The Democracy and Fraternity of American

Industrialism*

BY JOHN CARLISLE KILGO

President of Trinity College

For the past twenty-five years industrialism has been clearly in the ascendency in America. It has engaged our best energies, taken possession of our political thought, given direction to our educational policies, shaped our social influences, and strongly influenced our literature and our religion. Holding as it does such a large place in our American life, it is inevitably the chief agency through which the cardinal principles of our civilization and the ideals of our social life must find their largest and their most effective expression. Our faiths must be verified amid the strains and the conditions of our industrial activities. Our ideas of government, of society, and of religion must become embodied in the laws, the relations, and the ethics of industry. We cannot, for example, separate our religious duties and acts from the relations and the tasks of the shop, the bank, and the factory; and, if there be any need for a revisal of our religious life, it will not be found in the demand for new creeds, but in making old creeds do less service about high altars and more service amid the dust and din of industrial tasks.

It seems to me that some of our most valued traits are finding expression in the vigorous industrial life which we have developed. In it one will find the truest and strongest spirit of our nationalism. There is nothing sectional, nothing provincial in our industrialism. The diameter of its vision is the diameter of the whole nation, and the circle of its activities takes in all sections and people of our great country. The industrial world cares little about the old-time debate between Webster and Calhoun, or the latter day discussion between Mr. Tillman and Mr. Lodge. It is vastly more interested in the cotton crop of Texas and the wheat crop of Dakota than it is in any academic theories of government. In its geography there is no Mason and Dixon's line, and the battle

*A portion of this article was used in an address before the American Bankers' Association at Chicago, September 17, 1909.

of Gettysburg is not on the front page of its history. It invests in railroads that run from the Lakes to the Gulf, and from sea to sea; it puts its capital in Alabama mines and Oregon banks, and send its agents into every State of the Union. Its very soul throbs with nationalism, and nowhere on this continent will you hear a finer note of nationalism than you will hear in the humming wheels of a Carolina cotton mill.

If this American union of States is to be real and not merely nominal, if it is to be vital and not incidental, it must find a deeper and a stronger bond than the articles of our national constitution, and it must be held together by a power greater than legislative enactments. People are bound together not by documents and enactments and bayonets, but by the ties of a common ancestry, by the traditions of their race, by the common experiences of their history, and, above all, by their association with each other in doing the work of the world.

In its freedom from class distinctions and the rule of caste our American industrialism is the finest triumph of democracy to be found in any part of the world. This freedom is strikingly illustrated in two forms. First, the distinction between capital and labor, which in aristocratic governments is a real class distinction, does not represent a real distinction in our industrialism. While economists for the sake of their science make such a classification, in reality the American capitalist is an American worker. The idle capitalist spending his time in lordly indolence is not a custom among Americans. The captains of American industries do not regard work with social disdain, as becoming only to the poorer classes. In our industrialism it is an honor to work, a disgrace to idle. The marks of labor are badges of respect. And in the great army of American laborers there will be found none who work harder, none who more highly esteem labor, none who devote more wisdom to their tasks than the heads of our great industrial organizations. Who in America works harder than Mr. Morgan? Who gave a larger number of hours and more tireless efforts to his tasks than Mr. Harriman? Every great industrial enterprise in America is a monument to the working spirit of our capitalists. There is, therefore, among Americans no just ground for warfare between capital and labor as though they were alien and dissimilar forces battling against each other for

heartless conquest. The capitalist and the laborer share the scenes of toil and know their common interests and regard their common relations.

The second way in which American industrialism is the world's best example of freedom from the rule of class or caste is the ease with which a man may pass from one line of work to another. In old countries the reign of industrial classes has predestined the field of each man's work. Ask an Englishman why he is a merchant and he will answer, "because my father and because his father before him were merchants." Ask another why he is a tailor, and the same traditional reason will be given. They inherit an industrial destiny. But ask an American why he is a merchant, or a tailor, or a farmer, or a banker, and he will reply, if he replies at all, "because I wish to be." His grandfather was a carpenter, his father was a farmer, he began as a clerk, changed to a traveling agent, went West and became a banker. It is an abnormal record in which the man has not passed through many fields of industry before settling down to one field, while the typical genius of our race is a natural conceit which makes every true American believe that he can do anything. And it is the rule to find a successful business man engaged in several lines of business rather than to find him devoting all his energies to a single industry.

Dr. Eliot thinks that the ideal democracy is a social order in which each man will have a free chance to do the thing which he can do best. Perhaps the same idea was more accurately expressed by Mazzini when he defined a democracy as a "chance for all through all under the leadership of the wisest and the best." Both agree that a sound democracy should furnish each member of society a ready chance to find the place in which he can render the most efficient and remunerative service. This ideal may not yet have been attained, but I believe that it has been more nearly realized in our industrialism than it has in any other department of our social order. The richest heritage of the American youth as he quits college is the full assurance that all the gateways to all the fields of human endeavor are wide open before him, and that he may select or change his calling as may seem best to himself. And it has been this soul of democracy in our American industrialism that has filled the American youth with a conquering vigor and kept alive in his mind the spirit of freedom.

It is popular to discuss the failures of democracy, and it is common enough to find Americans who express doubts as to the final results of our effort to maintain a democratic government. And the effort is full of difficulties. It demands eternal vigilance. But if our efforts to establish democracy in the earth, to prove its cause to all mankind, fail, the blame cannot be justly charged to our industrialism. The tendencies which seem to threaten our democracy do not spring out of our industrial spirit, they do not belong to our industrial methods. They come out of the social realm, and should be credited to the weakness and the insincerity of our social sentiments, standards, and customs. They are the creations of men and women who are the beneficiaries of the wealth produced by industry and who use it to set up false and undemocratic ideals of society and to parade the forms of aristocracy in a most harassing way. The chief danger, if there is any danger, is in the parlor, not in the shop. Americans are democratic enough in the scenes of work; they become suspicious when they lay off their working clothes and put on dress suits and pass into the social world. Then human sympathy seems to chill. Then the laborer comes in contact with a spirit which he resents. It is in the snobbishness of the parlor, the arrogance of the social spirit that American democracy reaches its lowest point and seems to have its least chance. It is unfair, therefore, to charge to industrialism the crimes of social life, the shortcomings of the educational spirit, or the failures of politics. Judged by every fair test there are ample reasons to believe that the democracy of our industrialism is not a failure, but that it shows signs of health and of vigorous growth. I feel justified in believing that in it the spirit of democracy is developed to a larger degree and in a sounder form than in any other department of our national life. It is more democratic than our politics, than our society, than our education, and, I regret to say, than our church fellowships. If the soul of democracy is, as Archbishop Ireland says, "a supreme faith in manhood," then where will one find a higher, a sincerer, and a more persistent faith in true manhood than he will find in the history and the standards of American industrialism? In the fields of our industry each man is to a larger degree the master of his own destiny than he is in any other sphere of American life. There ancestral influences, social badges, and other incidental

circumstances count for less and personal manhood counts for more than it does in other fields of activity. I never fill out a blank for some person who is applying to a bonding company that I am not deeply impressed with the high estimate the business world puts upon personal worth as the chief basis of business confidence and esteem. This is democracy in earnest. It is the one spirit that inspires hope in every heart and furnishes a high motive for sacrifice and labor. It invests manhood with a dignity and clothes it with rights that are acknowledged at the highest seats in every department of industry.

One of the most splendid achievements of our American history is the unlimited opportunity it has furnished men of all classes, conditions, and races to improve their industrial and social conditions and to rise to the highest points of success. In the halls of fame are recorded the names of those who have done some immortal thing in letters or the art of war or politics, but a roll that also reflects great honor upon our American government, the one that marks the high point of our social evolution, is that long roll of Americans who began at the bottom and by fidelity and labor rose step by step till they reached the summit of industrial influence and power. That is the common story of American men of business success. The Americans today, who command such large industrial power throughout the world, whose names give value to commercial paper in every market, bear witness to the genuineness of democracy in our industrialism. The little tot who is selling his papers along the street at a penny a copy is the citizen of a country and the heir of industrial traditions that make possible to him the day when he will own the paper and his voice become a national power. That is not the dream of democratic idealism, it is the wonderful record of our democratic industrialism.

In our industrialism is also embodied in a most practical form a true spirit of fraternity. The doctrine of human brotherhood was first given to the world by Jesus and is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian religion. But the church has preached it as a human relation to be verified in religious experience as an inner sense. Yet, as taught by Jesus, it was intended as a new basis of society to be worked out in all practical duties and relations. And one who has closely studied the evolution of society