There might perhaps be other ways of measuring that prosperity. As against the above imposing aggregation of figures, I offer a simple newspaper paragraph printed in 1902, which sounds like Kaskaskia, or Alder Gulch, or the end of the Santa Fé Trail: “Potatoes have been selling for a dollar and seventy-five cents a bushel in Chicago this week,” says the item. “A year ago the price was about forty cents. This enormous advance, coupled with the corresponding rise in the prices of nearly all vegetables, presents a serious economic problem for large families with small incomes.” The same paper goes on to say: “The greatest sufferers from the high price of potatoes are the small wage-earners. They have learned to depend upon potatoes almost as much as upon bread. Yet, at a dollar and seventy-five cents a bushel, this staple food is out of the reach of many. The best thing they can do is to fall back on rice, which is an excellent substitute for potatoes and is still reasonable in price. Unfortunately, large numbers of wage-earners are incapable of making a sudden change in their diet. Many women that have depended upon potatoes all their lives do not know how to cook rice or hominy. They are as helpless with these substitutes as were many of the Irish people with the corn meal that was sent to them from America during the potato famine, or as Hindus, who are accustomed to rice, would be when they were given wheat flour to cook. This scarcity of potatoes is likely to cause a good deal of hardship before the proper use of the cheaper staples is learned.”
And this is in America, in the zenith of the Age of Transportation! I fancy my man of pack-horse and cordelle living upon rice! I fancy Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett or Kit Carson using such diet as backing for his deeds! Meat and corn are the diet that built America. Good leaders of America, insist not over-much on this rice fare, as you do at present in these bubble days. Let weediness and immaturity, imported overmuch, be overrun and oppressed by organized rapacity, and then, one day, good leaders, you shall see the American man even yet fall to his well-learned task of leading himself.
This is in America, and in the Age of Transportation! I read of these startling changes and can scarcely believe that they have happened within a lifetime, a part of which was passed in a West where wealth and poverty, arrogance and self-denial, were alike unknown; where, if one hungered, he was free to enter the door of any little cabin he found here or there in the mountains, and to eat freely of whatever food he found, though the owner of the abode himself might be absent and might forever remain unknown; where the thought of price did not enter into the mind of either the uninvited visitor or his unknown host; where herds, wild or tame, covered a country vast, inviting and hospitable; where each man was his own leader; and where the thought of any difficulty in the simple problem of making a living never entered into the heart of man!
Those were days perhaps of not so great and apparent a national prosperity, but there comes a catch in the throat at comparing those days with these. The horror of it, the shameless waste, the destruction, the change, the ruin of it all—these can leave us little comfort as we gaze on the glittering picture of to-day. As a nation we are building for ourselves higher and higher a false castle of prosperity, blowing for ourselves wider and wider a bubble fragile at heart as any that ever met collapse in another day. “Give me back my legions!” cried the Roman general. God grant there may never bitterly rise to the lips of an American leader the unavailing cry, “Give me back my Americans!” God grant there come not too late the cry, “Give us back our America!”
“Taking it all around,” says an unprejudiced writer, “the present generation in the United States reminds one of a young spendthrift just come into a fine property, accumulated by the thrift and carefulness of many ancestors. He thinks he is something out of the ordinary, and intends showing others how things should be done. In the society of flatterers, speculators and gamblers, he soon parts with his ready money and bank stock. He then sells the timber off his land. After that is spent he sells his live stock. Having thus deprived himself of the means for the proper tillage of his soil, he then sells the hay crop from his meadows until they are no longer productive. He next mortgages his property; and the last scene in the final act is the auctioneer’s hammer at the public vendue.”[[62]]
Another commentator[[63]] takes up the same trend of thought: “The cry of the people of the West,” says he, “is rising almost to the ominous threat of revolution. The wealth of the country has increased enormously, but it is becoming concentrated in the hands of a comparatively few individuals. Only in the days of the early empire and late republic of Rome was it possible for a few individuals in a few years to amass such enormous fortunes as they do. Having exploited the wealth of the great middle class, we are now drifting into the second stage. Small investments no longer pay. There is no Eastern or Western state that has not a score of stranded towns and villages once prosperous in small industries. The small farmer is no longer able to make a living in the competition which he meets.... All this may be progress, but it is progress over a precipice.”
Still another observer[[64]] carries his conclusions yet further, and in a public address states: “The work of such men as [this monopolist] and his associates of the big combinations is preparing the minds of our people for socialism. I am not in favor of socialism, but men like these so-called captains of industry, who are opposed to socialism, are preparing the way for the rapid spread of the socialistic idea. Should some able leader take up that idea and advocate it, we shall see it spread with tremendous rapidity in America.”
So much for the accomplishments of the Age of Transportation. It has already shown us the meaning of monopoly and has shown us the abolishment of the individual. It has taught us, or some of us, to believe that the establishment of an expensive university may serve as emendative of an unpopular personal career. It has taught us, or some of us, obsequiously to worship that form of wealth that soothes its conscience by the building of public libraries. Whether or not learning best grows and flourishes that has such foundation heads, library and university alike must to-day admit their impotence to answer the cry of the leader, “Give me back my Americans!”
The America of to-day is an America utterly and absolutely changed from the principles whereon our original America was founded, and wherefrom it grew and flourished. Never was there any corner of Europe, before the days of those revolutions that put down kings, worse than some parts of oppressed America to-day. It is not too late for revolution in America. There is not justice in the belief that America can to-day be called the land of the free. The individual is no more. He perished somewhere on those heights we have seen him laboriously ascending, somewhere on those long rivers we have seen him tracing. He died in the day of Across the Waters.
To-day we have labor unions, organizations that in the old West would have called forth indignant contempt in the mere suggestion. We have associations of managers to fight the unions; we have monopolies, combinations, masses, upon the one side and the other, contending, not working together harmoniously. We have become par excellence the people of castes and grades and classes. The whole theory of America was that here there was hope for the individual; that here he might grow, might prevail. It is degradation to abandon that theory. It is degradation for the American man to say of his own volition: “I am but one cog of a wheel, and my neighbor another. I can not change; I can not rise; I can not progress; I can not grow; I dare not hope.” The degradation of the industry shares the degradation of the individual. The joint degradation, if it be accepted as final, spells a national deterioration and a national ruin which may be gradual and slow, or may, in these swift-moving days, be rapid and cataclysmic in its nature.