I am perfectly serious when I suggest that the slaves of riches are just as much to be pitied as the slaves of poverty. No man need envy Mr. Rockefeller, for example, because he has something like six hundred millions of dollars, an annual income of about seventy-two millions. He does not own those millions, Jonathan, but they own him. He is a slave to his possessions. If he owns a score of automobiles he can only use one at a time; if he spends millions in building palatial residences for himself he cannot get greater comfort than the man of modest fortune. He cannot buy health nor a single touch of love for money.
Many of our great modern princes of industry and commerce are good men. It is a wild mistake to imagine that they are all terrible ogres and monsters of iniquity. But they are victims of an unjust system. Millions roll into their coffers while they sleep, and they are oppressed by the burden of responsibilities. If they give money away at a rate calculated to ease them of the burdens beneath which they stagger they can only do more harm than good. Mr. Carnegie gives public libraries with the lavishness with which travellers in Italy sometimes throw small copper coins to the beggars on the streets, but he is only pauperising cities wholesale and hindering the progress of real culture by taking away from civic life the spirit of self-reliance. If the people of a small town came together and said: "We ought to have a library in our town for our common advantage: let us unite and subscribe funds for a hundred books to begin with," that would be an expression of true culture.
But when a city accepts a library at Mr. Carnegie's hands, there is an inevitable loss of self-respect and independence. Mr. Carnegie's motives may be good and pure, but the harm done to the community is none the less great.
Mr. Rockefeller may give money to endow colleges and universities from the very highest motives, but he cannot prevent the endowments from influencing the teaching given in them, even if he should try to do so. Thus the gifts of our millionaires are an insidious poison flowing into the fountains of learning.
Mind you, this is not the claim of a prejudiced Socialist agitator. President Hadley, of Yale University, is not a Socialist agitator, but he admits the truth of this claim. He says: "Modern University teaching costs more money per capita than it ever did before, because the public wishes a university to maintain places of scientific research, and scientific research is extremely expensive. A university is more likely to obtain this money if it gives the property owners reason to believe that vested rights will not be interfered with. If we recognize vested rights in order to secure the means of progress in physical science, is there not danger that we shall stifle the spirit of independence which is equally important as a means of progress in moral science?"
Professor Bascom is not a Socialist agitator, either, but he also recognizes the danger of corrupting our university teaching in this manner. After calling attention to the "wrongful and unflinching way" in which the wealth of the Standard Oil magnate has been amassed, he asks: "Is a college at liberty to accept money gained in a manner so hostile to the public welfare? Is it at liberty, when the Government is being put to its wits' end to check this aggression, to rank itself with those who fight it?"
And the effect of riches upon the rich themselves is as bad as anything in modern life. While it is true that there are among the rich many very good citizens, it is also perfectly plain to any honest observer of conditions that great riches are producing moral havoc and disaster among the princes of wealth in this country. Mr. Carnegie has said that a man who dies rich dies disgraced, but there is even greater reason to believe that to be born rich is to be born damned. The inheritance of vast fortunes is always demoralizing.
What must the mind and soul of a woman be like who takes her toy spaniel in state to the opera to hear Caruso sing, while, in the same city, there are babies dying for lack of food? What are we to think of the dog-dinners, the monkey-dinners and the other unspeakably foolish and unspeakably vile orgies constantly reported from Newport and other places where the drones of our social system disport themselves? What shall we say of the shocking state of affairs disclosed by the disgusting reports of our "Society Scandals," except that unearned riches corrode and destroy all human virtues?
The wise King, Solomon, knew what he was talking about when he cried out: "Give me neither poverty nor riches." Unnatural poverty is bad, blighting the soul of man; and unnatural riches are likewise bad, equally blighting the soul of man. Our social system is bad for both classes, Jonathan, and a change to better and juster conditions, while it will be resisted by the rich, the drones, with all their might, will be for the common good of all. For it is well to remember that in trying to get rid of the rule of the drones, the working class is not trying to become the ruling class, to rule others as they have been ruled. We are aiming to do away with classes altogether; to make a united and free social state.