It was thought that this was impossible in our republic because we had no law of primogeniture, but we have another kind of geniture that is very effective. Recent statistics have shown that the very wealthy inhabitants of Fifth Avenue, New York, have in one year but one eighteenth as many children as the same number of families in the poorer neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Thus poverty multiplies itself rapidly, while wealth concentrates and needs no primogeniture to hold it together, because its numbers do not increase; and a similar fact, but not so extreme, appears in the reference to our Back Bay region in our own statistics, and in the statistics of Philadelphia. Thus it seems that we are destined to have the richest aristocracy by far that the world has ever dreamed of.
We know that concentrated wealth is power—and that great power is always dangerous to its neighbors. Like the slumbering power of dynamite, we are unwilling to have it near us, no matter how well guarded. I hold, therefore, that a republic has a right to guard itself against such dangers as much as the city has a right to prohibit the establishment of powder magazines in the centre of its population.
The profound and prophetic mind of Abraham Lincoln presaged this, and he said: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war. God grant that my suspicion may prove groundless.”
Wealth has a natural tendency to grow into an overwhelming power, for a million of dollars well managed will become $1,000,000,000 in a century and a half, and there are millionaires to-day who may become billionaires in forty or fifty years. But this growth has always been kept down by a generous or prodigal consumption, by ostentatious luxury, by profligacy, by pestilence, and by war. Yet when these checks are diminished; when, as in our republic, the danger of war is removed; when the generous consumption is hindered by wide-spread poverty; when pestilence is checked by sanitary improvements, and industry is enforced on the millions by daily necessity, then that growth of wealth which has been interrupted every few years in the old world by war, tyranny, taxation, standing armies, ignorance, and disease, will advance in our country as a mighty flood, impelled by the rains from heaven. The flood from heaven which is enriching us is the inspiration of genius in every form of science, art, and mechanical progress, which doubles and redoubles our productive power. We must look to human wisdom for the means of regulating the flow that it may act as a fertilizing rain, and not as a devastating flood, wasting the hillsides into barrenness, and sweeping away the bulwarks that the wise have erected.
It is no rhetorical exaggeration to speak of accumulated and unequal wealth as a dangerous flood. All ancient history proves it to be a danger. Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, and India, have shown by their terrible record how wealth in a few hands has ever proved a curse instead of a blessing to society. The pyramids of Egypt, an awful monument of the blood and toil of slaves, are a gloomy record of the senseless ostentation of despots, yet who ever speaks of the pyramids as the monuments of a crime?
Immense wealth for personal use is not a normal desire. It is an unsound, unhealthy appetite, resembling that of gluttony and darkness—an appetite that grows by what it feeds on and becomes insatiable.
It is an unsound appetite, for the increase of wealth already beyond all human wants, adds nothing to a man’s comforts or happiness—it adds only to his cares, which it increases, to his selfishness, which it intensifies, and to his power of indulging arrogance and ostentation. It impairs his sympathy with his fellowman, and inflames his egotism.
The superfluous mass of wealth serves only to supply an overruling power destructive to the social rights of others, and a haughty ostentation that humiliates fellow-citizens. It is, therefore, a hostile and dangerous element in a republic, although a few may hold great wealth and resist its insidious influence.
Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to man and injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature that the fittest shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not the fittest, for through the centuries they do not survive. The extremely wealthy are dying out, for they do not have children enough to maintain their numbers. It is our duty so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. They are twin evils; extreme wealth indicates extreme poverty, as mountains indicate valleys. Wealth, corruption, and despotism, are grouped together in history, as liberty has been grouped with equality, simplicity, hardihood, the mountain and the wilderness.
Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to reform, its method of opposition being corruption, and these characteristics are intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth everywhere gives power to monopolize the face of the earth, and thus establish a hereditary nobility; for the landlords of millions of acres are the most substantial and formidable lords that society knows, and nowhere in the world have there been greater opportunities to establish such an aristocracy, which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one thousand dollars per capita, represents not the increased wealth of the masses but the enormous accumulations of a few. Our gain of about two thousand millions annually, does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the republic? If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it is corpulence instead of strength.