Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as long as class rule continues. Henry George, for example, recognizes that his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step towards real democracy, as long as classes persist.

That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States is now admitted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable other, by no means Socialistic, observers.

"The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind that he must remain a wage earner. He has given up the hope of a kingdom to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also by salaried brain workers. Large prizes still exist, and their influence is still considerable over the minds of young men. But, as was pointed out recently in an editorial of the Saturday Evening Post, they are "just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the children of the well-to-do.

To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns. The universal outcry for more farm labor can only mean that such laborers are becoming relatively fewer because they are giving up the hope that formerly kept them in the country, namely, that of becoming farm owners. Already Mr. George K. Holmes of the United States Bureau of Statistics estimates that in the chief agricultural section of the country, the North Central States, a man must be rich before he can become a farmer, and so rapidly is this condition spreading to other sections that Mr. Holmes feels that the only hope of obtaining sufficient farm labor is to persuade the children of the farmers to remain on the farms.

"Fifty years ago," said McClure's Magazine in a recent announcement, which sums up some of the chief elements of the present situation, "we were a nation of independent farmers and small merchants. To-day we are a nation of corporation employees." There can be no question that we are seeing the formation in this country of very definitely marked economic and social classes such as have long prevailed in the older countries of Europe. And this class division explains why the political democracies of such countries as France, Switzerland, the United States, and the British Colonies show no tendency to become real democracies. Not only do classes defend every advantage and privilege that economic evolution brings them, but, what is more alarming, they utilize these advantages chiefly to give their children greater privileges still. Unequal opportunities visibly and inevitably breed more unequal opportunities.

The definite establishment of industrial capitalism, a century or more ago, and later the settlement of new countries, brought about a revolutionary advance towards equality of opportunity. But the further development of capitalism has been marked by steady retrogression. Yet nearly all capitalist statesmen, some of them honestly, insist that equality of opportunity is their goal, and that we are making or that we are about to make great strides in that direction. Not only is the establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be about the demand for political, economic, or social equality.

It may be that the economic positions in society occupied by men and women who have now reached maturity are already to some slight degree distributed according to relative fitness; and, even though this fitness is due, not to native superiority, but to unfair advantages and unequal opportunity, it may be that a general change for the better is here impossible until a new generation has appeared. But there is no reason, except the opposition of parents who want privileges for their children, why every child in every civilized country to-day should not be guaranteed by the community an equal opportunity in public education and an equal chance for promotion in the public or semi-public service, which soon promises to employ a large part if not the majority of the community. No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners, children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate rÔles filled by their parents.

But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved. Mr. John A. Hobson, for example, believes that the present British government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the more or less democratic collectivism Mr. Hobson and other British Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously decrease the relative opportunities of the masses, and make them less equal than they are to-day.

Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller, but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain outside. Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day. But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable share of existing prosperity.

To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all classes of the population. Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in this direction. No man has more convincingly described what the first step towards a genuinely democratic education must be than Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, perhaps our most influential representative of political as opposed to social democracy.

"Is it not plain," asks President Eliot, "that if the American people were all well-to-do they would multiply by four or five times the present average school expenditure per child and per year? That is, they would make the average expenditure per pupil for the whole school year in the United States from $60 to $100 for salaries and maintenance, instead of $17.36 as now. Is it not obvious that instead of providing in the public schools a teacher for forty or fifty pupils, they would provide a teacher for every ten or fifteen pupils?"[86]

The reform proposed by Dr. Eliot, if applied to all the twenty million children of school age in the United States, would mean the expenditure of two billion instead of three hundred and fifty million dollars per year on public education. Ex-President Eliot fully realizes the radical and democratic character of this proposed revolution in the public schools, and is correspondingly careful to support his demands at every point with facts. He shows, for instance, that while private schools expend for the tuition and general care of each pupil from two hundred to six hundred dollars a year, and not infrequently provide a teacher for every eight or ten pupils, the public school which has a teacher for every forty pupils is unusually fortunate.

Dr. Eliot says that while there has been great improvement in the first eight grades since 1870, progress is infinitely slower than it should be, and that the majority of children do not yet get beyond the eighth grade (the statistics for this country show that only one out of nineteen takes a secondary course). "Philanthropists, social philosophers, and friends of free institutions," he asks, "is that the fit educational outcome of a century of democracy in an undeveloped country of immense natural resources? Leaders and guides of the people, is that what you think just and safe? People of the United States, is that what you desire and intend?"

In order not only to bring existing public schools up to the right standard, but to create new kinds of schools that are badly needed, the plan suggested by Dr. Eliot would take another billion or two. He advocates kindergartens and further development of the new subjects that have recently been added to the grammar school course; he opposes the specialization of the studies of children for their life work before the sixteenth or seventeenth year, favors complete development of the high school as well as the manual training, mechanics, art, the evening and the vacation schools, greater attention to physical education and development, and, finally, the greatest possible extension and development of our institutions of higher education. He also advocates newer reforms, such as the employment of skilled physicians in connection with the schools, the opening of public spaces, country parks, beaches, city squares, gardens, or parkways for the instruction of school children. He specifies in detail the improvements that are needed in school buildings, shows what is urgently demanded and is immediately practicable in the way of increasing the number of teachers, paying them better and giving them pensions, indicates the needed improvements in the administration of the school systems, urges the development of departmental instruction through several grades, and the addition of manual training to all the public schools along with a better instruction in music and drawing.

There are still other improvements in education which have already been tested and found to produce the most valuable results. Perhaps the most important ones besides those demanded by Dr. Eliot are the providing of free or cheap lunches for undernourished children, and the system, already widespread in England and the other countries, of furnishing scholarships to carry the brighter children of the impecunious classes through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this policy of scholarships would lead us to full democracy in education only if by its means the child of the poorest individual had exactly the same opportunities as those of the richest. It is not enough that a few children only should be so advanced; but that of impecunious children, who constitute 90 per cent of the population, a sufficient number should be advanced to fill 90 per cent of those positions, in industry, government, and society, which require a higher education.

There is no doubt that this actual equality in the "battle of life" was the expectation and intention of those who settled and built up the western part of the United States, as it has been that of all the democracies of new countries. But this reform alone would certainly require not one but several billion dollars a year; as much as all the other improvements mentioned by Dr. Eliot put together. We may estimate, then, that the application of the principle of democracy or equality of opportunity to education in accordance with the present national income, would require the immediate expenditure of three or four billion dollars on the nation's children of school age, or ten times the sum we now expend, and a corresponding increase as the wealth of the nation develops. This would be a considerable proportion of the nation's income, but not too much to spend on the children, who constitute nearly half the population and are at the age where the money spent is most productive.

Here is a program for the coming generation which would be indorsed by a very large part of the democrats of the past. But nothing could make it more clear that political democracy is bankrupt even in its new collective form, that it has no notion of the method by which its own ideals are to be obtained. For no reformer dreams that this perfectly sensible and practicable program will be carried out until there has been some revolutionary change in society. "I know that some people will say that it is impossible to increase public expenditure in the total, and therefore impossible to increase it for the schools," says Dr. Eliot. "I deny both allegations. Public expenditure has been greatly increased within the last thirty years, and so has school expenditure" (written in 1902). But Dr. Eliot doubtless realizes that what he advocates for the present moment, the expenditure of five times as much as we now invest in public schools, at the present rate of progress, might not be accomplished in a century, and that by that time society might well have attained a degree of development which would demand five or ten times as much again. Dr. Eliot is well aware of the opposition that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest indication how it is to be overcome. The well-to-do usually feel obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and even where public institutions are at their disposal they are forced to support these children through all the years of study. This is expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they are the chief taxpayers, to pay for the extension of these same opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?

In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle class, and that for the masses of the people—and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed easy, but that he be given an equal opportunity with the child of the rich as far as all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.

Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position of the upper classes as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that this passage from one class to another does occasionally take place, and is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual, as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions. This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower classes may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system. All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling class promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that suits it will only be augmented—and universal equality of opportunity will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers "State Socialism" will take up from the masses and equip for higher positions will constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few have been in any way equal to those of the higher classes, nor will even such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority.

Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of class schools stand as an isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of private institutions. The very classes of taxpayers who control city and other local governments and school boards are educating their own children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete with the children of the middle classes are now subjected to the necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true there.

In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some of the primary schools, though supported wholly or largely by public funds, charge a tuition fee. The fact that a very small per cent of the children of the poor are given scholarships which relieve them of this fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle classes, without in any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are attended chiefly by the children of the "lower middle classes," salaried employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the children of the professional classes on the one hand or of the best-paid workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New York City also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower middle from the working classes, and to charge fees in all secondary schools so as to bring a new source of income and decrease the number of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether automatic or consciously stimulated, towards class (or caste) education—such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or indirectly encourage—usually under the cloak of industrial education.

The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people, this would mean that the latter have only a hundredth part of the former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools, and of these but 6 complete the course.

The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the masses, owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the well-to-do, the competition becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or girl who must struggle not only against this excessive competition, but also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task.

It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises more rapidly than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never happened except when the masses obtained political power and made full use of it against the class in control of industry and government.

No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,—however rapid or even sensational it may be,—is of the first moment to the Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the classes might be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention, not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their progress when compared with that of the capitalist classes, i.e. when measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords.

No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society. Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or class hatred. But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed. It is the social duty of every less prosperous class of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day.

Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to counteract it. The citizen owes it to society to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less—a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right direction may be wholly illusory—is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of the maximum of progress.

[83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol. II, p. 515.