The enemy of the world to-day, the monster in the path of progress, is organized greed, the insane desire of a few men to take from others, and for themselves, what they do not need.
The trust, seeking through capital to reintroduce slavery under another form, and to establish the tyranny of money in place of the tyranny of swords and bullets, represents the present problem.
This problem, like all the others, will be solved in its turn. It will be found that the great danger did good as well as harm, and that, on its overthrow, only good was left behind it.
The diseases that once destroyed men forced them to live a decent life of cleanliness. Those diseases frightened human beings out of filth into respect for themselves as the rulers of the world.
We owe the cleanness and decent temperate living of to-day, as well as our knowledge of medical science, to the diseases that formerly destroyed the people.
The hideous travesties called religion which relied for their power on superstition, fire and sword appeared to block all spiritual development among men. These religions have passed away; only the vital, true religious principle is left—the command laid upon men to feel toward each other as brothers, to worship the ONE and benevolent power that rules the world.
A few years or centuries from now the trust problem will be solved, and that particular monster will lie dead on its ledge of rock back in the pages of history. And men will know that to the great danger and brutality of to-day they owe much of their progress and happiness.
When the trust goes commercial greed will go with it. It will have killed the hideous theory of competition, with its swindling of the public, its cutting of wages, its general mean, petty, treacherous tradesmen's warfare. ——
Every human being should read history intelligently, if only for the encouraging effect on the mind.
In every direction, and in spite of foolish croakers, the human race has improved.