“But is there not the pleasure of accumulation itself, Mr. Morning?”
“I suppose so,” replied that gentleman, “or men would not pursue it; but it is a cultivated and not a natural taste. Every man for instance, requires a pair of trousers and a hat, but after he has acquired enough of such articles for the use of himself and his family for life, and a generous supply for his descendants, why work the balance of his days to fill warehouses with trousers and hats? I do not know,” continued Mr. Morning—and our reporter thought that there was a deeper shade in his sea-gray eyes—“I do not know that I shall ever marry, but if I had boys I would leave them no fortunes larger than would suffice for a generous support.”
“Will you, then,” queried our reporter, “expend in your own lifetime all the great revenues of the Morning mine?”
“All that I can find time, strength, and opportunity to expend in ways that will help the world,” rejoined the Arizona Gold King.
[From the New York Times, July 17, 1895.]
Mr. David Morning is engaged in works of apparent charity, which to many thoughtful men will seem an injury rather than a benefit to the world. Capitalists are entitled to receive interest upon their investments, and if inducement to accumulation be taken away by the competition of such Utopians as Mr. Morning, then frugality may cease to be accounted a virtue.
On the whole, wouldn’t it be better for the business world, and the stability of property and property rights, if the tenants of the Morning Blocks were compelled to pay the full rental value of their apartments?
[From the New York Socialist, July 19, 1895.]
Dave Morning is endeavoring to throw dust in the eyes of the working masses of the country, by erecting seventeen-story palaces for boodle bookkeepers, and twenty-story tenement houses for mechanics. He has filled San Francisco, Chicago, and several other cities with his humbug Co-operative Labor Aid Societies. He is evidently plotting for the presidency in 1896, and expects to reach the White House by a golden path.
“The poor of this country should accept no employment as a boon, nor consent to engage in any wage-saving and profit-sharing corporation that will force them to accumulate, and they should take no such favors from the rich as cheap rents or free homes. Let the unnatural accumulations of rich scoundrels be distributed among the people. No man is honestly entitled to have or hold anything except the fruits of his own labor. It would be better for the world, and for the great cause of socialism which the pseudo philanthropy of Morning delays and obstructs, if this Arizona Gold King could be tumbled head first down one of his own shafts, and his seventeen-story marble-paved Edens be dynamited out of existence.”