Chapter 10

What is it but a matter of course, and fashionably proper for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But _has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him_?[14] Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and _we cannot ignore it_ or disregard it. Has any human being a right to look on at human suffering, and turn away contemptuously? to see men drowning and refuse to throw them the plank which lies conveniently by? to pass by the chamber of dying, with loud, unseemly revels? to titter and laugh alongside of the grave where an unrecognized brother is being buried? to feast upon costly wines and far-fetched elaborate viands at tables overloaded with fresh flowers and artistic gold, while the pallid faces of a hundred hungry ones are looking on, and who are not even recognized so much as the dog that receives a bone? To know that the city is attacked by a powerful army and refuse either to enlist for its defence, or to contribute means to help the defenders, would not be tolerated; but to do such things is precisely what selfish and unfeeling wealth demands, and what the aroused conscience of humanity will, ere long, forbid. It refuses to establish the industrial and moral education for all which would protect society from the invading forces of pauperism, crime, and pestilence. It refuses to suspend its costly royal revels until the voices of hunger and despair are silenced. It refuses to moderate its giddy round of fashionable frivolity and ostentation in the very presence of death, in the tenements where human life is reduced to less than half its normal length, so that death and revelry confront each other in the city.

[14] The writer once started a society upon this principle, to be called the BROTHERHOOD OF JUSTICE. Its principle was the abnegation of selfishness by strictly limiting the expenditure of every member to the amount really necessary to his comfort, dedicating the rest to humanity. It did not appear difficult to gather members, and an able apostle of this principle would be a world's benefactor.

I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the millionaire, we do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save the drowning; we do not even require you to be a manly man and bestir yourself before a life is lost; but we do say that the drowning man shall not be doomed to drown by your indifference? but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him, or a plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used, even if you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You have no vested rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth. It can order you in times of danger to all to place your body for the protection of the city in the path of the cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your life for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members to be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave your piles of hoarded gold and silver to accumulate as a magazine of corruption and danger to society? No, Mr. Millionaire, poverty, pestilence, and crime, are making war upon society and tumbling their slaughtered thousands into Potter's Fields. And if the commonwealth does not demand your personal service, but simply demands that you shall not make perpetual for the sake of ostentation all of the present unnatural inequality, you are surely treated justly and kindly.

When the planter objected to General Jackson's using his cotton bales as a rampart for the defence of New Orleans, tradition says the General ordered him to take a musket and stand behind them as a common soldier. At present we ask only your _superfluous_ cotton bales, and it would not be wise for you to oppose our demand. The people remember the unholy distinction of classes thirty years ago, which enabled a favored few patricians to flourish as vampires on the commonwealth, while the plebeians were giving it their sufferings, their blood, and their lives, and hence they seek justice through our enormous system of pensions.

Patricians would retain commanding superiority of wealth for power and ostentation, but the people object to this power and scorn the ostentation.

The immense concentration of wealth by syndicates, corporations, and trusts alarms us all, because we see in it a formidable danger to the republic.[15] Colonel Higginson admits the evil, but denies that any method of counteracting it is known, yet it may easily be shown that we have several effective methods.

[15] It is not only in the strong language of many political meetings, conventions, and the independent press, that this danger is recognized, but in that wealthy and conservative body, the United States Senate, it is distinctly recognized and frequently expressed; the language of Senators Ingalls, Stewart, Call, Gorman, Vest, Berry, and others, shows that they are alarmed and would warn their colleagues.

Senator Call, of Florida, said:--"It is well for the people to form some idea of the extent to which the powers of the government are becoming subject to the control of a very small number of people, and the extent to which these powers are becoming absolute, despotic, monarchical, almost as much so as the Czar of Russia.

"The present system places the control of the wealth of this country in the hands of a very small number of persons, an almost infinitesimal portion of the people; gives them money to buy those who represent the people."

Senator Berry said:--"So much injustice has been done to the people, so many wrongs have been perpetrated in the interests of wealth and capital by the passage of unjust laws, that the people are in open revolt to-day, and they have a right to be; they have determined to have relief, and they are entitled to it."

Senator Stewart said:--"If there is no reason nor humanity in the possessors of accumulated capital there is power in revolution."

Senator Gorman, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said:--"We stand to-day, Mr. President, upon a financial volcano. The labor of the country appeals through every channel it can to this administration and this Congress to stay the awful wreck that is threatened."

The eloquent address of Senator Ingalls presented still more forcibly and fully the evils of plutocracy, which is "threatening the safety if it does not endanger the existence of the republic," by "the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital." "The conscience of the nation is shocked at the injustice of modern society. The moral sentiment of mankind has been aroused at the unequal distribution of wealth, at the unequal diffusion of the burdens, the benefits, and the privileges of society." "At this time there are many scores of men, of estates, and of corporations, in this country, whose annual income exceeds, and there has been one man whose monthly revenue since that period exceeds the entire accumulations of the wealthiest citizen of the United States at the end of the last century." "By some means, some device, some machination, some incantation, honest or otherwise, some process that cannot be defined, less than a two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession and have kept out of the penitentiary, in spite of the means they have adopted to acquire it, of more than one half of the entire accumulated wealth of the country. That is not the worst, Mr. President. It has been chiefly acquired by men who have contributed little to the material welfare of the country, and by processes that I do not care in appropriate terms to describe." "The people of this country are generous and just, they are jealous also, and when discontent changes to resentment, and resentment passes into exasperation, one volume of a nation's history is closed and another will be opened."

This feeling of resentment must arise in a community which is deeply in debt, and is not prospering. The last census shows in Iowa a mortgage indebtedness equivalent to over five hundred dollars upon every head of a family.

Our wealthiest are beginning to have incomes of over $5,000,000 a year, and it is very plain from the concentration of this wealth that a few wealthy men who could easily form themselves into close and secret corporation, will in time outweigh the entire republic, as Mr. Shearman says that 250,000 families are already a three fourths financial majority.

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.

Our social system has the elements of decay already as conspicuous as in the tuberculous patient. Invention increases the power of wealth instead of increasing the resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses machinery and diminishes the relative value of the man by making him a machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from the independent shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his neighbors, to the mere tenth of a shoemaker who if dislodged from the factory is helpless. The independence of the hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing. Population is gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. At this moment a strike of 150,000 is threatened. But it is not merely the laboring classes, for all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive let loose and flying wildly over the railroad. If there were no other formidable danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself a fatality. When a thousand millions enter the field they enter as master, in the Standard Oil fashion. They can buy out or crush out, as they may choose, every competitor in the field they may seize. There is _not a single form of industry_ which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is established, demand what prices they please for that which they alone can supply. Can we imagine the conventional brother Jonathan held down by the throat with iron grip, and his pockets open to the holder, or will he rebel before the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how well it is fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire country. Ten years more will introduce the struggle. The struggle must come, for plutocracy is advancing to universal absorption, and labor is becoming defiant, and well it may, for the COMMONWEALTH represents _not money but man_, and when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the nation's wealth, assumes the practical government, the commonwealth with a firm hand will thrust it aside; but will it be a peaceful change, will the conquerors yield to the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its sleeping victims while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy, or anything going on but the natural legitimate and healthful development of trade; and the medical corporations called colleges in seizing a stern monopoly of the healing art, assure us that it is only for the benefit and protection of the dear people who have not sense enough to distinguish between a successful and an unsuccessful doctor, and have so unpardonable a partiality for those who cure them cheaply without college permission. There is nothing too small for monopoly to grasp, not even the cheap dispensing of established remedies from the druggist's counter.

It is a just and patriotic sentiment which looks with apprehension upon the great and irresponsible power developed by extreme wealth, which lifts the wealthy far above society, enabling them to indulge in profligate luxury, and to squander in a single evening's pleasure (or display without pleasure) an amount that would make life prosperous to a hundred suffering families, or on a single piece of architectural splendor, enough to complete the education of the entire youth of a city--wealth enabling them to rival the despots of Europe in social ostentation, while almost within hearing of their revelry, ten or twenty thousand are suffering from want of employment, want of health, want of education, want of industrial skill, which society did not give them, suffering the slow death that comes through debility, emaciation, and disease, from toil and poverty, the sufferer being sometimes a woman in whom all the virtues have blossomed only to perish in the chilling atmosphere of poverty.[16] This may be utterly senseless talk to those in whom the sentiment of brotherhood is dead, but it expresses sentiments to which millions respond, and it is refreshing to see that these statements, which at last have found free expression through THE ARENA, are also beginning to find a home in the minds of public leaders, whose voices will compel attention. I allude to the philanthropic expressions of the Emperor of Germany, and to the language of Mr. Gladstone, who shows that the necessity of philanthropic action on the part of the wealthy is increased by their changed attitude, as they are becoming more isolated from the people, and no longer take that friendly personal interest in their tenants and employes of every grade, which was formerly common. In this country, social ostentation is a great power to increase this separation of ranks, and the book of Jacob A. Riis, "How the Other Half Lives," ought to be studied by every wealthy citizen as well as by reformers. Herbert Spencer, in a recent thoughtful essay, refers to this increasing interest in social welfare thus: "He is struck, too, by the contrast between the small space which popular welfare then occupied in the public attention, and the large space it now occupies, with the result that outside and inside Parliament, plans to benefit the millions form the leading topics, and every one having means is expected to join in some philanthropic effort." This is because the millions demand it, and they who, like the writer, have for half a century been interested in behalf of the millions, may now be listened to.

[16] And society is still organized to ensure the perpetuation of this poverty, no matter what the bounties of nature, or what the increase of wealth by art and invention. The army of the dissatisfied, the hungry, and the demoralized, continually grows and becomes more dangerous. The President of the National Home Association at Washington stated a few months since that there were _sixty thousand boy tramps_ in the United States.

The enormous wealth developed in our republic, in which a single city holds a thousand millionaires, controls the press, controls legislation, and teaches the ambitious to sell themselves to the wealthy who are the controlling power. Under such influences arises that moral insensibility which, in New York, could squander twenty millions on one building, while half the children were out of school, and a large portion of the insane were left wallowing in indecent filth, worse than that of a hog pen, as shown in the Albany _Law Journal_.