“There is much that is correct in all this,” he said; “much that I cannot truthfully contradict. But proceed.”
“Aye, and proceed I will,” replied the High President stoutly. “The aristocracy which surrounded these kings—that is, the men who formed their courts and helped to administer the public affairs—were in many instances vulgar publicans; men who derived their incomes by the maintenance of groggeries and low dancing houses, or worse—gamblers, touts, and a sprinkling of ex-convicts and little lawyers. Such was the aristocracy and the environment of these kings—the men who really ruled the land. I have spoken so far of the proud Empire State of New York. If you turn to the East or to the South, the middle country or the West, you will find that much the same conditions prevailed. Deny it, if you can!”
“I think,” protested the Professor, “that your criticism is, perhaps, directed into too narrow channels and that it treats too much of certain phases of mere partisan, or local politics.”
“But was not each State sovereign and independent,” retorted the High President, “and did not each State make its own laws and govern itself generally? Then, too, how was the Federal government itself made up except from the combined selections of the different States?”
“Still,” persisted the Professor, “I think that your criticism might be directed toward more broad and general conditions of our national life.”
“That, too, I will do since you have demanded it,” replied the High President. “Let us go back to the days of almost primeval man. What did the chief of the tribe, or band, do? He parcelled out the best of the plunder, or possessions, among his strongest fighting men, or else among the priests, or medicine men, or whoever was equally powerful with the fighting men in his particular way. Take it again in feudal England. What did the feudal Kings do there after the Norman Conquest? They divided the best lands of the country among the powerful Barons who formed their Court. And so it was in your Republic. The good things of the land—the great public franchises—were all parcelled out to these modern feudal Barons who waxed fat and built their wealth into the millions upon that which had been given them at the expense of the people.”
“But there were, I remember, various objections raised,” said the Professor, “to any other course being adopted—such as government ownership.”
“Objections!” exclaimed the High President contemptuously; “objections can be raised to anything. The murderer doubtless has his objections to the gallows and the thief strongly objects to the jail. There was at least one shining example of government ownership in those days. Was there anything so reliable or so admirably administered as the public mails—entirely conducted by the government? How is it possible in a true Republic to contemplate that which belongs to the public being given away for the benefit and enrichment of the few and the public correspondingly robbed to that extent.”
“And yet,” remarked the Professor, “in spite of these criticisms which you make, it seemed to be generally admitted that our people under the Republic had better reason to be contented than the people of any other nation on the face of the globe.”
“And so they had the right to expect to be,” retorted the High President, “but surely what you advance is no argument. Ought the people here to be satisfied merely because they are comparatively better off than the people of Scandinavia and the people of Scandinavia in turn be well content because they are comparatively better off than the people of the interior of China? But let us look further into the question as to how well the people under the Republic were contented. Were they really contented, or did they individually accept existing conditions because they could discover no particular way of changing them? Do you think that the average man among the great masses of the people was satisfied to work all his life for a pittance which was insufficient in most instances to fully furnish him, year in and year out, with the actual necessaries of life and see another man, of the same clay as himself, who could afford to squander aimlessly in one day upon an old bit of cracked porcelain, a piece of painted canvas, or some drab of the footlights, whose complexion was as false as her soul, as much money as that other man earned in a lifetime. And yet the one man was, perhaps, fully as well endowed physically and mentally as the other and the life work of the one was fully as useful to the community as the work of the other. Why, then, this awful disparity? Do you know, too, that statistics show that of ten adults dying under your vaunted Republic, nine went out of this world subjects for Potter’s Field? I do not mean by this that they were actually so interred, for the love and respect of friends who lent their aid usually saved them from this, but I do mean that nine out of ten died without leaving sufficient behind them, after a lifetime of honest, unremitting toil, to actually pay their burial expenses.”