This great National Joint Stock Company of ours, with its seventy million stockholders, is doing a thriving business and making barrels of money. There is only one objectionable feature. It is that after the labor of these seventy millions of people, their genius, their suffering and their sweat, are converted into wealth, the dividends are given to a few hundred men, while the rest of us pay the assessments.
We do not need better times. Anybody who wants to make more than forty thousand dollars a day is a hog. The real issue is not whether we shall have hard times or good times, prosperity or panic in the abstract, but it is whether that prosperity and good times, now monopolized by the few, shall become the inheritance of every child of God.
THIEVES TAKE PANIC WHEN PURSUED BY HONEST MEN.
If a select company of burglars and safe-blowers were to enter your village and relieve a number of your merchants of the contents of their safes, their stocks of jewels, silks and clothing, and were to secure all of the finest horses from half the neighboring farms, and utilize them in getting the booty safely to the nearest forest, they would no doubt, while unpacking their wealth and feeding their horses, after their hasty trip, congratulate one another upon "their remarkable prosperity." They would be very apt to brag about the unusual "good times." But if, as the sun rose over the tree-tops and they were repacking their goods they saw suddenly the glistening pitchforks of half a hundred angry farmers and the determined furious faces of as many brawny workmen and merchants, bent on reclaiming their property—there would be a PANIC.[11]
The plunderers of the world are enjoying good times at the expense of the masses. Their profits are as fabulous as their methods are cruel. But in the midst of their celebration feast, their crime is discovered, and the pitchforks of five million farmers glistening in the morning sun, the angry faces of four million city workmen loom up in the distance, and the result is PANIC and loss of confidence—(among the revelers.)
As we approach November, 1900, this panic will increase. But as there wells up the sound infernal of their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, there will be heard still louder, the voices of millions singing their chorus of deliverance. As these offenders look into the grave where lies buried their every plan for selfish aggrandizement, to us, their innumerable victims, that same grave will be the open window through which we behold the land of promise.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Republic, March 20, 1897.
[2] Witness the following extracts: