There is, in fact, no such conflict, and the laboring men of the United States have the power to protect themselves. In the ballot-box the vote of Lazarus is on an equality with the vote of Dives; the vote of a wandering pauper counts the same as that of a millionaire. In a land where the poor, where the laboring men have the right and have the power to make the laws, and do, in fact, make the laws, certainly there should be no complaint. In our country the people hold the power, and if any corporation in any State is devouring the substance of the people, every State has retained the power of eminent domain, under which it can confiscate the property and franchise of any corporation by simply paying to that corporation what such property is worth. And yet thousands of people are talking as though the rich combined for the express purpose of destroying the poor, are talking as though there existed a widespread conspiracy against industry, against honest toil; and thousands and thousands of speeches have been made and numberless articles have been written to fill the breasts of the unfortunate with hatred.
We have passed through a period of wonderful and unprecedented inflation. For years we enjoyed the luxury of going into debt, the felicity of living upon credit. We have in the United States about eighty thousand miles of railway, more than enough to make a treble track around the globe. Most of these miles were built in a period of twenty-five years, and at a cost of at least five thousand millions of dollars. Think of the ore that had to be dug, of the iron that was melted; think of the thousands employed in cutting bridge timber and ties, and giving to the wintry air the music of the axe; think of the thousands and thousands employed in making cars, in making locomotives, those horses of progress with nerves of steel and breath of flame; think of the thousands and thousands of workers in brass and steel and iron; think of the numberless industries that thrived in the construction of eighty thousand miles of railway, of the streams bridged, of the mountains tunneled, of the plains crossed; and think of the towns and cities that sprang up, as if by magic, along these highways of iron.
During the same time we had a war in which we expended thousands of millions of dollars, not to create, not to construct, but to destroy. All this money was spent in the work of demolition, and every shot and every shell and every musket and every cannon was used to destroy. All the time of every soldier was lost. An amount of property inconceivable was destroyed, and some of the best and bravest were sacrificed. During these years the productive power of the North was strained to the utmost; every wheel was in motion; there was employment for every kind and description of labor, and for every mechanic. There was a constantly rising market—speculation was rife, and it seemed almost impossible to lose. As a consequence, the men who had been toiling upon the farm became tired. It was too slow a way to get rich. They heard of their neighbor, of their brother, who had gone to the city and had suddenly become a millionaire. They became tired with the slow methods of agriculture. The young men of intelligence, of vim, of nerve became disgusted with the farms. On every hand fortunes were being made. A wave of wealth swept over the United States; huts became houses; houses became palaces with carpeted floors and pictured walls; tatters became garments; rags became robes; and for the first time in the history of the world, the poor tasted of the luxuries of wealth. We wondered how our fathers could have endured their poor and barren lives.
Every business was pressed to the snow line. Old life insurance associations had been successful; new ones sprang up on every hand. The agents filled every town. These agents were given a portion of the premium. You could hardly go out of your house without being told of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. You were shown pictures of life insurance agents emptying vast bags of gold at the feet of a disconsolate widow. You saw in imagination your own fatherless children wiping away the tears of grief and smiling with joy.
These agents insured everybody and everything. They would have insured a hospital or consumption in its last hemorrhage.
Fire insurance was managed in precisely the same way. The agents received a part of the premium, and they insured anything and everything, no matter what its danger might be. They would have insured powder in perdition, or icebergs under the torrid zone with the same alacrity. And then there were accident companies, and you could not go to the station to buy your ticket without being shown a picture of disaster. You would see there four horses running away with a stage, and old ladies and children being thrown out; you would see a steamer being blown up on the Mississippi, legs one way and arms the other, heads one side and hats the other; locomotives going through bridges, good Samaritans carrying off the wounded on stretchers.
The merchants, too, were not satisfied to do business in the old way. It was too slow; they could not wait for customers. They filled the country with drummers, and these drummers convinced all the country merchants that they needed about twice as many goods as they could possibly sell, and they took their notes on sixty and ninety days, and renewed them whenever desired, provided the parties renewing the notes would take more goods. And these country merchants pressed the goods upon their customers in the same manner. Everybody was selling, everybody was buying, and nearly all was done upon a credit. No one believed the day of settlement ever would or ever could come. Towns must continue to grow, and in the imagination of speculators there were hundreds of cities numbering their millions of inhabitants. Land, miles and miles from the city, was laid out in blocks and squares and parks; land that will not be occupied for residences probably for hundreds of years to come, and these lots were sold, not by the acre, not by the square mile, but by so much per foot. They were sold on credit, with a partial payment down and the balance secured by a mortgage.
These values, of course, existed simply in the imagination; and a deed of trust upon a cloud or a mortgage upon a last year's fog would have been just as valuable. Everybody advertised, and those who were not selling goods and real estate were in the medicine line, and every rock beneath our flag was covered with advice to the unfortunate; and I have often thought that if some sincere Christian had made a pilgrimage to Sinai and climbed its venerable crags, and in a moment of devotion dropped upon his knees and raised his eyes toward heaven, the first thing that would have met his astonished gaze would in all probability have been:
"St. 1860 X Plantation Bitters."
Suddenly there came a crash. Jay Cooke failed, and I have heard thousands of men account for the subsequent hard times from the fact that Cooke did fail. As well might you account for the smallpox by saying that the first pustule was the cause of the disease. The failure of Jay Cooke & Co. was simply a symptom of a disease universal.