Macaulay’s Warning

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 2, 1908

Macaulay’s Warning

THE present industrial depression and the increasing bitterness of the strife between capital and labor lend a timely interest to the words of Lord Macaulay, who prophesied thus concerning this country:—

You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another can not get a full meal. . . . There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Cæsar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by the barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country and by your own institutions.

In this connection a recent interview with Hon. E. H. Root, Secretary of State, published March 15, will be of special interest. He said, in part:—

With regard to the immigration problem the United States is now in the position of the Roman empire, invaded by

the barbarians who overran it in search of riches. The barbarians—Sarmatians, Dacians, etc.—were miserably poor, and the rich countries of the Roman empire, with their high culture, irresistibly attracted them. The same peoples—I mean people from the same countries that sent barbarians Romeward—Croatians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Jews, and uncultured South Italians—are overrunning the United States now.

Is the Cæsar or Napoleon of whom Macaulay speaks, yet in sight?