СНАР. Why Exploitation by Govern Dying Out ment Is Significance of American "Good Government' The Turkish state amounts to a plundering organization of officials. Judges sell their sentences, police officials clap innocent men in prison in order to extort ransom, the tax collector raises or lowers the dues at his discretion, the official expects a commission on every contract. He who is charged with any sort of supervsion extracts a profit. In short, each employs the bit of authority granted him to intimidate the subject and extract money. At the top is the sultan, one of the richest sovereigns in the world. The shores of the Bosporus are sprinkled with his decaying palaces, built to satisfy a caprice, and the pashas imitate the greed and luxury of their sovereign. Such state exploitation is dying out because one can see with half an eye that it kills the goose that lays the golden eggs. Government must not be thus rapacious if the people are to develop intelligent industry and enterprise. Modern government therefore does not exploit directly but protects and enforces the property and contract rights by means of which the dominant class (or classes) exploits others. It stands back of the legal rights of the landlords, the amos, the hacendados, the pomieshtchiks, the wool kings, the cattle kings, the mine operators, the usurers, the monopolists, the big employers, and other groups which enjoy some measure of exploitive advantage. A social class which controls government in order to legitimate and safeguard its privileges and property claims is not primarily interested in having the salaries of offices or the spending of The government which amply meets its requirements may be quite honest, economical and efficient. What is known as "good government" in American cities often means nothing more than the clearing out of useless placemen, along with the elimination of "graft" from public works and the purchase of public supplies. It may have nothing in common with self-government or popular government, but may signify simply that a roused commercial or propertied class has wrested control from the shady politicians and crooked business men in order to restore government to the functions they are interested in. It is significant that the failure of Democrats in power usually takes the form of the multiplication of offices filled by inefficients and the lavish outlay of money in jobbed public works. On the other hand, the failure of Republicans in office more often takes the form of adopting laws and policies unduly favoring certain business or property groups and neglecting to curb interests which prey upon the public. THE LAWS OF EXPLOITATION 1. The social elements differ in original disposition to exploit. Those whose will to resist aggression is much stronger than their will to aggress will let pass opportunities to exploit which the aggressive will promptly seize. For example, hand-workers are less eager to live off others than those engaged in pecuniary employments, such as traders, manufacturers, bankers and financiers. None are so resolute to exploit as those bred to leisure, for they feel they have a God-given right to live delicately at the expense of others. A class reared to despise work is in sooth the most dangerous element in society, for in order to avoid self-support it is willing to sacrifice morals, religion, popular liberty and national independence. No political movement is so bloody, sordid and unpatriotic as a White Terror. CHAP. XII Bred to Leisure Are Reso lute to Exploit ness of Kind Is an Ob stacle to Exploitation 2. Exploitation is more open, ruthless and stubborn between Consciousthe unlike than between the like. One part of a kin group does not prey upon another part. Strong tribal, or national, or sectarian consciousness checks exploitation within the tribe, the naton or the religious body. Exploitation is worst just after conquest and every step in the assimilation of conquerors and conquered is followed by a let-up. People like the South African Foers, who are quite without predatory traditions, bring themselves to enslave aborigines very unlike themselves. African slavery was tolerated by European opinion long after white slavery had been outlawed in Europe. Exploiters invent or exaggerate unlikeness in order to justify themselves. The Southern master insisted the negro had no soul or made out his bondage to be God's punishment laid upon the descendants of Ham who failed in respect to Father Noah. Aristotle justifies slavery by imagining a difference in the natures of masters and slaves. For centuries the English have given to convince the world that the Irish are incapable of governing themselves. Islam prohibited the enslavement of the faithful but approved that of "infidels." The treatment of the Indians of Mexico and Peru as bondmen found warrant in their heathenism, for in rendering life-long service in return for a knowledge of the true faith they made a good bargain. The СНАР. XII Exploiters Parasites Never Go to Work religious orders in the Philippines excused their neglect to provide for popular education by representing the natives as little better than monkeys. Difference has, indeed, such validating power that the very ignorance, rudeness and degradation caused by exploitation will be offered as a justification for its existence and continuance. 3. An element is ready and whole-hearted in exploitation in the degree that it constitutes a self-conscious group. Islam knit together the Asiatic intruders into southeastern Europe in their collective exploitation of the Christians. In the Middle Ages Christianity gave the population the solidarity it needed in order systematically to exploit the Jews. On the march to Peking in 1900 race consciousness gave the allied armies the warrant they needed for common maltreatment of the peaceful Chinese along their route. The less self-conscious is a group, the greater the power of public opinion over its members. But public opinion will always be less favorable to infra-social exploitation than the opinion which forms within the exploiting group. 4. The will to exploit lasts as long as the power to exploit. Willingly Exploiters never tire of exploitation. A kept class never loses its taste for consuming the fruits of other men's toil, nor does it ever give up exploiting out of conviction of sin. Its manner of life becomes completely adjusted to its parasitism and it never fails to develop moral standards, theories and ideals which chime with the economic basis of its life. Individual members of a kept class may come to feel that their exploitation is indefensible, but the class merely disowns them, dresses its ranks and moves on. Exploiters Never Compunc tion Nevertheless, the spirit of the age reverberates even in the Cease from members of an exploiting class and in some cases they have been brought to feel compunction respecting their relation to those who support them. This feeling expresses itself never in a movement utterly to give up parasitism, but in insistence on greater humanity toward the exploited or in the recognition of "duties" and "responsibilities" toward them. Toward the end of feudalism there was a movement among the lords to better the lot of the serfs. Southern slaveholders developed higher standards of humanity in the treatment of their slaves and punished atrocities by the more ferocious masters. Employers adopt "welfare" work and "safety first" for their employees, while capitalists urge the "Golden Rule" in business and espouse such doctrines as the "stewardship of wealth" and "the Christianization of capital." Imperial countries admit an obligation to spend a part of the revenue extracted from a tropical colony in improving the colony, while kings by Divine Right acknowledge their duty to promote the welfare of their subjects. But never do the exploiters of their own motion abolish serfdom, or slavery, or absolutism, or turn loose the dependency, or socialize the great estates, or adopt progressive taxation, or extend public ownership. Slavery, serfdom, peonage, landlordism, industrial feudalism, absolutism and monopoly have never been ended by consent. Tolstoi, who knew his class, describes the manifestations of a new-born social conscience in the Russian landowner. The nobleman came to feel sorry for the moujik under him. He would change his position to make himself a little easier to carry. He would speak kindly to the moujik, would even bend down and wipe the sweat from his brow. His conscience had become so sensitive that he was willing to do anything for the poor fellow anything, that is, except get off his back! СНАР. XII Bule Home Ex 5. Foreign domination is likely to suppress infra-social ex- Foreign ficitation. If the foreign masters exploit the dependency they Spous will be jealous of the native exploiting groups and if they do ploitations not they will be disgusted by them. The Romans followed the principle of Parcere subjectis, debellare superbos in order to create in the dependency an interest loyal to their rule. In Inda the British have either done away with the insatiable native princes or else curbed their rapacity. One reason for the unappeasable discontent there is that the elements which in the absence of the British would be able to exploit the masses are dened their opportunity. The Americans on occupying the Philippines found the parasitism of the friars, who owned one Efteenth of the cultivated land, so odious that they soon packed them off. tion Is gered by 6. A new element menaces the continuance of an exploitation Exploita unless that element be made a sharer of its benefits. Outsiders Endanp the game. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ne- Intruding slavery was more inhuman in the self-governing English Elements elonies in the West Indies than in the Spanish and the French West Indies, which were governed from Europe. Lay churches, Like the Protestant denominations, were more complaisant about slavery than the Roman Catholic church. In Virginia, Jamaica CHAP. Only Masked tion Has a Good Prospect of Life and Barbados, where the masters controlled both state and church, the slaves had the fewest rights. Eastern opinion working through the Federal Government has checked the frontiersmen's grabbing of the land of the Indian and the traders' robbery of him by selling him whiskey. By arousing public opinion in Holland with his story "Max Havalaer" the novelist Dekker dealt a finishing stroke to the exploitation of the Javanese by means of the "culture system." Aroused British opinion put an end in 1833 to slavery in the English colonies, while Northern hostility, aroused chiefly from 1835 on, was the cause of the downfall of slavery in the United States. The coming of Hawaii under American law in 1898 automatically terminated the system of indentured labor which the planter class had established on the sugar plantations. 7. Masked exploitation outlasts open exploitation. In an enExploita- lightened democratic society the only considerable exploitations that can survive are clandestine. Jobbery in municipal contracts is secret. The white slave traffic is furtive. Peonage is remote and wears an innocent air. Monopoly endures not in virtue of royal grants or favoring law, as in olden time, but by reason of hidden rebates from carriers or secret understandings among commercial rivals. Tax dodging by railroad companies is cloaked by substituting for the general property tax a specific tax on gross earnings under pretext that it is impossible to value railway property. Having no standard of comparison the public acquiesce in a tax of 4 per cent on gross earnings when the rate ought in fairness to be perhaps 7 per cent. A race-track gambling game wears the guise of an amusement enterprise or an encouragement of horse-breeding. The periodical shearing of "lambs in the stock market is tolerated only because the process is not understood by the public. In Modern Struggle - Hence, what latter-day exploitation most dreads is being unmasked! What it fights most desperately is investigation or publicity. It centers its pressure on newspaper men, newspapers, magazines, prosecuting attorneys, legislative committees, professors of the social sciences, clergymen, agitators in a word, on those who may expose it or direct public attention its way. It follows that alarmed resistance to publicity on the part of a business affords just ground for suspicion. 8. The favorite mask of an exploitation is a counter service |