PROSPERITY, "THE McKINLEY" AND OTHER BRANDS.
We can vote our country prosperous. But it is very essential that we understand clearly WHOM we mean when we say "country." We have been voting for one kind of prosperity for a long time, even before the "McKinley brand," was on the market. Our mistake has been in not asking the "Advance Agents" to tell us whose prosperity they represented.
If a burglar is emptying your wife's jewelry box, and filling his trousers pockets with the contents of your safe, prosperity to him means ruin to you, and your success means the burglar's death. So, in the larger affairs of our nation, the kind of prosperity hoped for by the plunderers of the people means ruin to their millions of victims, while good times for the workers, the farmers, the merchants, mean hard times to our despoilers.
We now have the best times the world has ever seen. Mr. Rockefeller, or Robafellow—one is his name, the other ought to be—has an income of forty thousand dollars a day, and it is increasing. No country in the world has ever produced so much; never were there barns so bursting with grain, or warehouses so filled with clothing, furniture and jewels; never before so many men making from five to forty thousand dollars a day.
This great National Joint Stock Company of ours, with its seventy million stockholders, is doing a thriving business and making barrels of money. There is only one objectionable feature. It is that after the labor of these seventy millions of people, their genius, their suffering and their sweat, are converted into wealth, the dividends are given to a few hundred men, while the rest of us pay the assessments.
We do not need better times. Anybody who wants to make more than forty thousand dollars a day is a hog. The real issue is not whether we shall have hard times or good times, prosperity or panic in the abstract, but it is whether that prosperity and good times, now monopolized by the few, shall become the inheritance of every child of God.