half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our
horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus
destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means
that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his
presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of
his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life
authorize him to destroy it?
It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly
wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would
have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society
is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps,
and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into
respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is
squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste.
While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm's length, or
looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters
think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on
their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in
diamonds in a Washington court circle,--all of which I hope to see in
time condemned by a purer taste as _tawdry and offensive vulgarity_,
even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is.
"Twenty-four hours in the slums" (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York
_World_)--"just a night and a day--yet into them were crowded such
revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once
been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards." Such is life in
New York. What it is in "Darkest England," as portrayed by General
Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must
not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the
millionaire's metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a
breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs,
where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious
exaction of unfeeling landlords[10] worse than those against whom the
Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on
the consumptive's cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the
startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has
no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.
[10] Fifteen to forty per cent. is the usual profit exacted on
tenement-house property, according to witnesses before a
Senate Committee,--forty per cent. being common. Is not
this the plunder of poverty by wealth? Has Ireland anything
approaching this or resembling the horrid conditions in New
York? "All previous accounts and descriptions" (says
Ballington Booth) "became obliterated from my memory by the
surprise and horror I experienced when passing through some
of the foul haunts and vicious hotbeds which make up the
labyrinth of this modern Sodom." "How powerless" (said Mr.
Booth) "are lips to describe or pens to write scenes which
baffle description, and which no ink is black enough to
show in their true colors."
The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven
into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for
ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many
defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many
struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks
and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the
Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against
it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the
universities patronized by the wealthy.
New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which
is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule
"whatever is most costly is most fashionable." Nor is the cost the only
evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not
only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but
by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an
evening's lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng,
almost within hearing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city
in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the _utterly destitute_
every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of
humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday.
Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the nature of
CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked to read in parallel
columns the crushing agonies of famine and pestilence, and the costly
revels of aristocracy, or the millions wasted on royal families, that
manifest about as much concern for the suffering million as a farmer
feels for the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is surprised
or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for poverty, famine, and
pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda could offer a pearly and jewelled
carpet, ten feet by six, costing a million of dollars, as a present to
the woman who had pleased his fancy.[11] How many lives and how much of
agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents pays for a
day's labor? Twenty million days' labor is a small matter to a petty
prince.
[11] This love of ostentation has much to do with the
degradation of India. The silver money which should be in
circulation is hoarded up or used for silver ornaments. A
wedding in that country is not marked by proper preparation
for the duties and expenses of conjugal life, but by a
display of jewelry and silver. A thousand rupees' worth
must be furnished by the bride, and two thousand by the
bridegroom, if they are able to raise so much, and
sometimes they raise it by going in debt beyond their
ability to pay. This love of ostentation marks an inferior
type of human development.
CRIMINAL OSTENTATION stands ever in the way of man's progress to a
higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the
recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a
greater mastery of nature's forces, and thus emancipate the race from
poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of
the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a
Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to
uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make
a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which
might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England's _three
millions_ of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.[12]
[12] These suggestions are not offered in a hostile spirit. The
writer fully realizes the large amount of moral sentiment
and fervent piety assembled in the Church to uplift society
in this country, but he deeply regrets that it is not more
enlightened in ethics and in doctrine, and that the Church
has never got rid of its ancient taint, mentioned by the
Apostle James, that the brethren paid more respect to the
man with a gold ring than a man in cheap clothing.
The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their thoughts, and the
grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the
mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that
ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished
scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone.
How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the
Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "If the governments of the world would spend on
scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men,
or rather in making preparation for killing men and then not doing it,
the secrets of the earth would be laid bare in a time inordinately
short." But this very warlike ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL
OSTENTATION, like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt--the
desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the
field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the
leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the
antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on the
road to insanity.
The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this country to public
life, as was scandalously displayed in the twenty million State House
job at Albany (which our arithmetic makes equivalent to twenty thousand
lives) and renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive[13]
(except in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it arrested by
the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and a hundred thousand
dollar tomb for an individual eminent only by wealth is but a
fashionable matter of course to-day. Against this my moral sense
revolts. Had I the wealth of Croesus, or the power of Napoleon, I could
not consent to the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a
funeral and monument, was the effort to destroy as much as possible, and
take from the resources of benevolence that which might gladden a
thousand lives. To look back from the enlightened upper world upon such,
a monument of base selfishness, would be the hell of conscience; but a
simple rose or hawthorn over the couch of the abandoned form would
harmonize well with the sentiments of heaven.
[13] The salary that was sufficient for the commanding dignity
and ability of Washington is not sufficient for the
third-rate politician who occupies the White House to-day.
The numerous allowances which are added to his $50,000
salary raise it to $114,865. But why should he have any
salary at all? Would any man require the bribe of salary to
induce him to accept the Presidency? The honor of the
office would be more than sufficient pay for the third-rate
men that are accidentally chosen to a far higher rank than
nature gave them. We have too many ideas and fashions
inherited from old-world kingdoms, and the ridiculous rules
and etiquette of precedence and punctilio are as carefully
enforced in the court circle of Washington as in the old
world which still rules our fashions. But far worse than
they, we have the criminal ostentation of a funeral for a
Congressman, costing from fifty to a hundred thousand
dollars, which is simply an unconstitutional and shameful
robbery of the people to imitate the style of royalty.
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.