CHAPTER XV.
WHAT WE WERE COMING TO BUT FOR THE REVOLUTION.
"We read in the histories," said Edith's mother, "much about the amazingextent to which particular individuals and families succeeded inconcentrating in their own hands the natural resources, industrialmachinery, and products of the several countries. Julian had only amillion dollars, but many individuals or families had, we are told,wealth amounting to fifty, a hundred, and even two or three hundredmillions. We read of infants who in the cradle were heirs of hundreds ofmillions. Now, something I never saw mentioned in the books was thelimit, for there must have been some limit fixed, to which one individualmight appropriate the earth's surface and resources, the means ofproduction, and the products of labor."
"There was no limit," I replied.
"Do you mean," exclaimed Edith, "that if a man were only clever andunscrupulous enough he might appropriate, say, the entire territory of acountry and leave the people actually nothing to stand on unless by hisconsent?"
"Certainly," I replied. "In fact, in many countries of the Old Worldindividuals owned whole provinces, and in the United States even vastertracts had passed and were passing into private and corporate hands.There was no limit whatever to the extent of land which one person mightown, and of course this ownership implied the right to evict every humanbeing from the territory unless the owner chose to let individuals remainon payment of tribute."
"And how about other things besides land?" asked Edith.
"It was the same," I said. "There was no limit to the extent to which anindividual might acquire the exclusive ownership of all the factories,shops, mines, and means of industry, and commerce of every sort, so thatno person could find an opportunity to earn a living except as theservant of the owner and on his terms."
"If we are correctly informed," said the doctor, "the concentration ofthe ownership of the machinery of production and distribution, trade andindustry, had already, before you fell asleep, been carried to a point inthe United States through trusts and syndicates which excited generalalarm."
"Certainly," I replied. "It was then already in the power of a score ofmen in New York city to stop at will every car-wheel in the UnitedStates, and the combined action of a few other groups of capitalistswould have sufficed practically to arrest the industries and commerce ofthe entire country, forbid employment to everybody, and starve the entirepopulation. The self-interest of these capitalists in keeping businessgoing on was the only ground of assurance the rest of the people had fortheir livelihood from day to day. Indeed, when the capitalists desired tocompel the people to vote as they wished, it was their regular custom tothreaten to stop the industries of the country and produce a businesscrisis if the election did not go to suit them."
"Suppose, Julian, an individual or family or group of capitalists, havingbecome sole owners of all the land and machinery of one nation, shouldwish to go on and acquire the sole ownership of all the land and economicmeans and machinery of the whole earth, would that have been inconsistentwith your law of property?"
"Not at all. If one individual, as you suggest, through the effect ofcunning and skill combined with inheritances, should obtain a legal titleto the whole globe, it would be his to do what he pleased with asabsolutely as if it were a garden patch, according to our law ofproperty. Nor is your supposition about one person or family becomingowner of the whole earth a wholly fanciful one. There was, when I fellasleep, one family of European bankers whose world-wide power andresources were so vast and increasing at such a prodigious andaccelerating rate that they had already an influence over the destiniesof nations wider than perhaps any monarch ever exercised."
"And if I understand your system, if they had gone on and attained theownership of the globe to the lowest inch of standing room at low tide,it would have been the legal right of that family or single individual,in the name of the sacred right of property, to give the people of thehuman race legal notice to move off the earth, and in case of theirfailure to comply with the requirement of the notice, to call upon themin the name of the law to form themselves into sheriffs' _posses_and evict themselves from the earth's surface?"
"Unquestionably."
"O father," exclaimed Edith, "you and Julian are trying to make fun ofus. You must think we will believe anything if you only keep straightfaces. But you are going too far."
"I do not wonder you think so," said the doctor. "But you can easilysatisfy yourself from the books that we have in no way exaggerated thepossibilities of the old system of property. What was called under thatsystem the right of property meant the unlimited right of anybody who wasclever enough to deprive everybody else of any property whatever."
"It would seem, then," said Edith, "that the dream of world conquest byan individual, if ever realized, was more likely under the old _regime_ to be realized by economic than by military means."
"Very true," said the doctor. "Alexander and Napoleon mistook theirtrade; they should have been bankers, not soldiers. But, indeed, the timewas not in their day ripe for a world-wide money dynasty, such as we havebeen speaking of. Kings had a rude way of interfering with the so-calledrights of property when they conflicted with royal prestige or produceddangerous popular discontent. Tyrants themselves, they did not willinglybrook rival tyrants in their dominions. It was not till the kings hadbeen shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in,leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the moneypower, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotismarrived. Then, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, wheninternational trade and financial relations had broken down nationalbarriers and the world had become one field of economic enterprise, didthe idea of a universally dominant and centralized money power become notonly possible, but, as Julian has said, had already so far materializeditself as to cast its shadow before. If the Revolution had not come whenit did, we can not doubt that something like this universal plutocraticdynasty or some highly centered oligarchy, based upon the completemonopoly of all property by a small body, would long before this timehave become the government of the world. But of course the Revolutionmust have come when it did, so we need not talk of what would havehappened if it had not come."