THE PROBLEM VS. A GOOD MAN WHO IS AS RICH AS HE IS NOBLE.
After supper Fern Fenwick and Fillmore Flagg returned to the tower room
for the continuation of the story. She began by saying:
"Let us return to my father's mining operations in Alaska. In 1892,
Dewitt C. Dunbar assumed the active management of the Martina mine. A
large proportion of my father's surplus capital from the mine had been
invested, through trusty agents, in the cities of San Francisco, Saint
Paul, Chicago, Washington and New York. We at once planned a tour of
travel that would give him the opportunity to personally inspect these
investments, and at the same time give me a chance to see the world,
and to mingle in society, or so much of it as a continuous hotel life
might offer.
"For my mother and myself this delightful tour was one long holiday. We
enjoyed it so much. To me especially, it proved exceedingly profitable;
geographically speaking, my ideas of the largeness of the world, and the
vast number of its people, were wonderfully expanded. In December, 1893,
father completed his investments by the purchase of a winter home in the
city of Washington, and this summer home here. This cottage was built in
the year 1900.
"During the summer of 1894 we visited the brothers and sisters of my
father, who were at that time living with their families on farms in
Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. As was generally the
rule, with a large class of farmers in those states at that time, we
found them, with but few exceptions, poor, in debt, and very much
discouraged by the menacing outlook for the future. Farm interests
everywhere were in a desperate condition. A succession of twenty years
of falling prices for all farm products, accompanied by frequent
calamities, such as hail storms, hurricanes, hot, blighting winds,
drouth and armies of grasshoppers, had so multiplied and magnified the
farm debts, and so reduced the value of farm, stock, and product, that
even the interest on the indebtedness could no longer be kept up; ruin
and beggary threatened the entire community of farmers. Under the severe
pressure of these conditions, great numbers of the more unfortunate
abandoned their farms in despair and sought employment elsewhere, mostly
in manufacturing centres and the large eastern cities. Much of the money
and wealth of the land had flown to those points, thither logically,
they followed, to enter the ranks of that vast army of competitors for
the crumbs that might fall from the table of an already glutted labor
mart; to learn by bitter experience how cruelly the system of
competition in all kinds of business can grind the helpless poor; to
learn, through years of suffering, the real meaning of competition, that
so long as it rules over commercial and industrial systems, the rich
must grow richer and fewer in number, while the poor must grow poorer,
and more and more numerous; to apprehend, slowly and painfully, that by
coming from farm to city they had still farther congested the already
overstocked labor market, thereby adding fierceness to the competition,
insuring an increase in the purchasing power of the dollars of those who
held the labor market, while they correspondingly decreased the
possibilities for earning the dollars they must have in order to live;
to perceive dimly in their desperation, that congestion of the labor
market speedily affected all markets; that an overstocked labor market
always meant a decrease of wages, which in turn, caused a corresponding
shrinkage in the number of purchasers for all salable goods in the
general market, followed by increased panic and stringency in the money
market; which speedily rolled up another disaster, sweeping in turn,
additional thousands into the ranks of the unemployed; demonstrating,
finally, that a repetition of these evils is inevitable; that
competition in its last analysis, means the complete destruction of all
business.
"As my father came to understand the full significance of this
deplorable situation, involving and distressing his own brothers and
sisters, his noble nature was grieved and shocked. He made haste to
place his people in a condition of financial independence. How happy and
grateful they were! And my father rejoiced with us that he was able to
offer such timely assistance. He then announced to us his determination
to devote the remainder of his life, and so much of his fortune as might
be necessary, to the solution of the problem of how best to overcome the
blighting evils of the competitive system. After much thought, long
research and hard study, he decided to commence with the land as the
necessary basis of all progress; with the farm as the rational
progressive unit; with improved farm methods on co-operative lines, as
the lever by which to restore the control of the land to the farmers,
and to lift them and their sons and daughters from the class of ignorant
dependents, to a class of cultured independents, which should be well
worthy of serving as a model in the race of progress, for all the other
classes. In his efforts to modify, correct, and reform social and
business methods, he proposed to use the strong and kindly arms of
Co-operation in fighting the evils of Competition, or its
representative, the pitiless competitive system. He reasoned that all
forms of government are but the result of co-operative effort. Both
experience and observation had taught him that the measure of excellence
of any government is the measure of its perfection in co-operation.
Therefore it logically follows, that the more perfect the co-operation
achieved by the administration of any form of government, the greater
the degree of justice and equality attained in the distribution of
benefits to all of the governed."