Hence the idle rich. I do not mean to say that by any means all of the dividends and interest are gathered by the idle rich. Such a condition as that can exist but once in the history of a nation. It came about in Rome—and it led to the fall. It came about in France—and it led to the terror. Here, in America, it has gone far to be sure, and the tendency is still onward; but it has not yet quite reached a point where one may say: “To-morrow the harvest is ripe!”
“As well might the oligarchy attempt to stay the flux and reflux of the tides as to attempt to stay the progress of freedom in the South. Approved of God, the edict of the genius of Universal Emancipation has been proclaimed to the world, and nothing, save Deity himself, can possibly reverse it. To connive at the perpetuation of slavery is to disobey the commands of Heaven. Not to be an abolitionist is to be a wilful and diabolical instrument of the devil. The South needs to be free, the South wants to be free, the South SHALL be free!”
—Hinton Rowan Helper.
Chapter Four
WHO ARE THE SLAVES?
For thirty years, since 1880, we have been piling up wealth in the hands of men who do not work. In almost every year there has been pouring from our mills a steady grist of idlers. It has gone so far that to-day, in every city of the Union, the class of the idle rich has reached proportions that to the thoughtful student of events are alarming. The millionaire habit has spread until to-day men of millions are far more numerous in our great cities than were men of one tenth the wealth twenty years ago.
I do not desire to criticize wealth; for I am not a Socialist, and I entertain no Utopian dreams concerning the equal distribution of wealth among the people or the public control of all sources of wealth. I agree thoroughly with Mr. Carnegie, and with much older economists, in the opinion that any arbitrary distribution of wealth, or any arbitrary assignment of the sources of wealth, would be but temporary, and would be followed by another period of adjustment which would end with the reappropriation of wealth and the reassignment of the sources of wealth into the hands best qualified by nature to hold them. I take it to be proven by the experience of the world that individual exploitation of the sources of wealth remains as the established basis of the industrial, commercial, and social development of the world.
Yet, I confess, the terrific sweep of industrialism across this land throughout the past century appalls me as I study it from records written and unwritten. I cannot go down through the crowded tenement sections of our great cities without having it borne in upon me that we as a nation pay a fearful price in human blood and tears for our industrial triumphs. I cannot see the poverty, even the degradation, of the wives and children of the wage-working class in many cities, and even in many rural districts, without being visited by the devastating thought that surely, if the principle of the thing be necessary and right, there must be fearful errors somewhere in the application of the principle.