THE LABORER AND THE LADY

BY JOHN CORBIN

We have been accustomed to think of the manual worker as a victim-victim of the Industrial Revolution that in a little more than a century has transformed all living. But neither sociologist nor historian has recognized a fact, quite demonstrable to those who will see it, that his cause is bound up with the cause of a strangely assorted companion in misery, a companion whom he neither loves nor in any way considers, the woman of the middle class. It is true that their misfortunes are widely different, so different that one rubs one's eyes at realizing that they have a common cause. To the laborer the factory has brought grinding toil; to the lady it has brought deprivation of all productive function-everything that, since the far dawn of family life, has made her self-supporting, self-respecting. There is a further difference. Though the laborer has been a victim, he has already found a means of escape. Through his unions he has magnificently resisted oppression; in the doctrines of equality and democracy he has the promise of transcendent power, industrial as well as political. If he is victim of the present he is also protagonist of a future deeply portentous. In brief, what the lady has lost in productivity and in amplitude of life-all that and more—the laborer is winning, has won. It is a strange duel, this, between antagonists who have no thought of each other, are scarcely aware of each other's existence. What is to be the end of it?

First, let us pause to consider how far we have come since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The substance of our thought, social as well as political, has been largely made over. The process has been gradual, for the most part insensible; but it has been none the less profound-none the less ominous to the woman well born and well bred, to the middle class home.

When the Constitution was framed the nation faced formidable

problems. Individual States were jealous of one another. For fear it might be taken for only a small Commonwealth, lose its equality under the union, Rhode Island insisted on having two Senators, quite like New York. Senators were an asset in those days. To-day Senators have dwindled and States are no longer sticklers for the theory of equality. Rhode Islanders are citizens of "the greatest nation on earth" but Rhode Island is only as large as it is. That question was faced and solved at the outset; not so the question of State Sovereignty. To placate the South, nothing was said about slavery in the instrument of our liberty, about secession in the instrument of our union. So we had the Civil War. To-day the negro is as free as seems humanly possible and the nation is one and indivisible. Those issues, too, are as past—dead as the jealousy of Rhode Island for New York. It is a fact of prime importance: Everywhere the old local spirit has been submerged in a sense of common nationality.

One other question the Constitution evaded-whether the National Government should be weak or strong. It has been settled, or all but settled, by a peaceful process of growth. When Washington and Hamilton assumed office they sought to make the Nation organic and functional. An opposing party, largely created by Jefferson and ultimately led by him to victory, distrusted authority in all forms. Though they despaired of the glorious "unrestraint" of the life of the Indians, they exalted individual freedom, denounced central authority. Yet our deeper instincts have always been national. The structure of the Federalists stood. Of all Hamilton's "monocratic" measures, which Jefferson so bitterly, vindictively, assailed as leader of an irresponsible opposition, he did not venture to alter one, not one, when the tide of the new democracy swept him into power. More than that, he was the first to give rein to another deep national instinct which equalitarians among us still denounce as Imperialism. He bought Louisiana from the monocrat Napoleon and, instead of administering it as a free dependency, he governed it in Napoleon's own monocratic manner, as a subject colony-though he knew very well that in doing all this he made the Constitution, as he expressed it, "waste paper." Down to the present our "Empire"--the term is Washington's-has

widened always and has been in the main administered in the high spirit of liberty. Yet always the central government has consolidated its power. The Civil War gave to Federalism, the functions of union, a constitutional basis. The spreading growth of industry, and its rapid integration on a national scale, have given it a magnitude and diversity of responsibility which, though Hamilton foresaw it quite clearly in a general way, was beyond the power of any mortal mind to grasp in its complexity, its immensity. We do not yet know how far the federal power may extend in the world of business, even in the more personal affairs of the citizen, but so much is certain: Whatever the doctrinary democrat may say, the Federalist programme of Washington and Hamilton is an accomplished fact, firm and irrevocable. In proportion as the local spirit has faded, the national spirit has intensified.

There was only one other great issue. It was latent in 1787 and for the most part unsuspected, but it was destined to sow new seeds of internal strife and disruption, to transform the status of the lady-the opposition between rich and poor. The well-to-do had always led-manorial farmers, merchant traders, professional men. It was they who organized the Revolution, who framed our Constitution and gave it the bent of their genius while they administered it. Democracy was a word they avoided, an idea they distrusted. Those fit to lead were to that extent people apart, with a special scale of life, special resources. No one really objected, for the differences between man and man were not articulate, being by no means oppressive. Land was plenty and farming the principal, almost the only, occupation; ability, even mediocrity, was free to rise-did rise. The institutions of liberty functioned. Yet the doctrine of a universal and “natural” equality had been enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and envy is always with us. Eventually Jefferson, whose political instinct was as deep and practical as his "philosophy" was shallow and doctrinary, recognized a strategic opportunity.

Rejecting the whole-visioned, unfactional government of the best which Washington dreamed, he accomplished his much vaunted "Revolution of 1800"-in effect creating the class

struggle half a century before Karl Marx. Conciliatory as was the intention of his inaugural address, the consciousness of having launched a new era breathes through it; he never ceased to vaunt his revolution as of equal moment with the Revolution of 1776. The credulous, narrow-minded gossip as to those perilous "monocrats" and "Anglomen", Hamilton and Washington, which he spread in his Anas, was probably not altogether inspired by an underhand, personal malice; it had also the purpose of recording for posterity the nature of the menace from which he had delivered his countrymen, the full scope of the opportunity which his Democratic Revolution had opened to them.

Doubtless there was a measure of truth in both his hopes and fears. Hamilton saw too vividly the envy, cupidity, thoughtlessness, of our national character-trusted too fully in the splendid rectitude, vigor and public beneficence of the institutions he was helping Washington to create. Doubtless also there was a genuine if superficial spirit of fraternity in Jefferson's democracy, an optimism as to American character which in some measure has been justified. Our national tradition is ampler, richer, warmer for the "Revolution of 1800". But all that will avail us little if the postulates upon which Jefferson founded it were false and if, through thick as through thin, we continue to act on them.

Of all the issues present or latent in 1787, that of equality and democracy is the only one that survives as a menace. More than that, it has grown hugely, enormously, until Jefferson himself, if he could see our plight, would be appalled. For, in spite of his "philosophy" and his affectation of a homespun equality, the architect of Monticello can only have loved beauty and distinction, believed that it is the prerogative of the able and the wise to lead. His beautiful mansion is an original creation quite apart from the Georgian movement and essentially superior to it. True, it is the work of an amateur. Jefferson played by ear not only in fiddling and in statesmanship but in his supreme accomplishment of architecture. But where Inigo Jones and Wren derived from Palladio, he had the purity of taste to go straight to the classic Roman architecture. His style of living

was grandly exclusive, his house planned with amazing skill, as the traveler may see to-day, to obliterate all sight of his many servants, all that busy human contact with them which was inevitable and manifestly welcomed in other manorial households, notably Mount Vernon. Washington housed his artisans and laborers substantially within a stone's throw of his industrial manor, and mingled with them freely; but Jefferson housed his slaves in distant dug-outs, wretchedly unwholesome, made them approach his manor through a tunneled passage and go about their ministrations in hidden halls and stairways.

This is the democrat who received the British Ambassador in slovenly homespun shorts and carpet slippers, who denounced Washington's simple dignity as monarchical. Henry Adams remarks in his History that, whereas John Marshall was among the most approachable and (as Marshall would not have said) democratic of our Revolutionary statesmen, Jefferson was, in his personal instincts, the most aristocratic. Land being the basis of independent seclusion, the great democrat scorned city life and looked to the future of the nation as purely agricultural. Hamilton recognized the vast sources of prosperity made possible by mechanized industry and, as a pupil of Adam Smith, foresaw that its development was inevitable in all countries; so he urged an intelligent preparation for it. Jefferson, as he tells us in his still delightful Notes on Virginia (1782), hoped to keep our nation free from its toils. "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body." To the angry protests of our incipient industrial population he added this soothing word, unconsciously and ironically prophetic. As yet, he wrote, American workmen were "independent and moral" and would "continue so as long as there are vacant lands for them to resort to". He little suspected that within a single century free land many times the area of the thirteen States would be taken up, that long before then democracy would wear a different front toward the kindliest sage, the most patronizing philosopher. He could not foresee that his Democratic Revolution would be met and be reënforced by a revolution far more subversive.