So, too, Professor Sumner, Professor Walter A. Wyckoff, the entertaining author of “The Workers,” and a host of other instructors of the public, the mere roster of whose names would require several pages of fine print. Of the only two safeguards of the dependent classes against complete exploitation--social legislation and the labor society--our moulders of opinion would seem to have taken the job of demolishing the former, leaving to the magnates themselves the task of attending to the latter.
With many if not most of these publicists the criticism is delivered not only at protective laws, but at the force behind them--democracy. “Every age,” writes Professor Sumner, “is befooled by the notions which are in fashion in it. Our age is befooled by ‘democracy.’ We hear arguments about the industrial organization which are deductions from democratic dogmas, or which appeal to prejudice by using analogies drawn from democracy to affect sentiment about industrial relations.” Many of our moulders of opinion elaborate the argument often made in the writings of our literary magnates, that only men who are themselves possessed of property should have any voice in the disposition of wealth or the regulation of property rights. To justify this view recourse is had to several recently imported dogmas, fashioned by Mr. W. H. Mallock, author of “Aristocracy and Evolution.” All increase of wealth, all advance in knowledge and virtue, contends Mr. Mallock, come from an aristocracy--a word which he defines as meaning the “exceptionally gifted and efficient minority, no matter what the position in which its members may have been born, or what the sphere of social progress in which their efficiency shows itself.” Therefore, since the efficient have produced everything above the maximum which the ignorant and unskilled workman can produce without this higher aid, it follows that the efficient should be left in untroubled possession of their holdings. The large assumption among others in Mr. Mallock’s argument--that those who efficiently sow and those who richly reap are the same persons--need not concern us here. It is sufficient to point out that his argument has been eagerly taken up by a number of our own moulders of opinion, fostered and even developed to further conclusions.
