“Work!” replied Morton, with quite a flash of animation. “I'd make every fellow work—rich and poor alike. I'd invent fardels for the idle. The only difference between the rich and the poor is a difference of cooks and tailors—really! Idleness, don't y' know, is everywhere and among all classes the certain seed of vice.”
“You would have difficulty, I fear,” remarked the Reverend Bronson, “in convincing your gilded fellows of the virtuous propriety of labor.”
“I wouldn't convince them, old chap, I'd club them to it. It is a mistake you dominies make, that you are all for persuading when you should be for driving. Gad! you should never coax where you can drive,” and Morton smiled vacantly.
“You would deal with men as you do with swine?”
“What should be more appropriate? Think of the points of resemblance. Both are obstinate, voracious, complaining, cowardly, ungrateful, selfish, cruel! One should ever deal with a man on a pig basis. Persuasion is useless, compliment a waste. You might make a bouquet for him—orchids and violets—and, gad! he would eat it, thinking it a cabbage. But note the pleasing, screaming, scurrying difference when you smite him with a brick. Your man and your hog were born knowing all about a brick.”
“The rich do a deal of harm,” remarked the Reverend Bronson thoughtfully. “Their squanderings, and the brazen spectacle thereof, should be enough of themselves to unhinge the morals of mankind. Think on their selfish vulgar aggressions! I've seen a lake, once the open joy of thousands, bought and fenced to be a play space for one rich man; I've looked on while a village where hundreds lived and loved and had their pleasant being, died and disappeared to give one rich man room; in the brag and bluster of his millions, I've beheld a rich man rearing a shelter for his crazy brain and body, and borne witness while he bought lumber yards and planing mills and stone quarries and brick concerns and lime kilns with a pretense of hastening his building. It is all a disquieting example to the poor man looking on. Such folk, dollar-loose and dollar-mad, frame disgrace for money, and make the better sentiment of better men fair loathe the name of dollar. And yet it is but a sickness, I suppose; a sort of rickets of riches—a Saint Vitus dance of vast wealth! Such go far, however, to bear out your parallel of the swine; and at the best, they but pile exaggeration on imitation and drink perfumed draff from trough of gold.”
The Reverend Bronson as he gave us this walked up and down the floor as more than once I'd seen him do when moved. Nor did he particularly address himself to either myself or Morton until the close, when he turned to that latter personage. Pausing in his walk, the Reverend Bronson contemplated Morton at some length; and then, as if his thoughts on money had taken another path, and shaking his finger in the manner of one who preferred an indictment, he said:
“Cato, the Censor, declared: 'It is difficult to save that city from ruin where a fish sells for more than an ox.' By the bad practices of your vulgar rich, that, to-day, is a description of New York. Still, from the public standpoint, I should not call the luxury it tells of, the worst effect of wealth, nor the riches which indulge in such luxury the most baleful riches. There be those other busy black-flag millions which maraud a people. They cut their way through bars and bolts of government with the saws and files and acids of their evil influence—an influence whose expression is ever, and simply, bribes. I speak of those millions that purchase the passage of one law or the downfall of another, and which buy the people's officers like cattle to their will. But even as I reproach those criminal millions, I marvel at their blindness. Cannot such wealth see that in its treasons—for treason it does as much as any Arnold—it but undermines itself? Who should need strength and probity in government, and the shelter of them, more than Money? And yet in its rapacity without eyes, it must ever be using the criminal avarice of officials to pick the stones and mortar from the honest foundations of the state!”
The Reverend Bronson resumed his walking up and down. Morton, the imperturbable, lighted a cigarette and puffed bland puffs as though he in no fashion felt himself described. Not at all would he honor the notion that the reverend rhetorician was talking either of him or at him, in his condemnation of those pirate millions.
“I should feel alarmed for my country,” continued the Reverend Bronson, coming back to his chair, “if I did not remember that New York is not the nation, and how a sentiment here is never the sentiment there. The country at large has still its ideals; New York, I fear, has nothing save its appetites.”