The crusade of a few iconoclastic and revolutionary vulgarians to endow
libraries, cheap schoolhouses and retreats for cripples, old maids and
other unmentionables, should encounter our organized and unanimous
resistance. The conservatives and respectables among us are called upon
to sweep back the tide of delusion threatening our decent and
time-honored prerogative of making wills and having them broken for the
benefit of unknown collateral relatives, lawyers, chorus girls and other
common law tenements.
It is no less incumbent upon us as Americans and plutocrats to thwart
the disposition of meddlesome and impertinent persons of questioning in
print the wisdom of the Almighty in constituting us trustees without
bond for the great indigent and financial unwashed. Aside from the
blasphemous character of such delusions, expressed misgivings do nobody
good and actually mislead the public into a complete misconception of
the profound contumely of riches.
Those foolishly inclined to consider our lot a bed of roses, hyacinths
and Lawson pinks, will please reflect upon the dread uncertainty of not
knowing at what moment “one” may be precipitated overboard from a yacht
or be hurled to a violent finish from the back of a vicious polo pony or
perchance dislocate the spine on the palace stair or the inlaid floor,
or superinduce apoplexy by overindulgence in golf or bridge! And reflect
for a moment upon the hazard of the auto from infants and common
pedestrians getting tangled in the machinery! And how about being
written up in the putrid press and being called a congenital money maker
with pictures of some exceedingly primitive people called parents! And
how about being compelled to worry along without means to buy new hair,
new lungs and new stomachs? And how about irritating irregularities in
the water supply when the stock is famishing and how about the Sunday
school class coming in late after a peevish week in rebates?
Fellow plutocrats, aristocrats and autocrats, let us
steel—ourselves—yea, to callousness against the crime of being
misunderstood by the molten masses and betrayed from within by the
two-faced Tom Lawson!