If the Millionaire Does Not Give, He is
"Stingy;" if He Does Give, He
is Called a "Briber."
Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, the distinguished Chicago rabbi, says that "charity, as the word is known to-day, is only a bribe of moneyed men to make a community forget the wrongs heaped upon it." The New York Globe catches at the text, and brings out the fact that present-day critics are leaving the rich no refuge at all. The rich man is the common target.
Heretofore the poor man has had the world's sympathy as the under dog. Now he is becoming supercanine and the rich man subcanine. Does the rich man not give? He is stingy. Does he give? He is a briber—passes from negative to positive crime.
If he would get rid of superfluous wealth his only chance is to buy edifices and burn them down uninsured. Even then he might be arrested for arson and accused of maliciously overworking the poor firemen; or hygienists would say he was dirtying the air with smoke, and thus murdering those compelled to breathe it.
Instead of settlements for the neglected poor—such institutions as grew up in East London after Sir Walter Besant wrote "All Sorts and Conditions of Men"—there should be settlements for the neglected rich.
As things are now they have no chance—their best is necessarily a worst. Victims of society, equally condemned whether they do or don't do, no option seems open but to journey to the extreme edge of space and jump off into nothingness.
A favorite doctrine of Calvinistic New England was that a man was not saved unless entirely and absolutely willing to be damned for the glory of God; with a similar inexorable logic our new moralists have established the doctrine of unescapable taint—that if a man have and keep he is stewed in iniquity; that if he does not keep, adding would-be bribery to his other sins, he scatters his own corruption among the innocent.
Ground between upper and nether stones, fenced in all directions, the life of the rich is necessarily an ethical tragedy. Whatever he does or doesn't do, the rich man is a traitor to the kingdom, a puller down of the temple.
It is obvious that the only thing feasible is to abolish wealth and go back to the tree-climbing days, to that period of primitive apehood when each plucked his own cocoanut and had no thought of ownership, tainted or untainted.