One of these establishments would suggest to your view an exaggerated estimate of its founder’s wealth. In most cases his income extends but little beyond the support of this enterprise. In his dream of wealth he has achieved the hope of his ambition, and he stops there.
Your passion of hoarding beyond a competency, without purpose except the lust for hoarding, is the offshoot of that instinct in the carnivorous brute, which impels him to refuse to his hungry fellows any portion of his captured carcass, one-tenth of which he cannot consume. This low and brute-born heritage of greed only fails of a better suppression in your society, because you have neglected to entirely remedy, by your political methods, the generally precarious way in which your animal and intellectual wants are supplied. Suffering now follows just as close to a miss in your struggles for sustenance, as it did when your skin-clad hunters failed of their game.
Your passion to get and hold is intensified and brutalized in its lack of regard for the consequences to others, by the large number of artificial necessities only attainable in your society by a considerable accumulation of money, the want of which implies degradation, and a sacrifice of many things that have grown to be dear to life. Every addition to the savings removes to a greater distance that dreaded condition of your civilization, known as poverty. The insatiable character of the hoarding is not unlike the motive of overcaution in a wanderer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a dreaded animal in his path, increases his distance by flight far beyond all possible approach of the dangerous presence.
Your breathless pursuit of wealth, beyond all reasonable limit of obtaining the objects of desire, is induced also by the remarkable opportunities its possession affords to appropriate the earnings of industry. The capacity of your wealth to absorb and control the fruits of toil exists in a geometrical ratio of increase with the greater wealth employed, and the taste of power once felt is seldom appeased, but increases with every money addition. Under your favorable laws, it may extend to the privilege of a single individual exacting the whole surplus earnings of an army of busy workers.
Through centuries of legislation and usuage you have established various processes, by which wealth is enabled to extract an undue portion of the earnings of industry. Among these processes may be named rates of interest on money graded to the necessities of borrowers, rents gauged by the ability of tenants to pay, monopoly supplies with prices fixed just below the point of compelled abstinence, variations in the value of mediums of exchange, with other unsuppressed agencies promoting frequent change of values for the opportunities of capital and the distress of labor; stupendous aggregations of wealth reversing the laws of economy by advancing the price of necessities on the one hand and depressing the wages of labor on the other; and more successful than all, a system of land proprietorship which permits holders of the Earth’s surface, in addition to their privilege of exacting a large portion of the profits of industry in rent, a further right to pocket, in the form of appreciated values of their land, an unearned share of the collective fruits of the industries which surround them.
Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry. With us, property is the means, and not the end, beyond which there are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. The great aim of our government has been to provide for the well-being of persons, while it may be said of yours that the most attention has been devoted to the welfare of property; by which is meant its protection and increase, regardless of the manner of its distribution, or the doubtful methods of its extraction from the energies of labor. In the pursuit of this policy you are only perpetuating, without much change, your primitive conditions, when the strong arm gathered the most of the wealth. Your early born instincts do not seem sufficiently evolutionized to co-operate in any undertaking which denies opportunities of the strong over the weak; and the unhappy consequence is a society so mercenary that the general estimate among you is not from any quality which indicates a nearness to the Deity, but principally from the cool numerical calculations of property attachments.
The unity of our spiritual and temporal interests makes it necessary that every government act shall be a religious one. The spirit of kindness, and charity to all which is the only deserving part of your religions, we have taken as the foundation of all our public acts, and have made it the cornerstone of government itself. Our legislation, if the mere assent to measures recommended can be called by that name, considers first the welfare of persons comprising the whole, subservient to which every possible interest must take its place. And the welfare of persons, in our politico-religious point of view, is dependent upon the proper and equitable rewards of industry; their equal opportunities of acquiring knowledge; an encouragement of their morality by a recognition of their virtues, making it the necessary stepping-stone to their advancement; and the sweeping away of every social form which establishes a sense of inferiority, destroys the pride of self, and institutes that feeling of degradation which is the most prolific source of evil in society.
It is easy to note your tendency in these directions. The barbaric institution of force and its concomitant of fear, as agencies in the management and control of men, is gradually being eliminated from all your progressive governments, and the better methods of assent and co-operation are getting in their salutary work of emancipation. Knowledge is spreading itself among you—no longer a dessert only upon a few favored tables, but a chief dish under the newly acquired appetites of the many. The glamour of your wealth and the impressiveness of your religion are losing their reverential respect, with the focused light directed upon their doubtful origins. You have inaugurated the beginning of a new faith, with better spiritual foundations, not condemning the world and its society, but loving it, following in the footsteps of the divine presence within its limits, taking a hand in its affairs, and directing them towards the better possibilities in view.
Ah, my brother, the coming of your Messiah was both more and less than you have imagined. The era of new and better things in social development is preceded by the gradual decay of old convictions, which have served their time and are no longer useful, except in their place within the catalogue of traditions to mark the progress of thought.
Society assumes its beliefs under an impulse of progression, as much controlled by evolutionary laws as the organic substances of the Earth. No one can teach the world. With a free exercise of its intellectual faculty, it teaches itself. The power of an idea, among the moral forces, is in its corresponding with a proper stage of development to receive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral agent, without its already existing half-formed figments scattered about in society. Its power to move lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas and beliefs have been adopted at different stages of your civilization, and have served as great motors to progress, which, ages before, were enunciated without impression. Society rids itself of its rudimentary impressions and beliefs, in much the same manner that an animal, under changing environments, sheds its old organs and develops new ones. Every new belief affecting society is subservient to it, and is only adopted slowly and by degrees. If it be a truth making its way, its final installation is marked by an unquestioned acquiescence and an undisturbed tranquility. If an error, agitation and unrest mark the whole period of its accession.