our self-respect and usefulness and that the only way to prepare for war is to prepare in time of peace. But it is worse than useless to praise these as abstract truths and to fail to apply them to present instances. Every public man who after the August day in 1914 when the great war broke out, failed at once to do all in his power to prepare this nation on a gigantic scale for the danger looming in our immediate front was blind and deaf to the writings and warnings of Washington and was recreant to his duty to the Republic; and so were all the apologists and upholders of such a man.

Washington's Farewell Address contains advice which is permanently applicable.    At the time when the address was written a violent faction of his countrymen were endeavoring to secure the submission of the United States to the outrages and insults of Revolutionary and Directorial France by appealing to and inflaming the American antipathy to England. Washington's Address condemned the effort thus to make hatred of England blind us to our duty to the United States as follows: "Nothing is more essential (to a free, enlightened and great nation) than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations ... be excluded. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred ... is in some degree a slave." This applies with even greater force to the sinister enemies of our country who at this moment endeavor to serve German brutality at the expense of the United States and of humanity at large by stirring up antipathy to England. When Washington wrote his address he was separated by but sixteen years from that winter camp at Valley Forge in which, under his leadership, the manhood of democratic and liberty-loving America stood its supreme test. We are separated from it by a century and a quarter. He had faced the British bullets. The anti-English agitators of to-day shriek against England in complete personal safety. The England of his day was still hostile to the United States. The England of our day has been friendly to the United States for half a century. The men who at this crisis try in any way to stir up our people against Britain are traitors to the United States. Some of them are the paid agents of America's malignant foe, Germany. The rest, whether from folly or wickedness, are playing Germany's game. No man is a true American who hates another country more than he loves his own.

What is true of the teachings of Washington and Lincoln as regards our international relations is no less true of their teachings as regards affairs within our own household.

It has been the fashion among some well-meaning but crude extremists to contrast Lincoln as a radical with Washington as a conservative. This is a shallow misreading of the facts. Each was the conservative leader of the efficient radicalism of his time. In each case the radicalism became efficient only because such leadership was furnished. It would have been absurd to expect either to be a radical about matters which in his time were not yet in real existence. To the Bourbons of his own day, to the Tories or the copperheads, each seemed the most dangerous of radicals; and when necessary, as in the crises of 1776, and 1862-3, each took the extreme radical position. But by the extremists, whether visionary or sinister, each was denounced as a reactionary—the sympathizers with license and disorganization taking this position about Washington from 1789 to the day of his death, just as the extreme radicals in Missouri and elsewhere took the same position about Lincoln in 1864. To use the terminology of today each preferred an attitude of liberalism rather than radicalism until the arrogant obscurantism of the reactionaries themselves—• George III in one case, the slaveocracy in the other—made radicalism imperative. When this became evident, neither one hesitated to cut loose from the trimmers and halfway men and unfalteringly to lead the effective fight against Bourbonism; and of course each then practiced a constructive, and not merely a destructive, radicalism.

Lincoln was always against slavery, but until the upholders of slavery, in 1854, became violently aggressive, he stood by Clay and Webster and against the abolitionists; and at first he remained a Whig, not becoming a Republican for several months after the formation of the party. He upheld Clay's compromise measures. He took Webster's position on the fugitive slave law—it is one of the melancholy ironies of history that the very men who abandoned and frantically denounced Webster for taking this position, later turned ardently to Lincoln, who had also taken it and who did not change from his position until the Civil War had begun. During the Civil War the radicals of the Wade-Davis type denounced him almost as bitterly as the conservatives who followed Seymour or Vallandigham; and the extremists among them nominated a presidential candidate against him.

Yet Lincoln was a great radical. He was of course a wise and cautious radical—otherwise he could have done nothing for the forward movement. But he was the efficient leader of this forward movement. To-day many well-meaning men who have permitted themselves to fossilize, to become mere ultra-conservative reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, but who still pay a conventional and perfunctory homage to Lincoln's memory, will do well to remember exactly what it was for which this great conservative leader of radicalism actually stood.

Much of what he said applies, with only a change of names, to the conditions of our own time.

In October, 1854, when it was objected that the course he advocated included some action demanded by the Northern abolitionists, and other action demanded by the Southern disunionists, to both of whom he had been opposed, he answered: "Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri compromise and stand against him in attempting to repeal the fugitive slave law. In the latter case you stand with the Southern dis-unionist. What of that? You are still right. In both cases you are right. In both cases you oppose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand on middle ground and hold the ship steady and level. In both you are national and nothing less than national. To desert such ground because of any company is to be less than a man— less than an American." And he remarked of those who took the opposite view that he must be allowed "to tell them, good humoredly," that their course was "very silly."

In precisely similar fashion to-day we find conservatives objecting to some piece of wise legislation because it is demanded by the socialists, and radicals objecting to some piece of wise legislation of another kind, because it is looked upon favorably by Wall Street. In Lincoln's words we must be allowed good humoredly to say that both attitudes are very silly—equally so whether we always oppose the Socialists or always oppose Wall Street. In one case we uphold what the Socialists demand, in the other case what Wall Street favors. In Lincoln's words: "What of it? We are still right. In both cases we are right."

(FOOTNOTE, I omit the sentence addressed merely to his fellow Whigs. END FOOTNOTE)

In August, 1863, Lincoln dealt with the questions of peace and war and the means necessary to make war a success. To his critics, who put peace above national salvation secured through war, he said: "You desire peace and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it ? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If so you should say so plainly." He then pointed out that the third method, a "compromise," was impossible because "no paper compromise" could "affect the (enemy's) army" and it was this army, this military strength of the enemy, which dominated the situation and which could not be affected by any "convention" of "peace men"— because nothing that such a peace convention could do would "keep (the enemy's) army out of Pennsylvania." The professional pacifists, the neo-copperheads of to-day, must either repudiate Lincoln or accept these words as their own condemnation. Make the terms as general as the truth they express, thereby applying them to any just war; and Lincoln says that he is opposed to the surrender of vital national rights, that he believes in maintaining these rights by force of arms, that peace (for which he so earnestly prayed) can be obtained only by armed strength backing right, and that no action by any "convention of peace men" can keep a European army out of New York or an Asiatic army out of San Francisco.

He is just as explicit in upholding the principle of obligatory universal military service (the draft) as compared with purely voluntary service. He of course heartily approved the volunteers who volunteered to fight, and he used them with efficiency during the first years of the war—for otherwise the war would have been lost. But he had no patience with the volunteers who volunteered to stay at home, and when these became too numerous he refused to "waste time" by further "experimenting" with the "volunteer system" which had been shown to be "inadequate." He wrote that the men who had refused to volunteer should now be subject to "the principle of ... involuntary or enforced service," so as to make them do what their "manly brethren" had already done; saying of the latter: "Their toil and blood has been given as much for you as for themselves. Shall it all be lost rather than that you, too, will bear your part? . . . The principle of enforced service (has) been used in establishing our independence . . . shall we shrink from the necessary means to maintain our free Government, which our grandfathers employed to establish it and our own fathers have already employed once to maintain it? Are we degenerate? Has the manhood of our race run out?"

One of Washington's earliest acts as President was to submit to Congress a plan for universal obligatory military training and service; and all those who now oppose such a plan deserve the scorn which Lincoln expressed for the men who opposed the plan in his day. The men who were too proud to fight he dismissed as degenerates, whose manhood had run out. To those who desired peace without victory he answered that in order to secure a just and lasting peace he would if necessary continue the war until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two hundred years of unrequited toil should be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash had been paid by another drawn with the sword.

In Lincoln's time wise radicals treated the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery as paramount over and precedent to all questions of social and individual betterment; exactly as wise radicals to-day treat the questions of Americanism—true Nationalism— and thoroughgoing preparedness for defense as dwarfing all others. But incidentally Lincoln expressed himself now and then on these social and industrial questions, and always in a spirit of sane but thoroughgoing and intense democracy. He as emphatically stated that the people were "the rightful masters of both congresses and courts" as any Progressive of 1912; and, in like spirit, he showed that this attitude was accompanied by entire respect for the courts and their authority. But it is as regards human rights and property rights, the rights of labor and the rights of capital, that his example is especially instructive.

In 1859 Lincoln announced as the true doctrine that "the rights of property" are secondary to the "personal rights of men," and that he was "for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar"; and he added the pregnant sentence: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." This applied to black slavery then. It applies now to any wealthy corporation which fails to respect and preserve and encourage all the manhood rights of its workers and to treat them as partners; and it no less applies to any powerful labor union which shows brutality or insolent disregard for equity in dealing with the rights of any of our citizens.

Lincoln had a seriously thought-out philosophy about the rights of capital and the rights of labor, which he developed before he was President, and to which he held throughout his Presidency. In 1859 and 1860 he formulated these views on several occasions. His radicalism had not a touch of Marxian socialism. He repeatedly and explicitly approved of protection for capital, and insisted that a "certain relation" between it and labor "rightfully existed." His words were: "That men who are industrious and sober and honest in the pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate capital, and also if they should choose when they have accumulated it, to use it to save themselves from actual labor, and hire other people to labor for them, is right," and again: "It is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I do not believe in a law to prevent men from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with every one else." But he regarded the laboring man as the normal man and the interests of labor as supreme, saying: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital; labor can exist without capital, but capital could never have existed without labor. Labor is the superior—greatly the superior—of capital." In line with this yiew he declares that: "Henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise education itself would become an intolerable evil"; and he especially holds up to admiration a community of highly skilled, educated, soil-tillers, able each of them to derive a comfortable subsistence from his own intelligent, thorough work in the intensive cultivation of a small farm. "Such a community," says Lincoln, "will be alike independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings."

When he became President his convictions if anything strengthened. In his view, as he expressed it in his special message to Congress on July 4, 1861, the war was "essentially a people's contest . . . (for) the rights of men and the authority of the people ... for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of lawful pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life." Five months later, in his regular message to Congress, he repeated what he had said before he was President: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights." He continued by stating that "there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits"; but insisted that there were only a few capitalists, and a few men who labored for capitalists, but that the large majority of the people neither worked for others nor had others working for them—a statement not even then as broadly true as he made it, and much less so now; and he went on to praise "the just, generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all," and he then singled out for special praise "those who toil up from poverty" as eminently disinclined "to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned"—a statement certainly more sweeping than is warranted by our subsequent experience with strong, self-made men. On March 21, 1864, in a reply to a committee of workingmen, he read this part of his message to Congress ofDecember, 1861, and added a few sentences running in part as follows: "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds. Nor should this lead to a war upon property or upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world . . . Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

These are the expressions of a man who held to the creed of democracy with fervent intensity of conviction and yet who never tried to apply his creed either with the rancor of the fanatic or with the experience-proof zeal of the doctrinaire. The kind of democracy with which Lincoln was familiar was the democracy of a farming country where the conditions were akin to those of pioneer days, and of "cities" which were hustling, overgrown villages, where there was little stratification of either the raw social or the raw industrial life. In consequence what he says has no direct bearing in detail on a community life of great capitalists and masses of wage workers, where the social conditions are far more static than in the early decades of the statehood of Illinois. His experience on the prairies had not enabled him to think out either the indispensable necessity of capitalism in great industrial achievements, or the need of a complex system of safeguards for labor under the very conditions necessary for such achievements. But the principles apply; and he carefully guarded his statements, so that they should not be too sweeping. Of course his words must be interpreted by his deeds—for example, his advocacy of the spirit of international brotherhood among workingmen must be read in the light of the fact that at the time he was straining every nerve to make the people submit to the most colossal sacrifices in order to secure the perpetuation of the national life—for Lincoln's life teaches us nothing more clearly than that international duty can be performed only as the sequence to the fullest insistence upon an intense spirit of nationalism.

Lincoln's belief in the superiority of the rights of labor to those of capital was expressed again and again; before he became President, in an official message to Congress while he was President, and again after he had been three years President. Evidently it was his deeply held belief. Surely the perpetuity of our institutions, even of our civilization, depends upon our holding and acting on the same view. We must shape our governmental policy primarily with a view to the welfare of the working-man and the farmer. Lincoln's words give us no hint of the details of the course we should follow; but they do clearly indicate that course.

But Lincoln also stood for the rights of capital; and here again we should follow his policy. If the laboring man permits himself to put improper burdens on capital, he will bring everything down with a crash; and even if the man higher up is smashed, this will be small comfort to the man lower down if he, too, is under the ruins. Lincoln explicitly disclaimed any hostility to a man because he was wealthy. He explicitly asserted that the accumulation of individual property was "right, and for the general good." He held up as the proper ideal, not burning down the house of another, but building up a house for oneself—a corollary to which is that it is better for the owner of a small house that another man should have a big house, rather than that neither should have any house. In other words, he believed in a constructive system which, while guarding the rights of capital, should see that the benefits were as widely diffused as possible and that all artificial obstacles to a fair start in the world, and to industrial democracy, were done away with. Finally, it is evident that, although he neither used modern terminology nor was familiar with modern industry, his ideal was a cooperative system in which each man labored and each man was to some extent an owner of the capital necessary for the work.

In order to live up to the spirit of Lincoln's teaching in this matter, it is necessary that we refuse to be bound by the letter, which is not applicable to an industrial world where capital is used in huge masses, mostly corporate, while labor is helpless unless it combines. In Lincoln's simple world capital was of far smaller importance than where gigantic, complex, highly useful undertakings have either to be financed on a huge scale or else left undone; and labor was far more fit to maintain its rights under a system of primitive individualism. In that simple world Lincoln saw only a few men as employers, and a few others as employed wage workers, while the majority were owners of the tools with which or on which they worked. What he upheld as a desirable principle was that the average man—who can never be the man of large means—should himself own a piece of the world and do his own work as regards that piece of the world. What he saw has changed. What he upheld as the desirable principle has not changed. The individualism of Lincoln's section in Lincoln's day has vanished and cannot be restored. At present the mass of people engaged in industry cannot become owners as individuals; and to give this mass a nominal ownership which does not imply control fails to reach the heart of the matter, for control is the element which implies equality between men. But no man is fit for control who does not possess intelligence, self-respect, and respect for the just rights of others. Therefore, instead of individual control of industry, there must to-day be some species of collective control of industry; which means that the tool users shall become the tool owners; but which also means that they will assuredly break down themselves and their business unless they are willing to pay for skilled management a price, in some measure, corresponding to the high value of the service rendered, and unless they are willing to give a just reward to whatever necessary capital they cannot themselves supply. This means an effort toward a combination of the proper functions of the corporation with the wise activities of the labor union (and I emphasize proper in one case and wise in the other). It is the negation of the I. W. W. theories and practices. From the standpoint of Lincoln's teachings and practices, those of the I. W. W. are harmful and wrong. But most certainly any fair treatment of any development of his theories points to progress, step by step, in the direction of securing a share of the control of the big corporation in the hands of the men who work for the corporation, but who ought not to remain merely the wage-earning employees of the corporation. This means some adaptation of cooperative ownership and management. Lincoln's teachings, applied to the facts of to-day, mean that if alive now he would lead toward a working combination of collective control and liberty, just as he once led toward a working combination of individual control and liberty. He would lead toward practical idealism in industry now exactly as he actually did lead toward practical idealism in government; and he would have been measurably successful precisely because he would never have forgotten that industry, like government, must be made a going concern.
In Lincoln's day, as in our day, there were wise men and foolish men, good men and evil men, both among those who called themselves conservatives and among those who called themselves radicals; and sometimes emphasis had to be placed on the need of daring, and sometimes on the need of caution. It was the radicals who were most interested in the destruction of slavery; and in this the radicals were right; and although Lincoln held them back, and steadied them and waited until the fullness of time, yet in the end he led them to victory. But on the whole the radicals put the destruction of slavery above the preservation of the Union, and herein they were wrong; and the conservatives took the reverse view, and herein they were right, and Lincoln sided with them; and in the end they followed him when he saw that it was best to make one cause both of freeing the slave and of saving the nation. From all his record it is safe to say that if Lincoln had lived to deal with our complicated social and industrial problems he would have furnished a wisely conservative leadership; but he would have led in the radical direction.