POPULAR DISSATISFACTION
It is as logical that dissatisfaction should develop because of
inequality of results in “money making,” as it is that
inequality in results shall follow inequality of aptitude and
effort. This dissatisfaction has tended strongly to develop
socialistic thought and teaching.
A century and a quarter, during which representatives were chosen
because of actual or supposed aptitude, and retained in office during
long periods—frequently for life—when nearly every industry was
fostered, and none fathered, developed a people, the best paid, the
best fed, the best clothed, the best housed, the best educated,
enjoying more of the comforts of life, far more of its luxuries,
enduring less hardships and privations, than any other in all history;
but it is an even guess if, at the same time, we did not become more
restless, discontented and unhappy.
We were not so much dissatisfied, however, with our own condition,
abstractly considered, as with our relative condition. The man with
rubber heels would have thought himself favored had he not seen someone
with a bicycle, and the man with a bicycle was contented until his
friend got a motorcycle. The man with a motorcycle thought he had the
best the world afforded until he saw an automobile and the man in the
automobile was happy until his neighbor got a yacht. “All this availeth
me nothing so long as I see Mordecai, the Jew, sitting at the king’s
gate.”
I have lived some years in this blessed land and the only criticism I
have ever heard, either of our form of government or our policy, is the
fact that some men have got rich.
I made this statement in a public speech some months ago and asked who
had heard any other. A man answered: “Some people have got poor.” I
admitted that I had known a number of fellows whose fathers had left
them money and who had got poor, but I told the audience that most of
the poor men whom I had known had simply remained poor. I asked my
critic if he had ever fattened cattle. He admitted he had not. Then I
assured him that he would seldom see a steer getting poor in a feed
yard where others were doing well and most were getting fat, but he
would frequently see one that remained poor, notwithstanding his
environments.
Two men were standing by the side of the New York Central Railroad. One
said to the other: “My, see this track of empire! Four tracks, great
Mogul engines taking two thousand tons of freight at a load, passenger
trains making sixty miles an hour. There comes the express!” As the
train passed a cinder lit in the eye of the enthusiast, when
immediately he denounced the road, cursed the management and swore at
all four tracks.
In a country like ours, where conditions have been superb, resources
matchless and resourcefulness unequalled, none should be surprised at
the speed we have developed and no one ought to use language unfit to
print simply because there are cinders in the air. Admittedly there
are. We have all had them in our eyes. They are more than annoying, but
the only way to prevent cinders is to tear up the tracks. And it is
simply surprising the number of good people who are trying to make the
world a paradise through a policy of destruction.
Socialists, near-socialists, bolsheviki, anarchists, I. W. W.’s,
non-partisan leaguers, single taxers, and all the infernal bunch of
disturbers and propagandists of class hatred, unintentionally led and
reinforced by a large percent of the teachers of political economy and
sociology in our colleges and universities, seem bent upon nothing less
than a revolution in both our form of government and our policy of
government. Unless something be speedily done to counteract there
surely will be precipitated in America what France experienced, and
what Russia is now suffering.
WHILE STATESMEN SLEEP THE EVIL ONE SOWS TARES
In the winter of 1898 I attended a much advertised lecture by George D.
Herron, then Professor of Applied Christianity in one of the largest
colleges west of the Mississippi. The lecture was given in the largest
church of Des Moines, on a Sunday evening, and most of the other
churches adjourned their services that they might hear this “remarkable
man.” Several of the leading pastors occupied the pulpit with him and
the pastor of the second largest church in the city introduced the
lecturer, I remember, as “a Man with a Mission.” He spoke at length and
his utterances were applauded by a good percent of the congregation,
and by several of the pastors. Of course the vile life he was living,
and the viler social belief which he then and now entertains, were
unknown, but his far more dangerous teachings were well known to all
and approved by many. The burden of his “mission” was denunciation of
what he called the “Divine Right of Property,” which he compared to the
“Divine Right of Kings” and predicted that as the latter had been
overthrown by revolution, the former must be. It was indeed a “theory
pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence and laid by
against a day of reckoning.” I speak of this not to criticise the good
people who approved his utterances, many of whom did not comprehend
what was involved, but to show the prevalence of bolshevist teachings
twenty years ago. Unless he has changed he should prove very
satisfactory to the bolshevists of Russia, where at this writing he is
supposed to be at the request of the President.
Quite recently the professor of political economy in one of the
state universities of the Middle West, in the course of his daily
denunciations of the policy of internal improvement as pursued by this
government, and his condemnations of wealth and the possessors thereof,
referred to the grant of land to the Northern Pacific Railroad and
characterized it as a “gigantic steal.” A member of his class who had
had rare privileges interrupted to ask: “If the lands in this grant
were so valuable how do you explain the fact that Jay Cooke, after
financing the Civil War, went broke in selling Northern Pacific
Railroad Bonds, secured by both the road and the lands, at 85 per cent
of par?” The professor inquired where the young man had obtained his
information and was told: “From the memoirs of Jay Cooke.” “Well,” said
the professor, “that is a subject to be considered.” But the next day
he continued sowing seeds of anarchy.
During the winter of 1916 I listened to a lecture by a man of
international reputation before the students of one of our very large
eastern universities. Early in his tirade, improperly called lecture,
he informed the students that there were two ways to make money—“one
to earn it and the other to steal it.” He told them that when they
worked on the street railway they earned their money, but when the
company charged five cents for a ride, it stole its money. The students
applauded. Later he told them that if they wanted to go to Boston over
the New Haven Railroad, and all the workmen should die or strike, they
would get no farther than they could walk; but if all the stockholders
and bond owners were to die, they “might thank God for the dispensation
but they would get to Boston just the same.” The students applauded. He
closed in this language: “They talk about preparedness, and well they
may, for if these conditions continue, preparedness will be necessary
against the internal uprising that is certain to follow.” The students
again applauded.
If there has been any systematic effort made to suppress, nullify or
destroy bolshevistic teachings, not always as bold but of the same
character, with which nearly every college and university is daily
deluged, both from chair and rostrum, I will be glad to know when and
where the counteracting forces have been applied. Many men of wealth
have thought they were advancing the interest of their country and
humanity generally by endowing colleges and universities. We have made
education a fetich and have assumed that all education is alike good.
It would be far better for America to have its youth poisoned with
strychnine than with bolshevism. Poison administered through the
stomach is not contagious, but what has been lodged in the brain at
these hotbeds of socialism spreads, and when it breaks in epidemic no
army can effect a quarantine.