And the pace-that-kills in the Chicagos and New Yorks is faithfully represented, on a small scale, in each of our towns. Don’t all of us know it? We do. But what is the remedy?
The temperance people believe that whiskey is at the bottom of the trouble. The church people believe that irreligion is the source of the evil. The school teacher believes that education will save the day.
But can not the student of human affairs see that the demoralization incident to four years of civil strife shook our entire social system like an earthquake? Did not the Spanish war light up,—luridly, vividly, horribly,—the almost universal corruption which had seized upon the body politic?
“Eat, drink and be merry—tomorrow we die.” When a nation rings with that cry, it is close to the whirlpool. “Let us have a good time!” The man drinks and makes much of his food; the woman drinks and thinks a deal about her eating; the boy drinks and knows the good dishes; the girl drinks and daintily scans the menu. “Hello!” shouts the dashing boy; “Hello!” answers the dashing girl, and off they hurry to some place where talk, songs, pictures and conduct are “up-to-date,”—and in many and many a case the Hello couple are reeling hellward by midnight.
Don’t we know that our statute-book is the Iliad of our woes?
The few are wickedly rich while the many are helplessly poor, because the laws have been made for the purpose of bringing about that very state of affairs. There is a fierce struggle for existence which waxes more desperate every year. Men fight each other for a job, with a ferocity like that of starving dogs fighting over a bone. Girls are forced into positions where delicacy of feeling is trampled out and where it requires heroic courage to resist the tempters who are ever on her trail to pull her down.
Who does not know that the ten million dollars which one of our religious denominations recently sent abroad for Foreign Missions would be better employed if it were devoted to the breaking up of our hideous marketing of white women to lewd houses? Who does not feel that the hundreds of millions which our Government has spent in the Philippines had better have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers here at home? Who does not know that we ought to tremble for our future when we see how our law-makers have been the willing tools of those who ruin the millions of men and women, girls and boys, in order that a few hundreds of ravenous rascals like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Havemeyer and Ryan and Vanderbilt and Gould and Harriman shall each be richer than any king ever was?
Most of us do know it. Some of us have long been trying to arouse the patient, victimized millions to a sense of their own wrongs. But it is an uphill work. Some despair, some scoff, some are callous, some won’t listen, some are timid, some are interested in keeping things as they are, some think it is God’s will that a favored few should reach the Paradise of unlimited riches while the unfavored multitudes sink into a hell of eternal wretchedness.
The lotus-eater’s plaint of “Let us alone” is to me as fearful as that reckless, creedless, madly selfish cry “Let us eat, drink and be merry: tomorrow we die.”
Jay Gould contemptuously dismissed the suggestion that, some day, the American people might rise in arms against its swinish plutocracy. Said Jason, the cynical,