第55章 Chapter 8(7)

Such a vested right to free income, that is to say this legitimate right of the kept classes to their keep at the cost of the underlying community, does not fall in with the lines of that mechanistic outlook and mechanistic logic which is forever gaining ground as the new order of industry goes forward. Such free income, which measures neither the investor's personal contribution to the production of goods nor his necessary consumption while engaged in industry, does not fit in with that mechanistic reckoning that runs in terms of tangible performance, and that grows ever increasingly habitual and convincing with every further habituation to the new order of things in the industrial world. Vested perquisites have no place in the new scheme of things; hence the new scheme is a menace. It is true, the well stabilised principles of the eighteenth century still continue to rate the investor as a producer of goods; but it is equally true that such a rating is palpable nonsense according to the mechanistic calculus of the new order, brought into bearing by the mechanical industry and material science. This may all be an untoward and distasteful turn of circumstances, but there is no gain of tranquillity to be got from ignoring it.

So it comes about that, increasingly, throughout broad classes in these industrial countries there is coming to be visible a lack of respect and affection for the vested interests, whether of business or of privilege; and it rises to the pitch of distrust and plain disallowance among those peoples on whom the preconceptions of the eighteenth century sit more lightly and loosely. It still is all vague and shifty. So much so that the guardians of law and order are still persuaded that they "have the situation in hand." But the popular feeling of incongruity and uselessness in the current run of law and custom under the rule of these timeworn preconceptions is visibly gaining ground and gathering consistency, even in so well ordered a republic as America. A cleavage of sentiment is beginning to run between the vested interests and the variegated mass of the common lot., and increasingly the common man is growing apathetic, or even impervious, to appeals grounded on these timeworn preconceptions of equity and good usage.

The fact of such a cleavage, as well as the existence of any ground for it, is painstakingly denied by the spokesmen of the vested interests; and in support of that comfortable delusion they will cite the exemplary fashion in which certain monopolistic labor organisations "stand pat," It is true, such a quasi-vested interest of the A. F. of L., which unbidden assumes to speak for the common man, can doubtless be counted on to "stand pat" on that system of imponderables in which its vested perquisites reside. So also the kept classes, and their stewards among the keepers of law and custom, are inflexibly content to let well enough alone. They can be counted on to see nothing more to the point than a stupidly subversive rapacity in that loosening of the bonds of convention that so makes light of the sacred rights of vested interest. Interested motives may count for something on both sides, but it is also true that the kept classes and the businesslike managers of the vested interests, whose place in the economy of nature it is to make money by conforming to the received law and custom, have not in the same degree undergone the shattering discipline of the New Order. They are, therefore, still to be found standing blamelessly on the stable principles of the Modern Point of View.