THE WEALTH OF ONE IS THE ASSET OF ALL.
The Man Who Taps the Common Treasury
for His Own Pocket Is a Judas,
Says Dr. Parkhurst.
Many expressions of socialistic or quasi-socialistic opinion have lately been written and spoken by men and women whose opinions are worth reading and hearing. From among these expressions the following letter by the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst may be selected as typical of American socialistic idealism. It accepts a principle; it proposes no method. It was written to Charles Sprague Smith, director of the People's Institute, at Cooper Union, New York, to be read before the institute in lieu of an address.
The one doctrine I would specialize (meaning one to be dwelt on in the institute work) is that of the solidarity of the race, or, to revert to your own more usual way of stating it, the brotherhood of man.
You stand for a great truth every time you put it before your people that we are not our own, but that we belong to each other; that we are all children of one household; that we belong to the family and the family belongs to us; that the assets of the family are the joint property of all the children; and that any man, rich or poor, who treats his particular holdings, large or small, as though they were not in the truest sense a part of the common holdings of the entire household is a renegade and a traitor to the household.
If it is charged upon me that this smacks of socialism, all I can say is that I do not care what you call it; it is the doctrine that I preach in the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, and if it is good for Madison Square it is good for Cooper Union; anyhow, it is biblical, and contains in it a good deal of the genius of the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Brotherhood involves reciprocity of rights and duties, but it means that we all need each other, are all debtors to each other, and are all intended to be trustees of the common assets, and that any man who cuts an underground conduit between the common treasury and his own pocket is a modern reproduction of the original Judas, who carried the bag and drew from it to meet his personal expenses.