The Dogs and the Fleas / By One of the Dogs

ONE OF THE DOGS
ILLUSTRATED
PUBLISHED BY Douglas McCallum 90 WASHINGTON ST. CHICAGO ILL. 1893
COPYRIGHT 1893 BY DOUGLAS McCALLUM ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ELECTROTYPED BY THE LIBBY & SHERWOOD PRINTING CO. CHICAGO.
Henry Ward Beecher, in a sermon shortly before his death, said America was going through a period of disgrace. This was true; for there had come to pass, what the prophetic Lincoln had foretold, that, as the result of the war, monopolies had been enthroned, that had filled the land with corruption and imperilled the liberties of the people.
To-day the period of disgrace is worse than then, for the corrupt tree which was then bearing so luxuriant a crop has had several years more in which to develop its fruit-bearing capacity.
On every hand Mammon reigns. His throne has been set up in the very place of sovereignty. His rule is universal and absolute. The price of his favor is the sacrifice of all truth, virtue and honor. Honest, hard work has become the synonym of poverty; and it has become the fixed rule of our civilization—a rule with absolutely no exception—that no one can come to great wealth except by some of the many forms of legal stealing. At his feet all organized institutions bow and worship. Politics are corrupt to the core. Our legislatures—as Beecher used to declare of that of New York—are everywhere the shambles where legislators are bought and sold like sheep. Political “bosses” possess, and lord it over, the souls and bodies of the chattel voters of the “parties” with as brutal a despotism as ever Czar or Kaiser wielded. Legislation-favored monopolists of the various means of the people’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are openly and commonly termed “Kings,” “Lords,” “Barons,” as though in undisguised contempt of the thinly veiled pretense that this is a republic.
To-day is fulfilled that which thirty-six years ago was prophesied by Lord Macauley, that, America’s public lands being all gone, England’s poverty would be reproduced in our cities. It is literally true as he foretold, that in Chicago there is a multitude of people none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner.