Daniel Webster, as far back as 1842, found that the spirit of unrest was in the air as it is now. In an address in that year he said:
“There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation and the pernicious influence of accumulated wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations and all means by which small capitals become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry, and dry all the streams. In a country of unbounded liberty they clamor against oppression. In a country of perfect equality they would move heaven and earth against privilege and monopoly. In a country where property is more evenly divided than anywhere else they rend the air shouting agrarian doctrines. In a country where the wages of labor are high beyond parallel, they would teach the laborer that he is but an oppressed slave.”
I will here deviate to another division of the subject.
Considerable uneasiness and unrest have been evinced not only by the Socialists, but by many others, as to whether great individual or corporate wealth—in other words, capital—is inimical and hostile to the public welfare and a menace to our institutions.
I think that it can be clearly shown that this anxiety and unrest are without any good foundation. There is nothing in fact to justify this unrest.
In our own country especially, where individual opportunities are practically limitless and where thought and effort are exerted to the utmost straining point, most fruitful, indeed, has been the result. We have seen that the making of large fortunes coincidently with great general prosperity, that is, by those doing a profitable business on a large scale, is an inevitable economic result.
The past forty-five years in the United States embrace a new era of wealth—an era in which the accumulation of vast amounts of money, or its equivalent, in individual and corporate hands, has accompanied the most marvelous national growth and prosperity in all history.
New conditions have arisen, and new methods have had to be employed, while new men, equipped with new ideas, have not been found wanting to meet all requirements, and to keep step with the march of progress on both land and sea. Unlike the people of some of the older countries, where, as in Russia, they distrust their government, Americans do not hoard their wealth. They employ it. They have nothing to hoard it for. Their quickly acquired fortunes are generally lavishly disbursed, both in their style of living and their investments. With much of the money they put into circulation, railroads are built and extended, mammoth factories are constructed, labor is employed on a larger scale than before, more farms are cultivated, and more crops are moved and exported. Through all the arteries of trade and commerce the wealth thus employed flows and adds to the growth and prosperity of the country.
Keeping the wheels of commerce moving, by supplying the demands of the financial, mercantile, manufacturing and agricultural world with the “sinews of war,” in the up-to-date American way, instead of merely gathering wealth and hiding it away, has been to my mind one great secret of our unprecedented national advancement.
