“We’ve all got everything there is, if we only understood it,” Christian answered, promptly; “but whatever we have, it’s something we hold dear.”
“If we hold it dear,” another voice objected, “why should we be asked to give it up?”
“Because we haven’t known how to use it. Think of all you’ve had in your own life, Tom, and what you’ve done with it.”
I didn’t know what Tom had had in his life, but the retort evidently gave him something to turn over in his mind.
“There never was a time in the history of the world,” Christian went on, “when the abundance of blessing was more lavishly poured out upon mankind. In every country in both hemispheres we’ve had the treasures of the earth, the sea, and the air positively heaped upon us. Food, clothing, comfort, security, speed—have become the commonplaces of existence. The children of to-day grow up to a use of trains and motors and telephones and airplanes that would have seemed miraculous as short a time ago as when I was a lad. The standard of living has been so quickly raised that the poor have been living in a luxury unknown to the rich of two or three generations ago. The Atlantic has got to be so narrow that we count the time of our crossing it by hours. The globe has become so small that young people go round it for a honeymoon. People whose parents found it difficult to keep one house have two or three, and even more. There is money everywhere—private fortunes that would have staggered the imagination of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and Augustus and Charlemagne all combined. Amusements are so numerous that they pall on us. In lots of the restaurants of New York you can order a meal for yourself alone, and feel that neither Napoleon nor Queen Victoria nor the Czar could possibly have sat down to a better one.”
“Some could,” one of our objectors declared, with all sorts of implications in his tone.
“Oh, I’m not saying there are no inequalities or that there is just distribution of all this blessing. In fact, my point is that there is not. All I’m asserting is that the blessing is there, and that the very windows of heaven have been opened on the world in order to pour it out.”
“I never saw none of it,” a thin, sour fellow put in, laconically.
“But, Juleps, that’s what I’m coming to. The blessing was there, and some of us wouldn’t try to get what belonged to us, and others of us collared too much, and we treated it very much as children treat pennies in a scramble. We did far worse than that. We rifled, we stole, we gobbled, we guzzled, we strutted, we bragged; the fellow that was up kicked the fellow that was down to keep him down; the fellow that had plenty sneaked and twisted and cringed and cadged in order to get more; and we’ve all worked together to create the world that’s been hardly fit to live in, that every one of us has known. Now, boys, isn’t that so? Speak out frankly.”
Since in that crowd there could not be two opinions as to the world being hardly fit to live in, there was a general murmur of assent.