Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington. Gilbert Clinton Wallace

were the leading citizens. They were "putting the United States on the map," as the local creator of wealth had put the small town on the map. They were doing something vast, from which we all undoubtedly benefited. Perhaps we could not trace our advantage so immediately as we could to the enterprise of the man who brought population to our town, swelling the price of our real estate or increasing the sales at our stores. But what had been a matter of experience on a small scale was a matter of belief on a large scale. The same consequences must follow, with manifold abundance. And the nation was demonstrably growing rapidly, immensely richer; surely cause and effect.

      Business had from the first taken on among us, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson remarks, a religious character; and when by a great thrust it overreached the bounds of locality and became national, its major prophets emerged. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks quotes Mark Twain as writing: "The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are as if they were solid wisdom." How much more of this sacred character inhered in the heroes who created nationwide railroad systems, vast steelmaking consolidations, monopolies of oil and coal!

      When a New York lawyer said of E. H. Harriman that he moved in spheres which no one else dare tread, he was putting, a little late, into words the national awe of the men who had overleapt the bounds of locality and bestrode the continent industrially, the heads of the vast business hierarchy. When Mr. Baer said that he operated the Reading Railroad by divine right he said only what a worshipping people had taught him to think. Those men did not use this half-religious language by accident; they crystallized into phrases the feeling of the country toward those who had done God's work of making it rich, making it successful.

      Each like an unconscious Cervantes helped to laugh our industrial chivalry away.

      How easy it is to believe about yourself what everyone believes about you! How hard not to! How easy to believe that you rule railroads by "divine right," or walk in "higher spheres," when the whole unexpressed consciousness of a hundred million people assigns you just such hieratic appurtenances and privileges. How doubt in the face of all this evidence? They identified themselves with Progress, and Progress was what ruled the world. If you have faith and if you are fortified with the faith of others, self-identification with one of the larger forces is not difficult. Was not what they were doing Progress, was it not the realization of that benignant will to the utter blossoming of chaos into utility which was planned in the beginning? Were they not instruments rather than mere men, instruments of the greater purpose of which America was the perfect work? If you believe in theocratic forces you believe also in chosen human agencies for carrying them out.

      They were more than instruments of Progress. I have spoken of government by economic law as having challenged political government in the consciousness of the people. As a country we perhaps believe in economic law more firmly than any nation in the world. Wasn't America being produced in accordance with economic law and wasn't America one of the marvels of the earth? I asked a salesman recently, a man with no personal interests which would give him the prejudices of the business world, why he hated Henry Ford. "Because," he replied instantly and without hesitation, "he defies economic law." He spoke like a true American. To defy economic law and make money at it is like selling the Savior for twenty pieces of silver.

      "The physical laws," says De Gourmont, "promulgated or established by the scientists, are confessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain a mechanism they declare its movements are due to a law. Bodies fall by virtue of the law of gravitation. This has precisely the same value in the serious order as the comic virtus dormitiva." In the promulgation of economic law our interest perverts the simple and just operation of our ignorance. In the field of physical phenomena we perceive a series of uniform events and call that uniformity a law. In the field of economic phenomena we perceive a series of events uniformly serving our interests and call that uniformity a law.

      These greater business men of the past fruitful generation operated on the whole over a long period of falling prices. Wealth accumulated. You read about it in the government reports, dividing the total by the total population. The division thus effected was mighty assuring. Labor was better paid. Higher institutions of learning multiplied. Libraries housed in marble grew upon every crossroads. Intellectual as well as material needs were in process of being better satisfied. We were approaching an age when ink upon white paper, now so cheap, cheaper than ever in the pitiful past, should lift humanity to a new and higher level.

      The evidence was conclusive. These greater business men were in supreme, in conspicuous direction of the country's development. The happiest results followed. They worked in harmony with economic law, for they prospered gloriously and one could no more break economic law and prosper than one could break criminal law and keep out of jail. Until Ford came no one could defy economic law with impunity.

      And law and justice being two ideas that associate themselves together in the human mind, in a binder of optimism perhaps, like the disparate elements that form clinkers in a furnace, they were accomplishing that perfect work of the justice which inhered in things at the beginning, when tiny atoms with the urge to produce an earth fit for man to live on, to produce America in short, began to discover affinities for each other. No wonder they penetrated "higher spheres" ruled by "divine right," and that "golden words" dropped from their mouths. Progress, destiny, an instinct for economic law, it was much to unite one man.

      Again, they were more than this. Men cannot be so universally looked to for the welfare of the nation as they were, without becoming in effect the government of that nation. Business and the government were one. Public opinion at that time would have regarded an administration which defied the great commercial interests as dangerous to the country's advancement. Lawyers like Mr. Knox or Mr. Root, who had proved their value to them, went to the Senate as their spokesmen. Able and ambitious men in both Houses of Congress, wishing power and influence, became their agents. The chairmen of the important committees of both houses were in their confidence and spoke with authority because of what they represented. Some of the virtue of the great, some shadow of divine right, descended upon them. Among valets the valet of the king is king.

      We forget, in the great outcry that was raised a few years ago over the "invisible government," that the invisible government was once sufficiently visible, almost consciously recognized, and fully accepted. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that the men who were making the country rich, making it a nation economically, should work their will freely at Washington. We jealously guarded their liberties. Woe unto the legislator who would interfere with their freedom to contract, for example, for the labor of children, which we described as the freedom of children to sell their labor advantageously. Adult labor banding together to arrange terms of its own sale was felt to be a public enemy. Every age has its fetish; the medicine man who could exorcise the evil spirit in stone and bush was not a more privileged character than his successor at whose touch prosperity sprang out of the earth, at whose word the mysterious economic forces which might in their wrath prove so destructive, bowed and became kind.

      Make a few individuals the embodiment of a national purpose that has long existed, unconscious and unquestioned, give them as you inevitably do in such a case the utmost freedom that is possible on this earth, let them be limited enough mentally so that they are blind to any other possible purpose; do all these things and you produce great men. It was an age of great men, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Hills, Ryans, Harrimans, and a host of others, richer in personalities than any other period of American life except that which produced Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, and Marshall. They were the flowering of the whole pioneer civilization.

      One hundred and fifty years of freedom has produced few free men. Perhaps these were all. They may not have been free intellectually. Charles Francis Adams writes of their kind: "I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many successful men, – 'big' financially, men famous during the last half century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement."

      Never mind. They were free in all the essential ways. The men of whom Adams wrote had no such sense of their limitations as he expressed. Only an Adams would then have had it, and the Adamses were not what M. Galtier of Le Temps suggested when, hastily absorbing the American spirit at Washington, he said to me: "I am reading The Education of