In the war between the states more than a million men enlisted on either side, and at the end of four and one-half years there were fifty or one hundred multi-millionaires in military achievement and military glory and ten thousand in unmarked graves. Socialists do not object to these inequalities. While they seem to welcome millionaires in art, in music, and in athletics they all point to millionaires in business as an unanswerable indictment of America’s political system. They rejoice that it can produce an Edison, but mourn that it can also produce a Rockefeller. Yet the success of these two wizards is traceable alike to extraordinary aptitude in their respective fields of achievement, plus extraordinary application. Neither of these men ever robbed me of a penny. On the contrary each has contributed to my comfort, thus adding to the worth of living, and each has cheapened for me the cost of high living. But for Mr. Edison, or someone of a different name to do what he has done, I would be deprived of electric light and many other comforts. But for Mr. Rockefeller, or some one of a different name to do what Mr. Rockefeller has done, every owner of an oil well would be pumping his product into barrels in the olden way, hauling it to town and selling on a manipulated market, while I would be deprived of a hundred by-products of petroleum, be still paying twenty-five cents per gallon for poor kerosene, and there would be no such thing known in all the world as gasoline.
CHAPTER XV
POPULAR DISSATISFACTION
It is as logical that dissatisfaction should develop because of inequality of results in “money making,” as it is that inequality in results shall follow inequality of aptitude and effort. This dissatisfaction has tended strongly to develop socialistic thought and teaching.
A century and a quarter, during which representatives were chosen because of actual or supposed aptitude, and retained in office during long periods—frequently for life—when nearly every industry was fostered, and none fathered, developed a people, the best paid, the best fed, the best clothed, the best housed, the best educated, enjoying more of the comforts of life, far more of its luxuries, enduring less hardships and privations, than any other in all history; but it is an even guess if, at the same time, we did not become more restless, discontented and unhappy.
We were not so much dissatisfied, however, with our own condition, abstractly considered, as with our relative condition. The man with rubber heels would have thought himself favored had he not seen someone with a bicycle, and the man with a bicycle was contented until his friend got a motorcycle. The man with a motorcycle thought he had the best the world afforded until he saw an automobile and the man in the automobile was happy until his neighbor got a yacht. “All this availeth me nothing so long as I see Mordecai, the Jew, sitting at the king’s gate.”
I have lived some years in this blessed land and the only criticism I have ever heard, either of our form of government or our policy, is the fact that some men have got rich.
I made this statement in a public speech some months ago and asked who had heard any other. A man answered: “Some people have got poor.” I admitted that I had known a number of fellows whose fathers had left them money and who had got poor, but I told the audience that most of the poor men whom I had known had simply remained poor. I asked my critic if he had ever fattened cattle. He admitted he had not. Then I assured him that he would seldom see a steer getting poor in a feed yard where others were doing well and most were getting fat, but he would frequently see one that remained poor, notwithstanding his environments.
Two men were standing by the side of the New York Central Railroad. One said to the other: “My, see this track of empire! Four tracks, great Mogul engines taking two thousand tons of freight at a load, passenger trains making sixty miles an hour. There comes the express!” As the train passed a cinder lit in the eye of the enthusiast, when immediately he denounced the road, cursed the management and swore at all four tracks.
In a country like ours, where conditions have been superb, resources matchless and resourcefulness unequalled, none should be surprised at the speed we have developed and no one ought to use language unfit to print simply because there are cinders in the air. Admittedly there are. We have all had them in our eyes. They are more than annoying, but the only way to prevent cinders is to tear up the tracks. And it is simply surprising the number of good people who are trying to make the world a paradise through a policy of destruction.