The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

Think, then, of the meaning of this sentiment from such a man at such a time! Marius, a plebeian, led the slaves of Rome to the seats of political power, broke down the age-old barriers of an aristocratic plutocracy, and wrote into the history of the world one of its earliest chapters on the revolt of a subjugated nation held in chains for the benefit of a few. Pitt, Lord Chatham, the “Great Commoner,” hurled from office by the combined power of a king, a plutocratic class, and a subservient political machine, was forced back into office by the will of the people, unorganized, in the face of all the banded powers against him, and in spite of a condition of political corruption that made his return seem a miracle. Peel gave the people of England free corn against the banded powers of commercial greed.

And to-day, in America, an aristocrat and a member of the plutocratic class, sitting in a great city club of fashion, reading an editorial from a paper that is published and edited to meet the demands of that very class, gives it as his opinion that in this country we must raise a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel! And the alternative—the days of the Terror, the bloody hands, the brutish mob, the wild-eyed, frantic leaders of the hosts that stormed the Bastile, set up the guillotine—so runs the mind of an aristocrat and a plutocrat, reading the Evening Post in a rich man’s club on upper Fifth Avenue!

I believe that he was right. Without referring specifically to the tariff reform—for this is no political document that I am writing—I believe that the catalogue of legislative enactments by our administrative machine over the past twenty years reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt that the will of the people is subservient to the will of the plutocracy. How can we further blind ourselves to the truth? When such a fact is known as gospel to the people, from Maine to California, published in every section of the press, from the gutter-snipe class to the scholarly review, how may the best educated class in the United States go on upon its careless way ignoring the fact?

The result is perfectly obvious in the light of history. The plutocracy, stripped of the artificial screens behind which it grew to power, stands exposed to-day in the full glare of the search-light of public knowledge. Under such circumstances, even in slave-holding nations, there has never lacked a tribune of the people. So sprung the Gracchi from the dust to lead the first great battle in Rome. So, even in the dawn of popular liberty, came a Tyler and a Cade, before their hour had struck, it is true, yet, even so, with power to call to their backs armies of men willing to die and conquerable only by accident or guile. So, in the fullness of time, came other greater men, a Marius, a Pitt, a Peel, who led the people onward and upward against the citadels of plutocracy.

To-day we of the class that rules, that draws unearned profits from the toil of other men, know full well that the time is almost here when there must be a true accounting. The fortunes that have been made are made; and that is all of it. The fortunes that are in the making through misuse of political power, through extortionate exploitation of the people and the people’s heritage, through industrial oppression and industrial denial of the rights of man—these must be checked. To-morrow, in this land, the door of opportunity must be again unsealed.

We cannot go back and create more free land to take the place of the millions upon millions of acres thrown away by a lavish, stupid, careless, traitorous government. We cannot fill again the plundered mines of Michigan or Montana or Pennsylvania. We cannot clothe the hills of Maine and Michigan again with pine, or the broad bottoms of Ohio with walnut. We cannot turn backward the hands of the clock, or re-create the economic factors that have been eliminated to make of their fragments the wealth and the social world to-day enjoyed by the exploiters and their descendants.

It is not so that evolution works. That rare civilization of the Aztecs which Cortez crushed can never be restored. Only echoes from the tombs of Lucumons, after the lapse of twenty centuries, attest the fact that once, in Etruria, there existed a civilization distinctive, splendid, brilliant, until the tempest of Sulla’s vengeance blotted it from the face of the earth. Only the ashes in the urn of history remain of Pharaoh’s Egypt, Athens, Babylon, Persia.

So, too, the golden opportunity of yesterday is gone, never to return within our borders. The lesson of America, however, is burned deep into the records of time. In Canada, such a man as Laurier reads it clearly. In the greater of the Latin republics in South America, they strive to-day to prevent the very condition we now find in free America. In this matter of the real substance of rulership, the United States is to-day an example to the nations of a democracy which has deliberately squandered its birthright.

Yet, for all our lost opportunities, much remains that can be done and will be done. It is not my purpose here to sketch the process of salvation that is yet possible. Only, at this point in my writings, I would warn the people of my class, those of them who do not yet think about these things or understand them, that the moment has arrived when the people demand a Marius—a tribune who shall lead them onward into freedom, a man who shall stand before the world untrammelled by the golden chains of wealth, undefiled by the pollution of time-serving politics, filled with the inspiration of the people’s will, courageous to battle to the very bitter end for the rights that the people demand.

Only the morally and intellectually deaf cannot hear the sound of the call of the people. It sweeps from the plains of Kansas in the breath of the rustling corn; it swells from the hills of Montana in the thud of the drill and the rising and falling of picks in the mines; it whirs from the looms of the South and the North, where child slaves earn the bread of labour; it moans from the lofts of New York, in the voice of the slaves of the sweat shop; it shrieks from the forges of Pittsburg, the charnels of Packingtown, the terrible mines of the mountains of coal.