Behind the Mirrors

red intermediaries between the will to increase and the rest of us, be

that government which the smoking compartment philosopher has in mind when he say

metimes bore a different author's name but which was always the same history. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of their eyes" and "If we don't hang together we shall all hang separately" were the unifying bond, and they were enough. We had the same sense of identity as an infant has when it becomes aware that

s offended. If you had a general store it was he who added to its patronage by adding to the population. If you raised farm products nearby it was he who improved your market. He built the fine house which it was your pride to show visitors. Your success and happiness was bound up in his. He conferred his blessings for a consideration, for you were careful to make no laws which restricted the free

heir first names. All the good will that went to the local business leaders went to them. They put money into our pockets, when they didn't happen to take it out of our pockets; on the whole they were doing the great work of ma

cated railroads that local enterprise had laid down and in the creation of a nati

to the arrival of Roosevelt, more than a generation, and, if we did not preserve the names of our Presidents in our histories, how many names are there worth remembering? Garfiel

rnegie, the Rockefellers, Harriman, Morgan, Ryan-business was fertile of men, politics sterile; you have to go back to the foundation of the government for a period so prolific in men, of the

ck to the small town again, who was it increased the opportunities of the storekeeper, the neighboring farmer, or real estate holder? Was it the mayor and the common council by passin

d our economic defense, against the foreigner, with laws written, however, by business itself, which naturally knew best how it wanted to be defended; you could not, in your proper senses, suppose that the Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys were wiser

to finance the consolidations. An investing public with a wider horizon than that which used to put its money in local enterprises entrusted its funds in the hands of the great bankers or took its chances in the market for stocks. Industry went through a sim

s desiring favors from the railroads placed representatives in each others' boards. This interlock

United States as a single field of enterprise as the imagination of E

ator 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 esta

al, 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 t

y 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 hi

ervantes helped to laugh o

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 t

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

e 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 fie

otal 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

FRANK W. MOND

appiest results followed. They worked in harmony with economic law, for they prospered gloriously and one could no more break economi

hat 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

ich 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, becam

ork 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 fel

e 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

r 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

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

" were interesting, witty, thoughtful, or refined, but whether they were free. And they were; they were so sure of themselves, and public opinion was so sure

iness life. "All our best and ablest minds went into commerce," we say. We flatter ourselves. Mr. Carnegie, born in the days o

the utmost opportunity for self-expression, the one great measure of freedom which this free country afforded. A jealous public guarded their divine right from impious hands. They believ

the "culture" of Boston? Boston has had its revenge. The words "mere money-getters" bit in. There were other objects in life beside pioneering the industrial opportunities of a whole continent just brought together into commercial unity. Mr. Morgan began to buy art. Mr. Carnegie began

ican political consciousness, governme

national passion for equality began to work. Had not Mr. Carnegie confessed the weakness in his soul's fortress by writing

g in their own way the sense becoming general that pioneering was over and that its ideals were too narrow and too few-even if no clear sense was coming of what state and what ideals were to take their place. Men turn from leaders whose day

st with the one we already had. The government personified by Mr. Roosevelt was the check and balance to the government personified by Mr. Harriman and Mr. Morgan. Governments never die but merely recede in the national consciousness, like the old clothes which we keep in the att

ctical men." It was the kind of revolution this country desired. The nation wished to eat its cake and have it, to retain government by business and have alongs

just how far he could go and no further. They would emerge. A moment later the press in response to a summons would arrive. Mr. Roosevelt would say: "I have just sent for Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Cannon and forced them to accept

rnment, existed side by side, of about equal proportions; and no one really wished ei

st of the pioneers, and started to set up representatives of the public as great as they were, was singularly

r. Root, Mr. Knox, General Wood, James Garfield, Mr. Pinchot, Mr. Knox Smith, the "Tennis Cabinet," to all of whom he succeeded in imparting some vividness fro

s reaching out to control certain phases of business itself. The great pioneers of national industry were growing old. They were becoming self-conscious, vaguely aware of changing circumstances, c

ng chances magnificently, pioneer fashion, "to strike it rich," to found industries or magnify avenues of trade. Th

om them. Wall Street had to orga

whole six, one after another, on his library rug. He had to exhibit in some way his large manner of doing things, and this was the best way he could think of at the moment. He belonged to a

w every rock and reef in the river. Stripped of much power and prestige, no longer looked to without question for the safety of the country, that mag

he second generation, of the younger Stillman, of the younger Rockefeller, competent but unremarkable, of the younge

ad been daring, a petty King who always had an aspiring Mayor of the palace at his elbow, inclined to go to sleep at his post from excessive watching of his property. As we would go over the names in the dynasty, Mr. Roosevelt

erentiated the true business man any more than we have differentiated the true statesman; whether that psychological change which I have sought to trace, that denial of freedom which once was the pioneers'-the new laws, the hard restraints operating now upon

g the blinkers of a single aim, which kept their eyes like those of harnessed horses in the narrow road; God w

ts shoulder and sees at New York the government by business, its traditional master, and wishing a master, is unaware that the twilight of the gods is come. And both see that greatest of all shadows, Public Opinion, the new mons

popular magazine fiction strive to furnish what life no longer does-the pioneer ideal, the hero who overcomes fire and flood and the machination of enemie

her channels began to close. We beat the bushes for the great, the kings that should come after Agamemnon. Monthlies of vast circulation tell us of every jack-of-all-trades who hits upon a mill

ly, "Ah, but business, the bankers, will not let the nations fight. They have only to pull the strings of the purse and there will be no money for

but it stood by impotent while the very foundations on

. Governments the world over showed that the industrial mechanism could be made to run faster and turn out more than eve

ulation, wasteful production, of luxuries, ensued and then a crash. One may explain all that happened in both cases on the basis o

rnings. He counselled moderation. He urged deflation instead of further inflation. His advice was unpopular with those who saw profits from a sudden withdrawal of wartime restraints. A

market where there is no market. To lower his costs he needs cheaper steel than he can buy, so he manufactures it himself cheaper than the great steelmakers can manufacture it. He operates independently of the "big business" gr

hat American credit must go into foreign trade. The next week equally "big" bankers from the interior visit the capital and tell the President that American cr

nose wishing to be led by it. The fat boys decline the nose. They are not leading anybody. In deprecatory manner they say: 'Please drive North. We think that is the way.' They go. The nex

divided in its own mind, it is ruled by second-rate men. Of two governments that have occupied a place in the popular consciousness, government by business