“That was a curious interview between the commandant of the militia, the gentleman born and bred—with an inheritance of belief regarding the rights to accumulate property, even if in so doing one crowded one’s fellow-mortal to the wall—and the iron-workers who constituted the Homestead committee. Gold-spectacled, practised in the art of snubbing and sure of the physical strength at his back, the officer was more than a match for the laborer, who in his turn was awed by his inherited respect for wealth and power. Chilled and overawed, the representatives of labor went down the hill from this unequal interview. The general in charge had neither the grace nor the will to recognize a labor association which embraced a membership large enough, if properly organized, to sweep out of existence the entire army of the United States. They must have reflected, as they went down the hill, these representatives of labor, that if a militia organization carried such weight, permitted such freezing dignity upon the part of a citizen towards other citizens, it might possibly be well for their interests to have a few thousand of their own men enrolled in this same militia. There is nothing to prevent a body of American citizens from organizing themselves as a militia organization with proper arms and equipments. There are enough workmen in Pittsburg and vicinity to give a hundred regiments of the full complement of ten companies of seventy men each, with as many more left over for onlookers at parades. Six months of hard drill such as the enthusiasm of these men would permit would leave them equal to the best of the Philadelphia troops. Does anyone believe for an instant that if there had been a hundred such regiments among the workingmen of Pittsburg, General Snowden would have declared that he could not recognize the existence of such a body of men as the Amalgamated Association?”
We will assume, with Mr. Walker, that the commandant of the troops sent to Pittsburg by the Governor of Pennsylvania, was a “gentleman bred.” About a man being born a gentleman, we may hold opinions at variance with Mr. Walker. Horses may exhibit the fact that they are thoroughbred, when intelligence in the shape of a jockey is perched upon their backs; but born gentlemen in America have never, as a rule, by their scintillating genius and danger-defying patriotism, carved out names upon the eternal monuments of the nation to rival the names of Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. We hope that the man put in command of the Pennsylvania militia was a “gentleman bred,” but the exhibition that he made of himself, while clothed with that brief authority, would not be conducive to the formation of such an opinion.
In his meeting with the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, who were contributing towards the payment of the taxes from which the expenses incurred by the State were to be defrayed, he did not conduct himself in a manner such as to make a shining example for those who shall command, in the future, the citizen-soldiery of the Republic. He seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that he came, not as a conquering hero, but as a private citizen, invested with a brief and circumscribed authority exercised for the greatest good to the greatest number in the prevention of lawlessness and violence and the peaceful solution of a local difficulty with which the Sheriff of the county appeared to be unable to contend. The arrogance assumed by this “gentleman bred” was not calculated to create any great amount of good feeling in the breasts of his fellow-citizens, to pacify whom he was sent by the Governor of his State. There would have been but slight loss of dignity upon his part to have allayed their anxiety by a little exercise of that “good breeding,” patience, and consideration for the feelings of others, which are supposed to be characteristics of the gentleman the world over. General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the armies of the nation, as victor in a contest of four years’ duration, has set a magnificent example in the treatment of his vanquished but great opponent, Lee, by his courteous, kindly, and magnanimous behavior toward Lee and his vanquished legions whom Grant had so long faced and at last vanquished.
“I choose to ask this question as a reductio ad absurdum, in the hope that it will cause my own class, who have power and authority, to stop and reflect that perhaps it will be best to concede something in the way of law, to regulate this one-sided distribution of wealth, lest it should be regulated through bloodshed, or, what is more horrible still, should throw into power, through sheer brute force, elements which will bring our Republic to anarchy. If there could have been pointed out to the nobles of Louis XVI. the things which were liable to follow their arrogance, the children of these French rich would have cause for congratulation to-day.”
Mr. Walker says that he chooses to ask this of men of his class. He hardly means that. Men of his class, like himself, would have brains enough not to require the question. Mr. Walker doubtless refers, in speaking of men of his own class, to the wealthy, and to them it is well addressed and worthy of their careful attention. France had its 14th of July, which should have taught Louis XVI. and his nobles the lesson which it is hoped has been learned thoroughly by the rich of this country, as taught in the result of the election of November 8, 1892. These are but the premonitory symptoms of a terrible scourge that might sweep over our country. The poor may be robbed with impunity; the “Common People” will good-naturedly submit to a lot of snubbing; but it would be well for men accustomed to exhibit their impudence and assumption, to forego the snubbing process when brought in contact with the people, as General Snowden was, while commanding the military power of the State, as he did at Homestead. General Snowden might well be taken as a type of the “smart set” of Philadelphia, imitating the manners of the McAllister “smart set” of New York.
“The fact is, we have two separate worlds in this country. The man who lives in what is known as the world of society has no conception of what the world of labor is thinking. Their worlds are almost as distinct and as completely cut off from each other as if one had its capital at Kamtchatka, and the other at Terra del Fuego. The poor do injustice to the kindly-hearted people whose minds have been warped by the teachings of inheritance and by their environment of wealth; and the rich do not dream of the thoughts which fill the minds of the poor. It is a dangerous ignorance. These two factors are like the nitre and charcoal of gunpowder. Any stray spark may produce disastrous results. The laborer believes now that the law is gradually being altered to suit what he considers the equities of his position. Let him become fairly convinced that the government is for the few, that the military is but a means of carrying out schemes of aggrandizement by the rich, and that votes are bought or majorities counted out in the same interest, and the crucial hour of the Republic will at once have arrived.
“Can science do nothing towards the solution of these difficulties? Statistics show us that if we were all to labor, no one would want for anything, neither the necessities of life, nor reasonable pleasures, nor enjoyments. Again, is there any intelligent rich man, who would not wish his sons to labor? Who does not believe that labor, in moderation, brings happiness, if only that it gives a keener zest for recreation? Who does not believe that idleness brings mental and physical injury? Who, then, would wish for his children existence in a community where idleness is to be their lot? Is there any thinking man who can feel reasonably comfortable, when only a few blocks distant, thousands are eking out a dark existence by labor that extends, in many cases, over double the allotted number of hours, who have few pleasures, and fewer still of what we call the comforts of life?”
It is not simply that those not possessed of wealth may live within a few blocks of those who are possessed of wealth; it is not that their lives may be eked out in darkness; it is the crushing shame to them that their miserable existence is made still more hard to bear by the flaunted superiority, socially, of the possessors of wealth, who live a few blocks away. Poverty, when accompanied by none of the other and more objectionable features, is not so hard to bear. The poor man believes in the dignity of labor. He does not feel degraded by the fact that he may toil with his hands. He only feels a sense of shame, and his bosom only swells with wrath, when the disdainful dames of the wealthy class presume to snub or insult his wife, the sharer of his toil and privations. She is to him the light and life of even his miserable hovel, only a few blocks away from the wealthy; hence, the keener pang that he experiences when the one bright spot in his life, sacred to him, is invaded by snobbery and pretended class distinction.
“Yet wise laws could regulate much of this in the brief period of one generation. Lighten the burdens of taxation upon the poor, by letting those whose wealth is protected by the State chiefly furnish the means of subsistence for the State, at the same time offering a discouragement to the amassing of great wealth. The well-known expedient of income-tax would be a step in this direction. Take out of the control of private individuals the power to amass great fortunes, at the expense of the public, through the management of functions like railway, express, and telegraph, which are purely of a public character. Establish a system of currency, self-regulated, by means of postal savings banks; tax highly the unimproved properties which are held for purposes of speculation. Finally, let it be a recognized principle that when men employ many laborers, their business ceases to be purely a private affair, but concerns the State, and that disputes between proprietor and workmen must be submitted, not to the brute-force of so many Pinkerton mercenaries, but to arbitration.”
The espousal, by Mr. Walker, of a doctrine which, to most of the wealthy, is rank heresy,—an income tax,—is a step in the right direction. A graduated tax, to be regulated by the amount of income received and enjoyed by the taxpayer, would furnish a speedy, practicable, and just means, not only of preventing these vast accumulations in the hands of individuals, by accretions resulting from that part of their income which they are unable to spend, but it would also furnish a means whereby the Federal Government might be supported without the imposition of even the existing internal revenue tax, and only such protective tariff tax as would prove absolutely necessary to sustain our manufactures. It was a great step in the right direction, for the owner of such a prosperous magazine as the Cosmopolitan, the possessor of much of the world’s goods, to propose such an expedient for the relief of the people; especially when coupled with the suggestion that corporations, like those of the railroads, telegraph, et al., should not be controlled and managed for the profit of individuals. We should have fewer strikes, and much less labor trouble, if the Government controlled the great corporations who employ large numbers of laboring men.
This article is given prominence and so liberally quoted from—not alone from the intrinsic merit of the article and discernment of the writer in predicting the overthrow of plutocracy, and warning the rich against their insolence to those less-favored brothers, as far as worldly wealth is concerned,—but also, because of the position of the writer of the article; a man of brains, enterprise, energy, and wealth.