XII.
THE GOLD GOD OF MODERN SOCIETY.
"When wealth no mere shall rest in mounded heaps.
But smit with freer light shall slowly melt
In many streams to fatten lower lands,
And light shall spread, and man be liker man
Thro' all the seasons of the golden year."
No one who is in touch with the throbbing life of this time can fail to perceive that this is an age peculiarly given up to the worship of Mammon. The literature of our day bears certain evidence of this fact. Scribner's Magazine of last year contained, under the title of "Jerry," a painfully realistic and comprehensive story, dealing with the debauch of a noble character by the fascination of gold. Jerry belonged to the "poor white trash" of the Cumberland Mountains, and on the death of his mother, being cruelly treated at home, he ran away to the West. After many wanderings, the little wayfarer, tired out and almost dead, fell into the hands of a quaint old miner who was digging and hoarding up gold in his cabin in the Northwestern Mountains. In the midst of this wild region, educated by a kind-hearted physician, Jerry grew up to be a young man of peculiarly noble and heroic character. He remembered with painful distinctness that he belonged to the poorest of the common people, and the ambition of his life was to uplift his own class.
The fearful tragedy of the story begins when the miserly old miner—who, all the time unknown to Jerry, is hoarding up gold for his young ward—discovers, to his great astonishment, that gold has no fascination for this strange young man, and fears that with his lofty ideals all his toil for him will be in vain and unappreciated. So the shrewd old man plans to send him to the East, where his eyes may be dazzled with the brilliancy of fashionable life, and where may be revealed to him the power gold gives to its possessor. Sitting in his old log cabin on the mountain side, the old miner would rub his hands back on his stubbly gray hair and reason with himself: "If Jerry only knew gold; if Jerry could only see what gold could get, could only spend gold; then he would be willing to take all he could get and never ask where it came from." So the old miner determined that "Jerry must learn to spend money, must learn to love it, and then all will go well." And then the story goes on to tell of the deterioration of this noble young soul—how that gradually he becomes dominated with the passion for gold, until he is not only willing to work for it, but murder for it, if only he may have gold and the power that it brings.
In another field Mr. Charles Dudley Warner gives us the same warning, in his story of "A Little Journey in the World." In this Mr. Warner tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and she becomes simply a material, worldly woman. This is the way he reasons about it: "But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the noble possibilities of her royal nature, under circumstances favorable to its development, felt more and more her departure from her own ideals. Her life in its spreading prosperity seemed more and more shallow. I do not say she was heartless; I do not say she was uncharitable; I do not say that in all the externals of worldly and religious observance she was wanting; I do not say that the more she was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature of her husband, she did not love him, or that she was unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty—and it seemed so near—that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interest to the trivial and sensuous gratifications—time, mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them—we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a dead soul—a beautiful woman in all the success of envied prosperity, with a dead soul."
[Illustration: CHILDREN PLAYING IN COPP'S HILL BURYING GROUND.]
If we turn away from these revelations of the worm at the heart of our social life, that are made fascinating by the art in which they are clothed, to the rude happenings of every-day observation, the same danger is everywhere apparent. The associated press despatches from San Jose, Cal., a few weeks since, bore this burden: "One of the best-known men in California died yesterday in a squalid hut on Colfax Street. He was Prof. Herman Kottinger, who at one time was the leading violinist on the Pacific Coast, and well known as a writer of prose and poetry, of 'A World's History,' and also of text-books on free thought. He was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, acquired by a lifetime of miserly frugality. At the time of his death sixteen hundred dollars in gold coin was found secreted in his bed. But one child, William Kottinger, a farmer, was present at the death. When the old man in his death-throes raised himself up in bed, the son rushed to his side. His father, mistaking the act, with a frenzied yell waved him back, and clutching at the bedclothes, pulled them back, disclosing to view the gold. He made a grab at it with both hands, and with the bright pieces in his fingers fell back with a gasp and expired.
"Prof. Kottinger was once a doctor in Heidelberg University, and was ninety years old. He was so wasted by hunger that his body weighed less than forty pounds, and was in a disgusting condition. His bed and clothes were reeking with filth. Over the head of the bed hung a violin of great value. So miserly was the old professor that fifteen years ago he drove his wife and all his children from home, saying that it cost too much to feed and clothe them. From that day until yesterday, when the end was approaching, not one of his relatives had come near him. Two big fierce Danish mastiffs, half starved, have for years been the old man's only companions, and they guarded the shanty so well that not even a tax-collector could approach. They had to be killed yesterday before the undertaker could get into the house. When it was learned that Kottinger was dead, a number of his relatives hastened to his hut. There has been a shameful neglect of the dead shown, and indecent haste in ransacking the place in search of the gold and other treasures known to be hidden."
All these show the destructive power of gold upon its worshippers. But these are by no means the only victims of this worship of the gold god. For every one who is hoarding up his millions, and who is dominated by the love of gold for its very shine and glitter, there are hundreds and thousands who are toiling for insufficient wages, and are suffering in poverty and want, that this lordly worshipper may pay his devotions to the money god.
[Illustration: DIGGING IN THE ASH-BARRELS IN WINTER.]
If some of these money kings who have made their millions by the oppression of the poor, in mines, and mills, and factories, were suddenly called to face the bones of the dead who have gone to their graves from weary, unrequited slavery, in order for their financial triumph, they would stand back aghast at the price of their own success.
It is this worship of the gold god which is at the bottom of all the wrongs which have been pointed out in this series of discourses. The wealthy merchant who pays the poor widow one cent apiece for making white aprons, and by his avarice and his lust induces the young women who sell them to eke out their scanty wages by the sale of their honor, is a worshipper of the gold god. The sweater who parcels out his work through the miserable tenement houses, grinding the face of the poor to the very last degree possible with physical existence,—indeed, many times beyond the possibility of existence, except when helped by charity,—is an obsequious devotee at the altar of Mammon. The chattel-mortgage shark, who watches all the necessities of the poor as anxiously as ever a hawk watched over a helpless or crippled bird, and the liquor-seller, who fills his coffers by a traffic which injures and destroys the health, the intelligence, and the morality of all the people whom he can draw into his net, investing all his cunning in methods to entrap the unwary, and gloating over the increasing appetite and the devilish passion for strong drink in his victims, are only brothers to the others who gather to pay their devotions to the god of gold.
[Illustration: FOUR SHINERS.]
If we do not approve these worshippers, what shall we say of ourselves for permitting this state of things to come to pass? It is inconsistent to condemn the liquor-seller and honor the city which licenses him to do his damnable work. It is impossible to condemn the sweater and retain your respect for the public which permits him to carry on his nefarious business. The spirit of avarice is in the very air, until society has been poisoned by its breath. Dr. Howard Crosby, writing in the Forum a few years since, says: "The healthiest form of human society is where the many are equally independent in their management of their affairs, where professions and trades are represented by individual thinking minds, and where those engaged in any one branch of industry stand on a level with one another. This condition of things promotes invention, activity, interest, manliness, and good citizenship. Now the gold-hunt system is directly antagonistic to all this. It seeks to destroy the many independent tradesmen, and to make them servants in a gigantic monopoly. The happy homes of freemen become the pinched quarters of serfs. The lords of trade have their hundreds and thousands of humble subordinates over whom they rule, often with a rod of iron. They may be turned away from work and wages at any moment, by any whim of the selfish employer. Hence, through fear of this, they lose their manhood, and dare not assert even a decision of their conscience. There is no more melancholy sight to my eyes than that which I often see nowadays—the former happy possessor of a shop or store, who has lived comfortably and with the true nobility of a citizen, and whose family have felt the dignity of the home, now made a clerk and drudge in a huge establishment that, by its relentless use of millions, has undermined and overthrown all the independent stores of a large district, while his family are thrust into the unsavory communism of a tenement house, and lose all the delicate refinements of a quiet home. It is easy to say that this is but the natural law of trade. So to devour men is the natural law of tigers. But this truth will not reconcile us to the process. If we are to stop men from stealing directly, we can stop them from stealing indirectly. If natural law works evil to the community, we are to make statute law, which will act as supernatural law, and control the offensive principle. Unless we wish our social equality destroyed, and a system of practical serfdom to take its place, we must put a limit to the acts of greed, and so preserve the independence of our citizens."
[Illustration: SOUTH BOSTON RAG-PICKERS.]
Every thoughtful observer of the "signs of the times" knows that the deepest problem of our age is the amicable solution of the struggle between labor and capital. Some of the ablest work done in literature, in our time, has been produced out of an earnest desire to abolish the more recent types of this white slavery, which has, in one form or another, threatened the masses since the days of old John Ball of early England. Perhaps the strongest portrayal, yet, of many phases of the question, especially those relating to the city, maybe found in Mr. Howells' story, "A Hazard of New Fortunes." For the country, if one really wants to see what is behind the great upheaval in the West, which has its outward manifestation in the Farmers' Alliance, he only needs to read Mr. Hamlin Garland's "Main Travelled Roads."
In the meantime most of us are asking, "What is the way out?" As for myself, I confess to being only a student. I have no word of sneer or scoff for any mail's honest thinking, who is sincerely trying to uplift his brothers and sisters; and yet I must say that, as yet, I have not been able to become a disciple of any of the new systems that have been presented. I feel something like the man who says, "There are good things to be said in praise of Socialism or Nationalism, as compared with the crushing and wearing methods of competition; but what the world is waiting for is the thinker who shall either show us how to reconcile the new system with human liberty, or else convince us that we can do without liberty." In the mean-time I believe in God, in His wise purpose in the creation of the world, in His providential care over it, and that under His grace there shall come the triumph of righteousness in it. I believe in Jesus Christ. To my mind, Christianity stands to-day very much as it did nearly two thousand years ago, when Jesus hung upon the cross between two thieves. The anarchy which, atheistic and reckless, would destroy all law and all property, is one of the thieves, and the devotee of the gold god of our time, who clutches his money-bags and says, "I have a right to get all the money I can, and do with it what I please," is the other thief. Christianity stands between them; her mission is to change them both, and bring them with a regenerated purpose into brotherhood and fellowship.
George Macdonald says: "The world will change only as the heart of man changes. Growing intellect, growing civilization, will heal man's wounds only to cause the deeper ill to break out afresh in new forms, nor can they satisfy one longing of the human soul. Its desires are deeper than that soul itself, whence it groans with the groanings that cannot be uttered. As much in times of civilization as in those of barbarity, the soul needs an external presence to make its life good to it." The Christianity of to-day must set itself, as did Jesus, to make men brothers, by bringing them to a recognition of the fact that they are all alike the children of one God and Father over all. Such a Christianity will necessarily be at war with the gold god of our time. The clear-cut declaration of Jesus, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," is as true now as when He uttered it. I do not remember to have seen this issue put as clearly anywhere else as by Henry D. Lloyd in an article in the North American Review entitled, "The New Conscience." He says: Let us listen while a delegation from the Money-power remonstrates with the New Conscience for its unreasonable sentiments and ideas. Here they come, one by one, and range themselves about.
First speaks—
THE MERCHANT PRINCE: I have a right to buy where I can buy cheapest.
CONSCIENCE: See these little stunted, hollow-eyed girls coming out of that factory.
LAWYER: Wages are settled by contract.
CONSCIENCE: Where can I find white-haired workingmen?
CAPITALIST: Every man has a right to do what he will with his own.
CONSCIENCE: What is the price of a senatorship to-day?
STATISTICIAN: Never were food, fuel, and clothing so cheap.
CONSCIENCE: Little Mary Mitchell works in Waterbury's ropeworks five days a week from six in the evening till six in the morning.
RAILROAD KING: Every man makes his own career. I was a workingman myself twenty years ago, and now I keep a carriage, a butler, and several judges and legislators, in four States, and—
CONSCIENCE: That tired-looking man is a railway conductor of a company owned by half a dozen men worth three hundred millions of dollars, which is not enough for them, so they squeeze a few more dollars a month out of him by making him, on every alternate trip, do twenty-eight and a half hours' work without sleep.
BANKER: Our wealth is increasing one billion dollars a year. We have boards of trades, the best railroads in the world, and packing-houses that can kill ten thousand hogs.
CONSCIENCE: The sickening stench, the blistered air, the foul sights of the tenements, and the motherhood and the childhood choking there.
CONSERVATIVE: This is the best government in the world. America is good enough for me.
CONSCIENCE: Listen to that "tramp, tramp, tramp" of a million of men out of work.
MANUFACTURER: Without this system of industry the subjugation of North America to civilization would have been impossible; we could never have shown the world the magnificent spectacle of—
CONSCIENCE: There is a little boy standing ten hours a day up to his ankles in the water in a coal-mine.
COAL MONOPOLIST: I have a statistician who can prove—he can prove anything—that the workingman is a great deal better off than he ever was, that he makes more than I do, that small incomes are increasing and large ones decreasing, that there is no involuntary poverty, and that the workingmen could live on twenty-five cents each a day and buy up the United States with their savings, and—
CONSCIENCE: How long shall it be cheaper to run over workingmen and women at the railroad crossings in the cities than to put up gates?
CLERGYMAN: The poor we are to have with us always.
CONSCIENCE: That sewing-woman you see pawning her shawl has lived this winter with her two children in a room without fire. Are you wearing one of the shirts she finished?
STATESMAN: The workingman has the ballot and the newspapers. He is a free citizen.
CONSCIENCE: As the nights grow colder see how the number of girls on the street increases.
It is this new conscience, the conscience of Jesus Christ, that appraises a hungry child to be of more value than ten thousand palaces, that must animate and dominate the church that is called by His name, in its war against the gold god of modern society.
You may find this conscience throbbing in Ella Wheeler Wilcox's plea for "Justice, not Charity."
"All hail the dawn of a new day breaking,
When a strong armed nation shall take away
The weary burden from backs that are aching
With maximum work and minimum pay.
When no man is honored who hoards his millions,
When no man feasts on another's toil,
And God's poor, suffering, starving billions
Shall share His riches of sun and soil.
There is gold for all in the world's broad bosom.
There is food for all in the world's great store;
Enough is provided if rightly divided,
Let each man take what he needs—no more.
Shame on the miser with unused riches,
Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard,
Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches,
And steals the bread from the poor man's board!
Shame on the owner of mines whose cruel
And selfish measures have brought him wealth!
While the ragged wretches who dig his fuel
Are robbed of comfort, and hope, and health.
Shame on the ruler who rides in his carriage,
Bought by the labor of half-paid men—
Men who are shut out of home and marriage,
And are herded like sheep in a hovel pen."
There must be no doubt about the attitude of the church in a time like this. Against the gold god and all his oppressions the Christian Church must stand with an unflinching front. Our God is the same who spoke through the voice of Amos of old, saying, "Hear this, oh ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail, saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? And the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat?" Ah! how much that sounds like the things that are going on at the present time! Yet listen to the oath of the Almighty as He looks on such things: "The Lord hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works. Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth therein?… And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in a clear day: and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sack-cloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day."
It is the mission of our blessed Christianity to save the world from that bitter day by so changing and transforming it that it will no longer deserve bitterness, but peace, at the hand of God. Although I have felt compelled, in this series of discourses, to uncover many dark and loathsome places in our social system, yet I am no pessimist, and I do not despair. Jesus Christ, our Captain, saw "Satan fallen as lightning from heaven;" and when we are as devoted to God, and as thoroughly consecrated to our mission of curing the world's heartache as was He, we, too, shall live in sight of the same glorious triumph. When we are imbued with this faith, and exalted into fellowship with Him, we will not dare to say that the sweatshop, or the neglected tenement house, or the noisome liquor saloon, is a necessary contingent of human life. And we will know that whatever is good enough to be true, may be and shall be true to the sons and daughters of God. In that faith we shall be able to sing with the poet:—
"'Tis coming up the steeps of time,
And this old world is growing brighter;
We may not see its dawn sublime,
Yet high hopes make the heart throb lighter!
We may be sleeping in the ground,
When it awakes the peoples' wonder;
But we have felt it gathering round,
And heard its voice of living thunder;
Christ's reign, ah, yes, 'tis coming!
Aye, it must come! the Tyrant's throne
Is crumbling, with men's hot tears rusted;
The sword earth's mighty have leant upon
Is cankered, with men's hearts' blood crusted!
Room! for the man of love make way!
Ye selfish great ones, pause no longer;
Ye cannot stay the opening day,
The world rolls on, the light grows stronger—
The Master's advent's coming!"