“Yes,” said the other, “I read it.”
“You read it?” exclaimed Mr. Sinclair, in complete surprise.
“Oh, yes—I always read it,” said the other, in a matter-of-fact way.
There are many like him. Five years ago you probably could have counted on the fingers of two hands the men in the wealthy classes who read the literature that comes from below. To-day it is a very common occurrence to hear in the best clubs of New York wealthy men discussing with intense earnestness and real economic sense articles of which they never would have heard five years ago.
It is not that many of us really feel the danger that impends. It is simply that our armour of complacency and self-satisfaction has been pierced, and our pride has been wounded.
“I used to think,” said a clubman to me last winter, “that we were well beloved; but I guess our class is the best hated class in the land. I am only beginning to find out why.”
Of course, I do not want to give the reader the idea that the muck-raker wrought this change. As a matter of fact, he is but the skirmish line. The wealthy classes would have weathered his attack without much trouble and gone upon their all-complacent way if he had been the culmination, instead of the mere beginning, of the hard attack. But after him, as I have said, came a great army of sober, sedate, forceful writers, hurling volleys of stinging facts upon our careless trenches. We roused ourselves to meet the real attack. Fiercely it swept upon us. Yet even that we might have met and gone back in the end into the peace and security of our age-long self-confidence, no whit the worse for the battle.
Worse—or better—was to come. When the pulpit and the press had done their worst—or best—the heavy artillery opened. Senators on the floor of the senate, governors from the chair of office, mighty lawyers before the bar, judges from the bench, and, last, a President from the White House, raked our outworn defences, and even the silliest and most fatuous of men within the walls knew, at least, that we were under fire.
To-day there is a lull. Many of those who awakened to the sound of battle but two or three years ago are slipping back into fancied security. The older heads know better. We see the forces of labour and poverty forming new lines upon the plains and hill sides. We see them lashed to new fury by the whip of rising prices; we hear the stern, stentorian voices of their tribunes calling them to battle for their lives and liberties; we smell the reek of them as they crowd from the dusty mines and sweaty factories.
We do not flatter ourselves, even those of us most drunk with the strong liquor of power and the sweet wine of indolence, that the forces of attack are weakened or weakening. We know full well that this great lull of renewed national prosperity has been used by the forces of the men that labour to make themselves stronger, cleaner, better caparisoned for the long battle of to-morrow.