300 CHAP. XV. THE GROWTH OF PLUTOCRACY. "The awful shadow of some unseen power THE first political effect of commerce is to form a class of citizens, and endow them with sufficient wealth and power to become an important check on the ruling orders of the state; its second effect is to raise out of the citizens a plutocracy. The first must be performed before the national acme is attained; the second is in course of performance during the acme. A plutocracy signifies "the rule of the wealthy," and is one of the forms of absolute government when there is no other power in the state to check it. It is unlike an aristocracy, in being founded, not on a difference of race or on ancient chieftainship, but on wealth acquired by commerce, by manufactures, by usury, and in some particular cases by rents from land; and the discrepancy in origin draws a line which may ever be distinguished between an aristocracy whose pride is in its blood, and a plutocracy whose boast is in its coffers. The first consider as derogatory any occupations but those of war, statecraft, and sometimes priestcraft; the others can hardly affect to despise the courses which enriched their immediate ancestors, and having nothing on which to pride themselves. but their wealth, they display it in a profuse luxury. From this distinction arises a well-known result. The feudal aristocrat lives in a rude pomp, affecting state more than luxury, and only when in attendance on the court of his sovereign tasting the pleasures of prodigal refinement. The city plutocrat lives in perpetual refinement and luxurious effusion of riches; for therein, in fact, consists the assertion of his being any other than a plain citizen. Out of this grow palaces and princely furniture, museums, galleries of pictures, collections of sculpture, concerts, operas, whereby the polished and well-educated descendant hopes to be a grade in the social scale above the coarse, money-making citizens, of whom his ancestor was one. He has the less objection to emerge thus visibly if his capital and his name are still in the business. Alfieri, with the assistance of Mr. Landor, contrasts the plutocracy of the Italian cities with the feudal noblesse of Piedmont in terms of sufficient strength: "I see no aristocracy in the children of sharpers from behind the counter, or, placing the matter in the most favourable point of view, in the descendants of free citizens who accepted from any vile enslaver, French, Spanish, German, or priest, or monk, the titles of counts and marquises. In Piedmont the matter is different: we must either have been the rabble or their lords; we were military, and we retain over the populace the same rank and spirit as our ancestors held over the soldiery.' But irrespective of this ambition to be other than a plain citizen, the beautiful is naturally an object of attraction to those whose occupations all tend to instil into them some considerable love of elegance and taste. The shopman has been selling splendid patterns, gorgeous furniture, elegant china, faultless drapery, costly vertu and bijouterie, all the toiling days * Landor, Imaginary Conversations, i. 188. A feudal nobility regards a "citizen" as of an inferior order; the plutocrat, who lives in cities, holds "magnifici cittadini" to be as lofty a term as people can apply to any one; the poorer citizens he calls "mezzo cito," and for them reserves his hauteur. of his life, and when he grows rich himself, will it not be a pleasure to him to buy a magnificent house, and furnish it with all the gorgeous array that he has been in the habit of selling to rich people? This sufficiently accounts for the great love of mere adornment and splendour; those who have a finer taste buy pictures and statues, and, we will hope, derive as keen a pleasure from the beauties of imitation as from the bare fact of possessing such costly and showy property. The old genuine aristocrat, on the other hand, values himself for himself, and not for his possessions. He glories in his strength of arm, his pride of descent, his loftiness of character, his valiant achieve ments, his scorn of mean traders. He delights in the sublime, the plutocrat in the beautiful. Let, then, nobility and plutocracy be no longer confused. A distinction thus founded in nature manifests itself repeatedly to the inquirer by ethical as well as social and political characteristics; and a statesman who takes coun sel of history should disdain to be dazzled by the tinselled affectation with which a plutocracy sometimes apes the outward form of an hereditary noblesse, or to be duped by the political arithmetician, when he preaches that the sole principle of aristocracy is hereditary wealth. Again, plutocracies are themselves of various origin, and the difference of origin introduces a difference of character. Those which arise from manufactures, or by the use of money at low interest*, are more addicted to fru gality; those which arise by commerce, or by the loan of money at high interest, are, on the contrary, more gene Nothing in the world will engage our merchants to spend less and trade more than the abatement of interest; for the subduing of interest will bring in multitudes of traders, as it has in Holland, to such a degree, that almost all the people of both sexes are traders; and the many traders will necessitate merchants to trade for less profit, and consequently be more frugal in their expenses, which is the true reason why many considerable merchants are against the lessening of interest."Child on Trade, Pref. xv. rous, diffuse, and prodigal; the former make their wealth by small savings and calculations, and from this habit of pinching others contract one of pinching themselves. The latter receive their fortune by large instalments, by the huge payments of their debtors, or by a grand sale, as each happy cargo comes to port; and after enabling them to pay all employed in the good enterprise with a liberal hand, leaves them a large surplus wherewith to indulge the magnificence of their own fancy, for men are ever more improvident and addicted to spend when their fortune comes in by jerks, as witness even the common sailor -the most improvident of the labouring classes-than when it increases at a steady rate. Out of this difference came, on the one hand, the plodding, coarse, niggardly, and minute Dutchman, who hated paintings, unless each brick was particularised therein; on the other, the proud and gorgeous Venetian, in his marble palace, and his gallery filled with the chefs-d'œuvre of Paul Veronese and Titian. Commerce is external and internal. It is natural that we should never have external commerce without some internal commerce; but the variety of nature forbids that the two species should ever be mixed in any two instances in the same proportion. The Venetians' commerce was, by force of their situation, nearly all external. That is, magnificent; the owners of fleets treated on equal terms with the princes and nobles, who could not dispense with their trade and their money; and the Venetians caught something of the spirit of those with whom they treated; the name of merchant princes was not then ridiculous. The Americans have both kinds of commerce-large external, but they have much larger internal commerce. Like the French of the present day, the common people are all petty traders; they have, every one of them, some little gambling venture, and, in consequence, each man's hand is against his brother, unless he happen to be in the partnership. It is against such a kind of commerce that the tirades so often launched vainly against commerce in general, might be most effectively pointed. In the early ages of the Christian nations, artizans and handicraftsmen, members always of the subject race, were compelled to combine in order to exist. They lived in towns, and there established the guilds and corporations, which had for their chief object the safety of the workman and his master from the military noblesse. This arrangement was followed by another result, that master, journeyman, and apprentice, all formed members, as it were, of one family. The master had begun as an appren tice, and having married the daughter of his master, did not refuse the hand of his own to an aspiring apprentice. These were happy days for the labouring classes, when the humblest might hope to rise by an easy and ascer tained gradation to the highest places in their corporation, and when the proudest of the members did not seek to mingle with the military noblesse, or earn their companionship by scorning those from among whom they rose. These guilds were the mainstay of a democratic resistance to monarchical and aristocratical absolutism; they embodied the citizen class, and gave its members the strength and influence which union alone can give.* But they did not create a plutocracy. That achievement was reserved for the altered system of large manufactures, where it would be hard for the master, however kind or generous, to establish between himself and his workmen. any other relation than that of payer and payee. The wealth of the master and the poverty of the "hands" give to any advances by the former the air of patronage, from which the free spirit of the workman recoils, and domestic ties between them would be objects of ridicule and shame. In this manner is the large capitalist in modern society "In early Rome there were guilds of artizans. The institution was ascribed to the remotest times. No quirite, still less a patrician, could belong to them."-Niebuhr, iii. 298. |