REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.
BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN.
There is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career around the globe, from the most ancient recorded time, beginning in barbaric tyranny and robbery of the toiler, advancing with the power and wealth of nations, and flourishing unchecked in modern civilization, sapping the strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity, impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence, stimulating with alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth and power, and making abortive the greater part of what saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for human redemption. But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and never arrested by the Church, which assumes to obey the sinless martyr of Jerusalem, and to war against all sins, yet has never made war upon this giant sin, but has fondled and caressed it so kindly that the pious and conscientious, believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of its enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened people shall pour their hot indignation upon the crime and the unconscious criminals.
This crime which the world’s dazzled intellect and torpid conscience has so long tolerated without resistance, and which antiquity admired in its despotic rulers, splendid in proportion to the people’s misery, is that misleading form of intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the elements of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander and destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other purpose than to uplift the man of wealth and humiliate his humbler brother. That purpose is a crime; a crime incompatible with genuine Christianity; a crime which was once checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only for a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless motive as in its wanton destruction of happiness and life to achieve a selfish purpose.
This feature of social ostentation, its absolute cruelty, has not attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On the contrary, the crime is cherished in the higher ranks of the clergy, and an eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying an absurdly expensive church, actually preached a sermon in vindication of LUXURY—defending it on the audacious assumption that it was right because some men had very expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should be gratified. A private interview with John Wesley would have been very edifying to that clergyman, as the more remote example of the founder of Christianity had been forgotten.
That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a crime becomes very apparent by a close examination of the act. There would be no harm in building a $700,000 stable for his horses, like a Syracuse millionaire, or in placing a $50,000 service on the dinner table, like a New York Astor, if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar represents an average day’s labor, for there are more toilers who receive less than a dollar than there are who receive more.[9] Hence the $700,000 stable represents the labor of a thousand men for two years and four months. It also represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand dollars would meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the cost of the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven hundred lives, and affirms that the owner values it more highly, or is willing that seven hundred should die, that his vanity may be gratified.
This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars would save not one but many lives in the Irish famine. It would save more than a score of lives in New York, if diligently used among those who are approaching the Potter’s Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dead of New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per cent., an institution that would permanently sustain educating to a virtuous manhood, two hundred and fifty of the waifs gathered in from the pollution of the streets, sending forth fifty redeemed ones every year. When $700,000 is squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed, by destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable to stay the march of disease, of crime, and of death.
The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning out half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life authorize him to destroy it?
It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm’s length, or looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in diamonds in a Washington court circle,—all of which I hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is. “Twenty-four hours in the slums” (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a night and a day—yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards.” Such is life in New York. What it is in “Darkest England,” as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire’s metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling landlords[10] worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive’s cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.
The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the universities patronized by the wealthy.
New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule “whatever is most costly is most fashionable.” Nor is the cost the only evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an evening’s lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng, almost within hearing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the utterly destitute every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday.
Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the nature of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked to read in parallel columns the crushing agonies of famine and pestilence, and the costly revels of aristocracy, or the millions wasted on royal families, that manifest about as much concern for the suffering million as a farmer feels for the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is surprised or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for poverty, famine, and pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda could offer a pearly and jewelled carpet, ten feet by six, costing a million of dollars, as a present to the woman who had pleased his fancy.[11] How many lives and how much of agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents pays for a day’s labor? Twenty million days’ labor is a small matter to a petty prince.
Criminal ostentation stands ever in the way of man’s progress to a higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a greater mastery of nature’s forces, and thus emancipate the race from poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England’s three millions of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.[12]
The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their thoughts, and the grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, “If the governments of the world would spend on scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men, or rather in making preparation for killing men and then not doing it, the secrets of the earth would be laid bare in a time inordinately short.” But this very warlike ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt—the desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on the road to insanity.
The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this country to public life, as was scandalously displayed in the twenty million State House job at Albany (which our arithmetic makes equivalent to twenty thousand lives) and renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive[13] (except in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it arrested by the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and a hundred thousand dollar tomb for an individual eminent only by wealth is but a fashionable matter of course to-day. Against this my moral sense revolts. Had I the wealth of Crœsus, or the power of Napoleon, I could not consent to the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a funeral and monument, was the effort to destroy as much as possible, and take from the resources of benevolence that which might gladden a thousand lives. To look back from the enlightened upper world upon such, a monument of base selfishness, would be the hell of conscience; but a simple rose or hawthorn over the couch of the abandoned form would harmonize well with the sentiments of heaven.
What is it but a matter of course, and fashionably proper for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?[14] Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and we cannot ignore it or disregard it. Has any human being a right to look on at human suffering, and turn away contemptuously? to see men drowning and refuse to throw them the plank which lies conveniently by? to pass by the chamber of dying, with loud, unseemly revels? to titter and laugh alongside of the grave where an unrecognized brother is being buried? to feast upon costly wines and far-fetched elaborate viands at tables overloaded with fresh flowers and artistic gold, while the pallid faces of a hundred hungry ones are looking on, and who are not even recognized so much as the dog that receives a bone? To know that the city is attacked by a powerful army and refuse either to enlist for its defence, or to contribute means to help the defenders, would not be tolerated; but to do such things is precisely what selfish and unfeeling wealth demands, and what the aroused conscience of humanity will, ere long, forbid. It refuses to establish the industrial and moral education for all which would protect society from the invading forces of pauperism, crime, and pestilence. It refuses to suspend its costly royal revels until the voices of hunger and despair are silenced. It refuses to moderate its giddy round of fashionable frivolity and ostentation in the very presence of death, in the tenements where human life is reduced to less than half its normal length, so that death and revelry confront each other in the city.
I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the millionaire, we do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save the drowning; we do not even require you to be a manly man and bestir yourself before a life is lost; but we do say that the drowning man shall not be doomed to drown by your indifference? but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him, or a plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used, even if you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You have no vested rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth. It can order you in times of danger to all to place your body for the protection of the city in the path of the cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your life for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members to be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave your piles of hoarded gold and silver to accumulate as a magazine of corruption and danger to society? No, Mr. Millionaire, poverty, pestilence, and crime, are making war upon society and tumbling their slaughtered thousands into Potter’s Fields. And if the commonwealth does not demand your personal service, but simply demands that you shall not make perpetual for the sake of ostentation all of the present unnatural inequality, you are surely treated justly and kindly.
When the planter objected to General Jackson’s using his cotton bales as a rampart for the defence of New Orleans, tradition says the General ordered him to take a musket and stand behind them as a common soldier. At present we ask only your superfluous cotton bales, and it would not be wise for you to oppose our demand. The people remember the unholy distinction of classes thirty years ago, which enabled a favored few patricians to flourish as vampires on the commonwealth, while the plebeians were giving it their sufferings, their blood, and their lives, and hence they seek justice through our enormous system of pensions.
Patricians would retain commanding superiority of wealth for power and ostentation, but the people object to this power and scorn the ostentation.
The immense concentration of wealth by syndicates, corporations, and trusts alarms us all, because we see in it a formidable danger to the republic.[15] Colonel Higginson admits the evil, but denies that any method of counteracting it is known, yet it may easily be shown that we have several effective methods.
Our wealthiest are beginning to have incomes of over $5,000,000 a year, and it is very plain from the concentration of this wealth that a few wealthy men who could easily form themselves into close and secret corporation, will in time outweigh the entire republic, as Mr. Shearman says that 250,000 families are already a three fourths financial majority.
It was thought that this was impossible in our republic because we had no law of primogeniture, but we have another kind of geniture that is very effective. Recent statistics have shown that the very wealthy inhabitants of Fifth Avenue, New York, have in one year but one eighteenth as many children as the same number of families in the poorer neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Thus poverty multiplies itself rapidly, while wealth concentrates and needs no primogeniture to hold it together, because its numbers do not increase; and a similar fact, but not so extreme, appears in the reference to our Back Bay region in our own statistics, and in the statistics of Philadelphia. Thus it seems that we are destined to have the richest aristocracy by far that the world has ever dreamed of.
We know that concentrated wealth is power—and that great power is always dangerous to its neighbors. Like the slumbering power of dynamite, we are unwilling to have it near us, no matter how well guarded. I hold, therefore, that a republic has a right to guard itself against such dangers as much as the city has a right to prohibit the establishment of powder magazines in the centre of its population.
The profound and prophetic mind of Abraham Lincoln presaged this, and he said: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war. God grant that my suspicion may prove groundless.”
Wealth has a natural tendency to grow into an overwhelming power, for a million of dollars well managed will become $1,000,000,000 in a century and a half, and there are millionaires to-day who may become billionaires in forty or fifty years. But this growth has always been kept down by a generous or prodigal consumption, by ostentatious luxury, by profligacy, by pestilence, and by war. Yet when these checks are diminished; when, as in our republic, the danger of war is removed; when the generous consumption is hindered by wide-spread poverty; when pestilence is checked by sanitary improvements, and industry is enforced on the millions by daily necessity, then that growth of wealth which has been interrupted every few years in the old world by war, tyranny, taxation, standing armies, ignorance, and disease, will advance in our country as a mighty flood, impelled by the rains from heaven. The flood from heaven which is enriching us is the inspiration of genius in every form of science, art, and mechanical progress, which doubles and redoubles our productive power. We must look to human wisdom for the means of regulating the flow that it may act as a fertilizing rain, and not as a devastating flood, wasting the hillsides into barrenness, and sweeping away the bulwarks that the wise have erected.
It is no rhetorical exaggeration to speak of accumulated and unequal wealth as a dangerous flood. All ancient history proves it to be a danger. Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, and India, have shown by their terrible record how wealth in a few hands has ever proved a curse instead of a blessing to society. The pyramids of Egypt, an awful monument of the blood and toil of slaves, are a gloomy record of the senseless ostentation of despots, yet who ever speaks of the pyramids as the monuments of a crime?
Immense wealth for personal use is not a normal desire. It is an unsound, unhealthy appetite, resembling that of gluttony and darkness—an appetite that grows by what it feeds on and becomes insatiable.
It is an unsound appetite, for the increase of wealth already beyond all human wants, adds nothing to a man’s comforts or happiness—it adds only to his cares, which it increases, to his selfishness, which it intensifies, and to his power of indulging arrogance and ostentation. It impairs his sympathy with his fellowman, and inflames his egotism.
The superfluous mass of wealth serves only to supply an overruling power destructive to the social rights of others, and a haughty ostentation that humiliates fellow-citizens. It is, therefore, a hostile and dangerous element in a republic, although a few may hold great wealth and resist its insidious influence.
Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to man and injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature that the fittest shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not the fittest, for through the centuries they do not survive. The extremely wealthy are dying out, for they do not have children enough to maintain their numbers. It is our duty so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. They are twin evils; extreme wealth indicates extreme poverty, as mountains indicate valleys. Wealth, corruption, and despotism, are grouped together in history, as liberty has been grouped with equality, simplicity, hardihood, the mountain and the wilderness.
Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to reform, its method of opposition being corruption, and these characteristics are intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth everywhere gives power to monopolize the face of the earth, and thus establish a hereditary nobility; for the landlords of millions of acres are the most substantial and formidable lords that society knows, and nowhere in the world have there been greater opportunities to establish such an aristocracy, which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one thousand dollars per capita, represents not the increased wealth of the masses but the enormous accumulations of a few. Our gain of about two thousand millions annually, does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the republic? If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it is corpulence instead of strength.
Our social system has the elements of decay already as conspicuous as in the tuberculous patient. Invention increases the power of wealth instead of increasing the resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses machinery and diminishes the relative value of the man by making him a machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from the independent shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his neighbors, to the mere tenth of a shoemaker who if dislodged from the factory is helpless. The independence of the hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing. Population is gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. At this moment a strike of 150,000 is threatened. But it is not merely the laboring classes, for all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive let loose and flying wildly over the railroad. If there were no other formidable danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself a fatality. When a thousand millions enter the field they enter as master, in the Standard Oil fashion. They can buy out or crush out, as they may choose, every competitor in the field they may seize. There is not a single form of industry which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is established, demand what prices they please for that which they alone can supply. Can we imagine the conventional brother Jonathan held down by the throat with iron grip, and his pockets open to the holder, or will he rebel before the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how well it is fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire country. Ten years more will introduce the struggle. The struggle must come, for plutocracy is advancing to universal absorption, and labor is becoming defiant, and well it may, for the COMMONWEALTH represents not money but man, and when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the nation’s wealth, assumes the practical government, the commonwealth with a firm hand will thrust it aside; but will it be a peaceful change, will the conquerors yield to the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its sleeping victims while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy, or anything going on but the natural legitimate and healthful development of trade; and the medical corporations called colleges in seizing a stern monopoly of the healing art, assure us that it is only for the benefit and protection of the dear people who have not sense enough to distinguish between a successful and an unsuccessful doctor, and have so unpardonable a partiality for those who cure them cheaply without college permission. There is nothing too small for monopoly to grasp, not even the cheap dispensing of established remedies from the druggist’s counter.
It is a just and patriotic sentiment which looks with apprehension upon the great and irresponsible power developed by extreme wealth, which lifts the wealthy far above society, enabling them to indulge in profligate luxury, and to squander in a single evening’s pleasure (or display without pleasure) an amount that would make life prosperous to a hundred suffering families, or on a single piece of architectural splendor, enough to complete the education of the entire youth of a city—wealth enabling them to rival the despots of Europe in social ostentation, while almost within hearing of their revelry, ten or twenty thousand are suffering from want of employment, want of health, want of education, want of industrial skill, which society did not give them, suffering the slow death that comes through debility, emaciation, and disease, from toil and poverty, the sufferer being sometimes a woman in whom all the virtues have blossomed only to perish in the chilling atmosphere of poverty.[16] This may be utterly senseless talk to those in whom the sentiment of brotherhood is dead, but it expresses sentiments to which millions respond, and it is refreshing to see that these statements, which at last have found free expression through The Arena, are also beginning to find a home in the minds of public leaders, whose voices will compel attention. I allude to the philanthropic expressions of the Emperor of Germany, and to the language of Mr. Gladstone, who shows that the necessity of philanthropic action on the part of the wealthy is increased by their changed attitude, as they are becoming more isolated from the people, and no longer take that friendly personal interest in their tenants and employes of every grade, which was formerly common. In this country, social ostentation is a great power to increase this separation of ranks, and the book of Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” ought to be studied by every wealthy citizen as well as by reformers. Herbert Spencer, in a recent thoughtful essay, refers to this increasing interest in social welfare thus: “He is struck, too, by the contrast between the small space which popular welfare then occupied in the public attention, and the large space it now occupies, with the result that outside and inside Parliament, plans to benefit the millions form the leading topics, and every one having means is expected to join in some philanthropic effort.” This is because the millions demand it, and they who, like the writer, have for half a century been interested in behalf of the millions, may now be listened to.
The enormous wealth developed in our republic, in which a single city holds a thousand millionaires, controls the press, controls legislation, and teaches the ambitious to sell themselves to the wealthy who are the controlling power. Under such influences arises that moral insensibility which, in New York, could squander twenty millions on one building, while half the children were out of school, and a large portion of the insane were left wallowing in indecent filth, worse than that of a hog pen, as shown in the Albany Law Journal.
In presenting these views, I am not assailing millionaires as men more objectionable or censurable than any other class. It is not true that the mere ability to gain wealth implies moral inferiority, for it implies many substantial and honorable qualities. Reverse the social ranks, give the wealth to the poor, and our condition would not be improved, perhaps it would be much worse. The fault lies in our social system of struggle and rivalry, and while that system generates, as it always has, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, we must combat these two evils, and to control them is the purpose of this essay. Whether a better social system is possible that would PREVENT them, is not now under consideration, but surely there must be a system which will make unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty impossible, for such conditions are incompatible with a permanent, peaceful, and prosperous republic. As well might we expect a successful voyage from a ship with four-fifths of its cargo on the upper deck, as from a republic top heavy with millionaire capital. Can we believe that republics are forbidden by the laws of progress and evolution; that they must, as Macaulay maintained, come to a fatal crisis? I trust not. But does not our social system, inherited from barbarism, built up on the hot ashes left where the fires of war have desolated, necessarily develop that inequality which has swept the great empires of antiquity to their doom. When all the wealth of the nation has fallen into the possession of two per cent. of the population, the period of danger has arrived. Five per cent. of our population had, in 1880, absorbed four fifths of the national wealth, and at present, according to the careful statistics of Mr. Shearman, less than two per cent. hold seven tenths of our wealth, and are rapidly advancing to nine tenths, their progress being assisted by the indirect taxation which places the burden of government on the shoulders of poverty. Popular ignorance of public affairs has tolerated this, and has tolerated a financial system far worse, which has given capital all possible advantage of labor. We are drifting in the rapids; how far off is our Niagara? But labor is roused, and a change in our system of taxation is imminent.
Unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty are the necessary results of the warlike stage of progress, which develops the conquerors and the conquered in the great battle of life. Unnumbered centuries of tribal and international war have developed to high perfection the wolfish and tigerish instincts of humanity. What is called peace is a state of financial war. Beneath the smooth skin of the civilized man, we find the wolf in undiminished vigor. The triumphant wolf rides in his chariot; the conquered wolf sleeps in the open air along the alleys, wharves, and streets; but what cares the wolf triumphant for that? for the 30,000 homeless in London? The policeman’s club, or the bayonet, is the only thing that keeps down riot and arson, and the uncertainty of the result is all that hinders the French, German, and Russian wolves from turning a continent into a pandemonium. Is Europe truly a civilized country? Not if tried by an ethical standard. Von Moltke, the great man of Germany, who has so recently passed away, considered war a permanent institution.
In this wolfish stage of human development, altruism is almost unknown, except as an eccentricity. It is safe to say, as a general rule to which there are not many exceptions, that no man is fit to be entrusted with any more than he needs for his own comfortable existence. Every dollar beyond that sum is wasted in his hands. He has not the faintest conception that he is a trustee of all such wealth, responsible to heaven for its use. As he cannot consume it, he can but squander it to gratify his vanity, and lift himself to a position from which he can, or thinks he can, look down upon his fellows. The leading idea of the average citizen is to construct a palace that will cost ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as much as the residence that would be amply sufficient and pleasant.[17] His talent for the destruction of wealth grows by indulgence, and thus the millions that the financial conquerors have won from the conquered are thrown into the blazing flame of ostentation, and might as well be thrown into a literal conflagration. Such is the humanity with which we have to deal at present. Wealth, no matter who holds it, does not restrain the destruction of the resources of the commonwealth, but the growl of the suffering millions may, and may lead to a recognition of the grand truth that everything beyond the demands of human comfort is a sacred trust for humanity, and with the millions thus aroused, I believe it may be possible to introduce laws which will gradually change the entire condition of society, and leave in this broad land neither an American prince nor an American beggar—a change which will be a greater forward movement than that of 1776.
The leading purpose of such legislation will be the controlling of that lawless selfishness, which wantonly destroys all in which the community is interested; which on the prairies exterminates the buffalo, in the mountains and forests destroys the timber, bringing on as a consequence the drouth, floods, and desolate barrenness, under which a large part of the old world is suffering; which would exterminate the seals if government did not interfere, and would infect every city with pestilential odors of offensive manufactories; which would destroy the people’s national money for the benefit of private bankers, and pervert all the powers of government for the benefit of monopoly and organized speculation.
May we not look to that struggle for justice which to-day assumes the forms of Nationalism, Farmers’ Alliance, People’s Party, Knights of Labor, and Land Nationalization, to accomplish this purpose and emancipate the present from the barbarian ideas of the past?
(To be concluded in July Arena.)
