“The rich man’s joys increase the poor’s decay.”
“Forty-five years ago, doctor,” said Professor John Thornton to his
friend, Dr. Eustace, “do you remember that, as barefooted boys, we
fished for pickerel together in this very pond, and from this very
spot?”
“And caught more fish with our bamboo poles and angleworm bait than we
appear likely to capture to-day with this fancy tackle,” remarked the
doctor.
“Everything about this lovely little lake seems unchanged,” resumed the
professor, “but elsewhere the great world has indeed rolled on. Then
there were less than one hundred millionaires in this republic—now,
doctor, there are more than eight thousand.”
“And then,” said the doctor, “we came here in a rickety old stage wagon,
and we were ten hours in making the same journey which to-day we
achieved in an hour while seated in a parlor car. Then the telegraph was
in its infancy, the electric light was unknown, the great manufacturing
cities were unconstructed, the petroleum of Pennsylvania and the gold of
California and Australia were undiscovered, the great Western railroad
lines were unbuilt, and the web of complex industries with which the
land is now laced was unspun. The victim of a raging tooth or a crushed
limb was compelled to suffer without relief from chloroform or ether,
and it was a crime punishable with social ostracism to question the
righteousness of human slavery, the curative virtues of calomel, or the
beneficence of infant damnation. I never could think, John, that the
good old times, whose loss you are always bemoaning, were nearly so
comfortable times to live in as those amid which we now dwell.”
“Dr. Eustace,” said the professor, “you attach undue importance to a few
physical comforts and conveniences. If our fathers lacked the advantages
of our later civilization, they were also without its vices. In the good
old times which you deride, wrecking railroads, stealing railroads, and
watering stocks were unknown. Senatorships and subsidies were not
procured by bribery; the legislator who sold his vote made arrangements
to leave the country, and bank burglars and bank defaulters kept, in the
public estimation, the lock step of fellow-criminals.”
“And what, in your opinion was the cause of our descent from this high
estate of public virtue and whale-oil lamps?”
“The main cause, Dr., of the corruption of the human race
everywhere,—gold. It was the gold of California that revolutionized the
finances, the business methods, and the morals of the nation. After the
year 1849 the advance of values, the aggregation of wealth, the increase
of population, and the magical growth of the West, made additional
facilities for inland travel and transportation a necessity. This
necessity caused the rapid construction of new lines of railroad. The
differences and difficulties of local management suggested the
advantages of consolidation—and then the reign of the centripetal forces
commenced.”
“But all the millionaires of the country are not railroad men, John.”
“Concentration of capital began with them, doctor, and their example was
soon followed by others. The Civil War broke down local prejudices, made
East and West homogeneous, introduced communities to each other on the
battle-field, obliterated State lines, and made individual effort in
business, in finance, in manufactures, and even in politics, less
advantageous to the individual than participation in aggregated effort,
where his gains were increased, though his personality was submerged.”
“I have always thought that our civil war was a moral education to this
people and to the world,” remarked the doctor.
“War was an educator,” conceded the professor, “yet the tree of
knowledge with its crimson leaves yielded evil fruit as well as good.
The moral nature of the American people has, I fear, reacted from the
tension of generous and patriotic sacrifice which war evolved. Some of
the very men who helped to strike shackles from black slaves have been
busy ever since forging other shackles for white slaves, and in
twenty-five years from the days when we freely paid lives and treasure
to preserve the existence of the nation, and free it from the wrong of
slavery and the rule of a slave-holding oligarchy, we have passed under
the sway of other despots, more selfish, more sordid, more relentless,
and more rapacious of dominion. The dusk-browed tyrant of Egypt has been
overthrown, but in his place Plutus reigns.”
“I grant you,” interposed Dr. Eustace, “that the wealth owners are the
rulers of our later civilization, but, so far as I have observed,
instead of endeavoring to curb or overthrow them, we are all doing our
best to join their ranks and participate in their power. You appear to
be the only living millionaire who declaims against his class. I know of
no other man who is brave enough to defy the power of money, great
enough to ignore it, or strong enough to resist its influence, and I
dare say you would change your views if you were to lose your millions.
We all defer to the plutocrats. The Spanish nobleman who, for his
ancestor’s services, was permitted to remain with his head covered in
the presence of his sovereign, would have been sure to take off his hat
if he had entered the office of the president of a country bank, with a
view of negotiating a small loan on doubtful security. There was a great
truth inadvertently given to the world in the programme of a Fourth of
July procession, wherein it was announced that the line would end with
bankers in carriages, followed by citizens on foot.”
“This subservience to King Gold, and pursuit of his favors, must cease,
Dr. Eustace, or this republic will be lost. The people must be taught to
assume a more independent and manly attitude toward the owners of
money.”
“Ah, John, money is so necessary, and it is so hard to turn one’s back
upon it! This way lies comfort, ease, luxury—that way deprivation and
sacrifice. This way ‘the primrose path of dalliance trends’—that way
‘the steep and thorny road.’ This way the wife and children beckon and
sue for safety and peace—that way only rocks, and bruises, and hunger,
and loneliness summon. What wonder that the Christ, voicing the cry of
the human to the infinite Father, placed as the central thought of the
Lord’s prayer the words, ‘Lead us not into temptation’! But, John,
honestly now, do you think the eight thousand millionaires you rave
about are such an utterly bad lot as you make them out to be?”
“Individually I dare say they are good husbands, fathers, and
neighbors,” replied the professor, “but they conceal their selfishness
and rapacity, and exercise their despotism from behind the shields of
corporations which they create and govern, and tyranny is none the less
tyranny because it is decreed not by kings, but by entities which fear
neither the assassination of man nor the judgment of God.”
“Professor, pardon me, but you generalize a good deal, and I fear
somewhat loosely. It would make a difference to me, in my feelings, at
least, whether I was knocked down by a ruffian, or by an electrical
machine.”
“Doctor, your simile was not considered as carefully as are your
prescriptions. If the machine be guided by the ruffian, what matters it
whether you be struck by his hand, or with an electric current directed
by his hand? If our great newspapers, which are influential, which claim
to be independent, and which ought to be free, are restrained from
publishing articles advocating postal telegraphy, or criticising the
management of a news corporation, what matters it that the freedom of
the press is choked by a board of directors rather than a government
censor? If the citizen dare not give voice to his views on public
affairs, what matters it whether his utterances be choked by the
knuckles of a king, or the polite menaces of an employer? If the voter
cast his ballot against his own convictions, and in accordance with the
will of another, what matters it whether he be coerced by a soldier with
a musket or a station agent with a freight bill? If the settler lose his
land, what matter whether the despoiler be a personal bandit armed with
a rifle, or a corporate robber equipped with a land-office decision? If
capital exempt itself from taxation, and place the burden of sustaining
government upon the broad back of labor, will it alleviate the pain of
the load to know that it is not the law of feudal vassalage but of
modern politics which accomplishes the exaction?
“Hallo! I have a bite! Ah! ha! my boy, your eagerness to swallow that
minnow has brought you to grief!”
And the speaker lifted a twenty-ounce pickerel from the placid waters of
Nine Mile Pond, and deposited it, struggling and shining, upon the green
turf at his feet.
“Well, John,” inquired the doctor, “what are you going to do about it
all?”
“We will have him split down the back and broiled for luncheon,” replied
the professor absently.
“Broil who?” queried the doctor, “Jay Gould?”
“Eh? No; the pickerel I mean, though I am not sure that similar
treatment might not be accorded to Gould, with advantage to the
country.”
“You ask,” continued the professor, “what shall be done about it all?
The wealth owners themselves should be able to see that existing
conditions must sooner or later find cessation either in relief or in
revolution. Monopolies in transportation, intelligence, land, light,
fuel, water, and food—all concealed in the impersonality of private
corporations—now sit like vampires upon the body of American labor, and
suck its life blood, and they have grown so bold and so rapacious that
they even neglect to fan their victims to continued slumber.”
“Why, John, you seem to have an attack of anticorporation rabies. You
talk like a sand-lot politician who is trying to sell out to a railroad
company. What is the matter with you? What have these much berated
entities done?” said the doctor.
“Done?” replied Professor Thornton. “What have they not done? They have
torn the bandages from the eyes of American justice and fastened false
weights upon her scales. They have turned our legislative halls into
shambles where men are bought and honor is butchered. They have written
the word ‘lie’ across the Declaration of our fathers. They have struck
the genius of American liberty in her fair mouth, until, with face
suffused with the blushes and bedewed with the hot tears of shame, she
turns piteously to her children to hide if they cannot defend her.”
“John Thornton,” ejaculated the doctor, “your remarks would be admirable
in substance and style for an address before some gathering of work
shirkers, organized to procure lessened hours of labor and larger
schooners of beer, but to me you are talking what our transatlantic
cousins call ‘beastly rot.’ I deny that a majority, or even any
considerable number, of the capitalists of this country are dishonest,
or unpatriotic, or indifferent to the rights and needs of their
fellow-men.”
“I have not said that they were, doctor,” replied the professor.
“Indeed, if such were the case, we might cry in despair, ‘God save the
commonwealth!’ for only Omniscience could work its salvation. What I
claim is that it is full time for the conscientious millionaires who
love their country and their kind, to seriously consider a situation the
perils of which they are every day augmenting by their indifference.”
“What perils do you mean, professor? How, for instance, would anybody be
hurt or periled if I were to become a millionaire?”
“A great fortune is a great power, doctor, and not every man is fit to
be intrusted with great power. To-day no second-class power in Europe
can negotiate a treaty or make even a defensive war without the consent
of the Rothschilds, while in America the owner of fifty millions is more
powerful than the president of the United States, and the owner of ten
millions more influential than the governor of a State.
“And so he ought to be,” interposed the doctor. “The man who can by fair
means make $10,000,000 is more useful to the community in which he lives
than a dozen governors of States.”
“But look at the danger to the people, doctor, of these great fortunes.
There are ten men in the United States whose aggregate wealth amounts to
$500,000,000, and who represent, and control, and wield the influence of
property amounting to $3,000,000,000. If these men should choose to
settle their rivalries and combine their interests and efforts, they
could about fix the prices of every acre of land, every barrel of flour,
every ton of coal, and every day’s wages of labor between Bangor and San
Francisco. They could name every senator, governor, judge, congressman,
and legislator in twenty States. They could rule a greater empire than
any possessed by crowned kings. They could promulgate ukases more
absolute, more despotic, and more certain of being enforced, than any
which ever went forth from St. Petersburg to carry desolation to a race.
They could say to the laborer in the grain-fields, ‘Henceforth you shall
be reduced to the condition of your brother in England or Scotland, and
eat meat but once a week.’ They could say to the toiler in the humming
factory or over the red forge, ‘Henceforth you must toil twelve hours in
each twenty-four.’ They could say to every wageworker in the land,
‘Henceforth we will take all the results of your labor, and give you
only the slave’s share—existence and subsistence.’”
“All you need, Professor John Thornton,” said Dr. Eustace, “is a long
beard, a woman with green goggles and a tamborine, a fat boy with a
snare drum, and a pair of bellows in your chest, to be a Salvation Army
seeking recruits for the church of Anarch. You know just as well as I do
that you are talking nonsense, and that the capitalists of our country
would be neither so inhuman nor so unwise as to push their power as you
indicate.”
“Maybe not, doctor, maybe not, but their ability to so use their power
if they choose is a menace to a free people, and a standing inducement
to disorder, and unless the plutocrats cease their aggressions the
people may invoke the motto, ‘_Salva republica suprema lex_,’ and tax
all great fortunes out of existence.”
“What aggressions do you refer to, professor? For the life of me I
cannot see that this country or this people have any just cause of
complaint. The census returns of 1890 show that in the preceding ten
years there was added to our national wealth, values amounting to nearly
$20,000,000,000.”
“The census returns tell only a part of the story, doctor. The cottages
of the land will tell you that while as a nation we may have grown of
late years very rich and prosperous, yet among the individuals composing
the nation its wealth is possessed and its prosperity enjoyed within a
very narrow circle. The value of all the property in the United States
in the year 1890 was $66,000,000,000. Do you know that $40,000,000,000,
or sixty per cent of the wealth of America, is owned by less than forty
thousand people? Do you know that in the last twenty years the laborers
of the United States have added to the general wealth of the nation,
values amounting to $30,000,000,000?”
“Well, what is there to complain of in that fact?” questioned the
doctor.
“The complaint is that the money has not been divided among the ten
million workers who earned it. The complaint is that it has not
furnished each of ten million households with a $3,000-shield against
the assaults of poverty. The complaint is that as fast as created it has
been seized by the centripetal tendency which now dominates our
civilization and hurried into the strong boxes of ten thousand
Past-Masters of the art of accumulating the earnings of other people.”
“The complete answer, professor, to your diatribe is that the
accumulations of which you speak are not the earnings of other people.
The greater portion of this wealth has been developed from the bounty of
nature in ways which could not have been pursued without large
combinations of capital.”
“That is a mere assumption, doctor.”
“Not at all, professor. The money taken from gold, silver, copper, lead,
iron, and coal mines, has come from the treasure vaults of nature, and
has not been filched from the earnings of anybody.”
“Mining is the one exception to the rule, doctor.”
“I beg your pardon, professor, but it is not. Another avenue to wealth
has been the organization and reorganization of great industries on
unwasteful and remunerative principles. For instance, the beef and pork
packing establishments of the West supply the retail butchers of the
land with meat at a less price than is paid for the live cattle.”
“Where, then, doctor, do these philanthropists of whom you speak make
their money?”
“They make it, professor, by scientific utilization of the hoofs and
horns, bones and blood, which in small butcher shops are necessarily
wasted.”
“You believe, then, in the rightfulness of monopolies and trusts, do
you, doctor?”
“John, there are no monopolies. No restrictions are placed by law on any
man who chooses to embark in any reputable business. As for the
much-abused ‘trusts,’ they have all resulted in higher wages and more
constant employment to the workman, and lower prices and better goods to
the consumer. I suppose you will not claim that the capitalists alone
are responsible for all the crime and pauperism of the land?”
“No,” replied the professor, “for the ignorant and vicious poor play
into the hands of the selfish and vicious rich, and between the two the
honest and industrious body of the people is being ground as between the
upper and nether millstone. Indeed, I do not know which is the greater
curse to the country, the stock thieves, whose dens are under the shadow
of Trinity Church spire, and who combine to corrupt courts, juries, and
legislators, or the dynamiters and anarchists who would involve the
innocent and the guilty in one common wreck of social order. I hope I am
no senseless alarmist, Dr. Eustace, but I am sure we must have relief,
or there will be national ruin.”
“From what source, professor, do you expect relief to come?” inquired
the doctor.
“Frankly, I don’t know,” was the reply.
“Maybe your next National Convention will relieve the situation,”
insinuated the doctor, slyly.
“I am sure that relief will not come,” said the professor, “from
existing political parties, whose orators grow earnest and belligerent
over the ghosts of dead issues, and travel around and around over the
same path, like an old horse on an arrastra, forever going somewhere and
never getting anywhere, neither knowing or caring whether he is grinding
pay rock or waste rock, conscious only of the whip of his driver, and
hopeful only of his allowance of barley.”
“Why, John, I thought you were a devoted partisan,” said the doctor.
“Did you?” was the retort. “Well, you were mistaken. What can be hoped
from political parties when legislators who are not free from suspicion
of venality are voted for and elected year after year, because Grant
captured Vicksburg, or Lincoln issued a proclamation of emancipation, or
Stonewall Jackson was killed more than twenty-five years ago? Must the
people forever submit to the rule of brawlers, and vote sellers, and
trust betrayers, because such men hurrah for some flag which other men
once carried into battle? Must the masses lie down in the path of
Juggernaut and invite him to crush them, because the evil-visaged god
parades his devotion to party issues which were long ago remitted to the
limbo of things lost on earth?”
“The people will right all the evils of which you complain, professor,
so soon as they see that it is to their interest to do so.”
“How can they doubt that it is their interest to right them? It is they
who suffer both in purse and pride for every unjust exaction and every
dishonest evasion. The poorest do not escape the consequences; it all
comes out of their toil in the end. It depletes their pockets in a
hundred unobserved ways. They pay for it in enhanced taxation of their
homes, in the fuel which cooks their food, in a greater cost of the
necessaries of life, in a higher rent, in the nails which hold their
houses together, and in the increased cost of the blows of the hammer
which drives them. I do not need to tell you, doctor, that labor must
bear the burdens of the State. Labor at last pays all and capital pays
nothing—all burdens of government, all expenses of courts and juries,
and prisons and police, all cost of armies and navies. The diamonds
which glitter upon the shirt front of the purchased legislator, the wine
which hisses down the throat of the lobbyist, the steel doors and locks
which guard watered stock and stolen bonds, the very powder and bullets
which shoot out the life of maddened and insurgent labor, are all paid
for out of the toil of the laborer.”
“While there is much truth in what you say, professor,” observed the
doctor, “yet where is the immediate necessity for you to work yourself
into such a state of mind about it?”
“Your remark, doctor, is a representative one,” replied Professor
Thornton, “and the general indifference which it expresses is the most
discouraging feature of the existing situation. Like the villagers who
cultivate their vineyards at the base of Vesuvius, we heed not the
rumblings of the volcano. Like the citizens long resident in Cologne, we
scent the tainted air without discomfort. We cry with the French king,
‘After us the deluge,’ and we seem to care very little what may happen
so long as it shall not happen to us.”
“There is the mate to your pickerel,” said the doctor, as he landed a
fish upon the grass at his feet. “Two of the millionaires of Nine Mile
Pond have succumbed to their own greed and the patience and cunning of
intelligent labor.”
“Many of our millionaires,” resumed the professor, not to be driven from
his theme, “and some of the most active and powerful of them all, are as
selfish, as rapacious, as arrogant, as ignorant, as corrupt, and as
despotic as Russian Boyars or Turkish Bashans. At the same time they are
unaware of their danger, are utterly obtuse to their social and moral
responsibilities, and conceited with the invulnerable conceit of
self-made men. They do not seem to recognize that they are unprotected
by an army, or a strong government, or spies, or the machinery of
despotism, or any traditions or practices of rule, and they appear to
take no thought of the infinite possibilities of disaster which line the
path of every to-morrow.”
“You really fear, then, the fulfillment of Macauley’s prophecy,
professor?”
“What thoughtful man does not? There is in every large city of our land
a multitude unindustrious, unfrugal of life, uncurbed of spirit,
undisciplined, uneducated, fretful of small gains, accustomed to freedom
of speech and action, jealous of anything which looks like oppression or
class rule, unaccustomed to restrictions of any kind, irrreligious,
materialistic, discontented, idle, envious, and often drunken.”
“In brief, a powder magazine,” said the doctor. “Great cities have
always presented the same problem to rulers, yet civilization lives,
nevertheless.”
“Because,” rejoined the professor, “in monarchial Europe the magazine is
guarded by trained armies and watchful sentinels, while in our country
it is left open and unguarded, and anarchists with lighted torches pass
to and fro. In Europe the train of government is built of
carefully-selected materials, it is officered by experienced engineers,
and at every station the testing hammer rings against the wheels. Here
we put in any piece of crystallized iron for wheel or axle, and give the
control of the engine to any loud-voiced braggart who can climb into the
cab, or any ambitious dotard who chooses to hire the tricksters of the
caucus to hoist him there. Then we throw the brakes off, the
throttle-valves open, and go screaming down the grade.”
“And how do you propose, John, to avoid a smash-up?” queried the doctor.
“We shall have passed the danger point,” replied the professor, “and
entered upon an era of safer and better life for the republic, only when
the great millionaires of America shall elect to consider themselves not
merely as conquerers on the field of finance, entitled to the spoils of
victory, but as trustees for humanity, as suns whose mission it is to
draw the waters of affluence from overflowing lake and stream, not to
hold those waters above the earth forever, but to distribute them in
bounteous and fertilizing showers.”
“And do you suppose, John Thornton, that the people would either
appreciate or respond to such seraphic unselfishness on the part of your
regenerated and beatified millionaires?
“Dr. Eustace, let me tell you that when the great, industrious,
intelligent, patriotic body of workers shall be made to feel that there
is no necessary conflict between labor and capital, —when they shall be
made to know that any considerable number of our millionaires are
seeking further wealth not merely to add to their personal luxury and
power, but in order that labor may be helped in turn to higher planes of
life, when it can be said truthfully—
“‘Then none was for a party,
Then all were for the State;
Then the great man helped the poor
And the poor man loved the great’—
In that day professional labor agitators will lose their vocations, the
workingman who never works will be without influence among his fellows,
and the brotherhoods of beer and brawling which infest the purlieus of
our larger cities, and clamor for bread or blood—meaning always somebody
else’s bread or somebody else’s blood—will find occasion to disband. I
do not despair of relief, I know that it must come. Whether it shall
come through ‘a preserving or a destroying revolution,’ whether it shall
come in wrath or in peace, is a question which the capitalists of this
country must answer and answer speedily.”
“John, you dear old dreamer,” said the doctor, “I know of one
millionaire whose gold has not corroded his humanity. I hope there are
many such, but I fear that if the world looks to its wealth owners to
lead it in a crusade of unselfishness, it will wait a long, long time.
But I do not diagnose the disease as you do. You resemble a boy who has
stubbed his toe. To him there is no world and hardly any boy outside of
that sore toe. Yet if the cure be left to nature, in time the pain will
abate and the toe recover. I do not believe that any law framed by man
can make a pound of flour out of half a pound of wheat, or that any
scheme of government can equalize the inevitable inequalities of human
life.”
“Then you do not believe in the wisdom and beneficence of compelling the
rapacious rich to aid the deserving poor?”
“No; I believe in the wisdom and beneficence of exact justice. I believe
that the skillful and rapid bricklayer is entitled to higher wages and
greater opportunities of employment than his stupid and slothful
associate, and that to deny the former his rightful advantage is an
outrage upon justice, whether such outrage be perpetrated by an employer
or a trades union. I believe that every man is fairly entitled to all
the fruits of his labor, his skill, his good judgment, and his good
luck. The pickerel at your feet came by chance to your hook and not
mine, and therefore it is your fish and not my fish.”
“But by the law of nature, doctor, there is no difference between a
beggar and a king.”
“There is where you are wrong, professor. The law of nature is a
universal statute of equality of opportunity and inequality of result,
and man distorts her purposes and violates her statutes when he places
an unearned crown on the head of a king, or an unearned crust in the
mouth of a beggar.”
“Do you think, then, that man has no excuse for his shortcomings,
doctor?”
“He has many. He is controlled by the occult power of race
transmissions, by laws which he did not help to make, by customs which
he did not help to form, by organizations and environments beyond his
power to change or combat. But because of these he should have no
license to plunder his wealthier neighbor, for, in this republic, it is
within the power of the people to change laws, and alter customs, and
secure to every man the result of his own toil and skill—and that is all
any man is entitled to.”
“But the wealth owners, doctor, have monopolized nearly all the
resources of nature.”
“Nonsense. There is not a hungry idler in the purlieus of New York City
but might catch fish enough at the nearest wharf to keep him from
starvation, or find within a day’s walk a piece of land he could
cultivate on ‘shares.’ The resources of nature are inexhaustible. If
every adult male in the land were to build for himself a marble palace,
there would be no perceptible diminution in nature’s supply of marble.
If every farmer were to devote his energies and his acres to the
production of wheat, until enough wheat should have been harvested to
feed the world for five years, yet the capacity of soil and sun, water
and air to produce more wheat would be neither exhausted nor impaired.
For thousands of years the men of every civilization have been hewing
forests, and smelting iron, yet the forests which are untouched and the
mines which are unopened are practically limitless.”
“Doctor, a man cannot stir the earth without a spade, or cut down a tree
without an ax, or mine iron ore without a pick, and the owners of the
spades, and picks, and axes, exact from the laborer an undue share of
his labor for their use.”
“Who is to determine whether the share exacted be an undue one? My own
opinion is that the laborer’s share of results has grown larger, and the
capitalist’s share smaller, during the last twenty years. At least, the
rate of interest on money is not much more than half what it was before
the war. But whether this be so or not it is not nature’s fault. Nature
is not only implacably just, she is impartially generous. No suitor is
denied the chance to gain her favors, and none is refused any favor he
may have earned. There are floods and tornadoes, frosts and fevers,
burning suns and chilling winds. Yet these, as well as the fruitage and
the harvests, are the offspring of inexorable law, and science now
interprets the law. It warns us of cyclones ten thousand miles away; it
predicts the date of arrival, speed, and duration of hurricanes; it
brings the ladybug from Australia to combat and destroy the scale-bug in
California; it promises to conquer drought by exploding dynamite bombs
in the air or by chemical production of rain; it restrains floods by
diverting rivers; it destroys malarial germs by planting groves of
eucalyptus; it analyzes soils; it selects seeds; it fertilizes with
electric wires, and it ploughs and plants and harvests fields with
iron-limbed and steam-lunged servants. A hundred years ago one man with
spade and sickle slowly wrested from the earth the sustenance for his
little household, with only sufficient surplus to scantily compensate
the weaver, who, with hand loom, constructed a few yards of cloth
between daylight and dark. Now a girl guides the spindles and shuttles
and makes thousands of yards of cloth in a day, and the labor of one man
industriously applied to so much land as he can advantageously cultivate
with the aid of improved machinery, will in one year produce one
thousand bushels of wheat, or their equivalent in agricultural
products—enough to feed fifty men for a year.”
“I grant you, doctor, that the production of wealth has greatly
increased. The problem of the hour is how to provide for a more equal
and just distribution of it.”
“John, the solution of the problem is not difficult. Allow every man to
have that which he earns, and compel every man to earn that which he
has. Accord every man the opportunity to work or starve, with the
assurance that for his work he will receive full value, and for his
idleness a hunger that no public or private charity will alleviate. Hard
labor and hard fare for the criminal, generous diet and tender care for
the sick, an ax or a pump handle for the tramp, and allow no healthy man
to eat his supper until he has earned it. Consider sporadic and
indiscriminate charity as great an evil as injustice. Accord every man
his dollar and demand from every man your dollar, and give and exact
shilling for shilling. Emulate and copy the inexorable justice of
nature.”
“Doctor,” said the professor, “I am silenced but not convinced. The sun
is getting too high for further fishing. Come, let us go to luncheon.”