Modern History Sourcebook:
Henry Demarest Lloyd:
"The Lords of Industry," North American Review 331 (June 1884)

Lloyd (1847-1903) was an influential critic of the "Robber Barons". These were the capitalists such as Carnegie, Rockefellar, and Vanderbilt who developed the transportation, communication, and industrial sectors after 1865. For years Lloyd was   associated with the Chicago Tribune.

Full text available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884hdlloyd.html

...The New England Milk Producers' Association met in Boston, last January, for the purpose of thoroughly organizing the milk farmers. Representatives from New York who had led the farmers there were present to point out the way. The Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture read a letter from a gentleman in which a cheek of one hundred dollars was inclosed, to pay for milk to be poured on the ground to help the success of the producers' cause. The membership was increased from 86 to 291. Resolutions were adopted calling upon all the farmers who supplied Boston with milk to join the association and do all in their power to solve the " milk problem." On March 22nd, the day of the similar meeting in New York, the association met again in Boston, conferred with the representatives of the milk dealers, fixed the price of milk from April to October at thirtyfour cents for eight and onehalf quarts by a vote of 91 to 39, and adjourned. The ballot is a new force in the manufacture of prices, and one well worthy the attention of those who are curious about the developments of universal suffrage.

Other combinations, more or less successful, have been made by ice men of New York, fish dealers of Boston, Western millers, copper miners, manufacturers of sewer pipe, lamps, pottery, glass, hoopiron, shot, rivets, sugar, candy, starch, preserved fruits, glucose, vapor stoves, chairs, lime, rubber, screws, chains, harvesting machinery, pins, salt, type, brass tubing, hardware, silk, and wire cloth, to say nothing of the railroad, labor, telegraph, and telephone pools with which we are so familiar. On the third of April, the largest and most influential meeting of cotton manufacturers ever held in the South came together at Augusta to take measures to cure the devastating plague of too much cotton cloth. A plan was unanimously adopted for the organization of a Southern Manufacturers' Association for the same general purposes as the New England Manufacturers' Association. The convention recommended its members to imitate the action of the Almighty in making a short crop of cotton by making a short crop of yarns and cloth, and referred to a committee the preparation of plans for a more thorough pool. Such are some of the pools into which our industry is eddying. They come and go, but more come than go, and those that stay grow. All are "voluntary," of course, but if the milk farmer of Orange county, the iron molder of Troy, the lumber dealer of San Francisco, the Lackawanna Railroad, or any other individual or corporate producer, show any backwardness about accepting the invitation to join " the pool," they are whipped in with all the competitive weapons at command, from assault and battery to boycotting and conspiracy. The pr*ate wars that are ravaging our world of trade give small men their choice between extermination and vassalage. Combine or die! The little coke burner of Connellsville works or stops work, the coal dealer of Chicago raises his prices or lowers them, the typesetter takes up his stick or lays it down, as the master of the pool directs. Competitors swear themselves on the Bible into accomplice, and free and equal citizens abandon their business privacy to pool commissioners vested with absolute power, but subject to human frailties. Commerce is learning the delights of universal suffrage, and in scores of trades supply and demand are adjusted by a majority vote. In a society which has the wherewithal to cover, fatten and cheer every one, Lords of Industry are acquiring the power to pool the profits of scarcity and to decree famine. They cannot stop the brook that runs the mill, but they can chain the wheel; they cannot hide the coal mine, but they can close the shaft three days every week. To keep up gold digging rates of dividends, they declare, war against plenty. On all that keeps him al*e the workman must pay them their prices, while they lock him out of the mill in which alone his labor can be made to fetch the price of life. Only society can compel a social use of its resources; the' man is for himself.

On the theory of " too much of everything" our industries, from railroads to workingmen, are being organized to prevent milk, nails, lumber, freights, labor, soothing syrup, and all these other things, from becoming too cheap. The majority have never yet been able to buy enough of anything. The minority have too much of everything to sell. Seeds of social trouble germinate fast in such conditions. Society is letting these combinations become institutions without compelling them to adjust their charges to the cost of production, which used to be the universal rule of price. Our laws and commissions to regulate the railroads are but toddling steps in a path in which we need to walk like men. The change from competition to combination is nothing less than one of those revolutions which march through history with giant strides. It is not likely that this revolution will go backward. Nothing goes backward in this country except reform. When Stephenson said of railroads that where combination was possible competition was impossible, he was unconsciously declaring the law of all industry.

Man, the only animal which forgets, has already in a century or two forgotten that the freedom, the independence of his group, of the state and even of the family, which he has enjoyed for a brief interval, have been unknown in most of the history of our race, and in all the history of most races. The livery companies of London, with their gloomy, guildhall, their wealth, their gluttony and winebibbing, their wretched Irish estates, exist today vain reminders to us of a time when the entire industry of Europe was regimented into organizations, voluntary at first, afterward adopted by the law, which did what our pools of railroads, laborers, manufacturers, and others are trying to do. Not only prices but manners were pooled. " The notion," says Cliffe Leslie, " that every man had a right to settle where he liked, to carry on any occupation he thought fit, and in whatever manner he chose, to demand the highest price he could get, or on the contrary to offer lower terms than any one else, to make the largest profit possible, and to compete with other traders without restraint, was absolutely contrary to the spirit of the ages that preceded ours." This system existed for centuries. It is so unlike our own that the contemplation of it may well shake us out of our conceit that the transitions, displacements, changes, upheavals, struggles, exterminationsfrom Indians to sewing womenof the last two hundred and fifty years were the normal condition of the race.

Those were not exceptional times. Our day of free competition and free contract has been the exceptional era in history. Explorer, pioneer, Protestant, reformer, captain of industry could not move in the harness of the guild brother, the vassal, the monk, and were allowed to throw away medieval uniforms. But now "the individual withers; the world is more and more." Society having let the individual overrun the new worlds to be conquered, is reestablishing its lines of communication with him. Literary theorists still repeat the cant of individualism in law, politics, and morals; but the world of affairs is gladly accepting, in lieu of the liberty of each to do as he will with his own, all it can get of the liberty given by laws that let no one do as he might with his own. The dream of the French Revolution, that man was good enough to be emancipated from the bonds of association and government by the simple proclamation of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, was but the frenzied expression of what was called Freedom of Selfinterest in a quieter but not less bloody revolution, if the mortality of the factories, the mines, and the tenements be charged to its account. A rope cannot be made of sand; a society cannot be made of competitive units.

We have given competition its own way, and have found that we are not good enough or wise enough to be trusted with this power of ruining ourselves in the attempt to ruin others. Free competition could be let run only in a community where every one had learned, to say and act "I am the state." We have had an era of material inventions. We now need a renaissance of moral inventions, contrivances to tap the vast currents of moral magnetism flowing uncaught over the face of society. Morals and values rise and fall together. If our combinations have no morals, they can have no values If the tendency to combination is irresistible, control of it is imperative. Monopoly and antimonopoly, odious as these words have become to the literary ear, represent the two great tendencies of our time: monopoly, the tendency to combination; antimonopoly, the demand for social control of it. As the man is bent toward business or patriotism, he will negotiate combinations or agitate for laws to regulate them. The first is capitalistic, the second is social. The first, industrial; the second, moral. The first promotes wealth; the second, citizenship. These combinations are not to be waved away as fresh pictures of folly or total depravity. There is something in them deeper than that. The Aryan has proved by the experience of thousands of years that he can travel. " But travel," Emerson says, " is the fool's paradise." We must now prove that we can stay at home, and stand it as well as the Chinese have done. Future Puritans cannot emigrate from Southampton to Plymouth Rock. They can only sail from righteousness to righteousness. Our young men can no longer go west; they must go up or down. Not new land, but new, virtue must be the outlet for the future. Our halt at the shores of the Pacific is a much more serious affair than that which brought our ancestors to a pause before the barriers of the Atlantic, and compelled them to practice living together for a few hundred years. We cannot hereafter, as in the past, recover freedom by going to the prairies; we must find it in the society of the good. In the presence of great combinations, in all departments of life, the moralist and patriot have work to do of a significance never before approached during the itinerant phases of bur civilization. It may be that the coming age of combination will issue in a nobler and fuller liberty for the individual than has yet been seen, but that consummation will be possible, not in a day of competitive trade, but in one of competitive morals.

Source:

North American Review 331 (June 1884)

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