Who Was There?
We need it, as we have just seen, to keep the Money Power in its place. The story of its taming would go down in history with the legends of Hercules. Today no Government, of any party, dares challenge its sway. By stealth or by ravin it does what it will. No man could become a real king until he had broken its mastery. But we need a monarch for more than to put a bit in the mouth of the Money Power.
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Who is there today, for centuries who has there been, to keep a watchful eye upon the development of our whole life, to see that it conduces to the stability of the State, the entire health and happiness of the whole people, the flowering of their genius, the preservation and increase of all that will evidence their worth, prove their metal, and satisfy their pride?
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Who was there, in the early days of the Machine, with the prescience to anticipate its development and its results, with a deep concern for the good of the millions of people it must affect?
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Who had the insight and the power, once at least manifested by a Roman king, to decide whether or not industry should be released to follow its logical course in the service of men’s lust for power and wealth, or should be held in leash, and to what end?
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Who is there to review the whole history of the gasoline engine, and in particular that of the automobile and the airplane, all the ramifications of its uses and its effects on the life of man, in order to pass judgment as to whether it has not cursed more than it has blessed, and to determine what we shall do with it?
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In the once-furious debate over the health of the soil, upon which every civilization ultimately rests, who is there with the wisdom and the power to institute scientific research that will render an authoritative decision between those who would fertilize the earth with chemical compounds and those who present evidence that the use of such artificial fertilizers gradually destroys the health of the soil?
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Or again, in the similarly vital matter of diet, who is there to come to the aid of the ordinary layman, so confused by all the conflict of opinion among the authorities, who will give him a dependable pronouncement as to what he should eat and what he should avoid eating?
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Who has there been to set some limit to wealth, to ensure that every man and every family in the land shall have income enough at the least to maintain health, and to determine that the work of the world shall be done primarily not to make money for usurers, but to serve the life of man?
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Who is there to remove the dictation of the advertiser over the editors of our newspapers, and to provide that a book with a message of vital and urgent importance shall be published even though it may not promise through its sales to make money for the publisher?
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Who will see to it that no movie and no radio or television program, however great the profits it may be expected to pay, shall be released upon the public if it will tend to deceive the people, overstimulate their nerves, debauch their taste, or weaken their morals?
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I might go on, but I have said enough, I think, to make clear the direction of my thought. Today, we are not a society. Appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, there is really no organic order among us, no sustained movement toward ripening any distinctive quality in our life. To the discerning eye, we are perilously near chaos. Europe is already far advanced in barbarism. Much of it is on the verge of anarchy. We ourselves are ever more like a garden without a gardener—all gone to weeds. We are ever more like a ship without a captain; no wonder we roll dangerously in the trough of the waves, and that a mutinous clique of drunken sailors has seized the helm and is driving us ever nearer the rocks.
-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man