A Significant Sign of the Age
By John S. Wightman
The apostle James, in the fifth chapter of his remarkable letter to “the twelve tribes” scattered abroad, gives a remarkably clear and concise description of the time we call “to-day” and of a condition of affairs everywhere prevalent, when the rich, impelled by insatiable greed, shall gather treasures into such vast “heaps” as shall be universally regarded as phenomenal. It is obvious to every candid observer that we are living in an age in which the affairs of men are as never before controlled by an oligarchy of wealth to that extent that the situation is appalling. The apostle declares that it is “for the last days” that individuals are vainly heaping treasures together, just before “the coming of the Lord,” in the solemn time when “the Judge standeth at the door.” James Bryce, in the American Commonwealth, observes that up to 1840 there were no large fortunes in the United States. But writing in the later eighties, he says: “Now there is some poverty, many large fortunes, and a greater number of gigantic fortunes than in any other country in the world.” In New York City alone there are more than two thousand millionaires. The Rockefeller family, of which John D. is the head, possesses wealth of an estimated value of a thousand millions. The human mind quite fails to grasp so huge a sum. If the wealth of this one family could be converted into gold coin, and carried upon the backs of porters into Canada or Mexico, it would require twenty-three thousand strong men, for it would weigh one thousand seven hundred and fifty tons. To carry a single day’s interest on this sum would require seven strong men, for it would weigh a thousand pounds in gold. Ten men—J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, W. K. Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, J. P. Morgan, Russell Sage, J. J. Hill, Wm. H. Clark, and Wm. Rockefeller—control an estimated aggregate of two thousand million dollars. Note the figures, $2,000,000,000. Byron W. Holt, editor of Moody’s Magazine, and the statistical expert of R. G. Dun & Co., offer us a conservative estimate of the total value of the wealth of America’s five thousand multimillionaires, as follows:—| No. of fortunes |
Amount |
|---|
| 10 aggregating |
$2,000,000,000 |
| 490 aggregating |
3,000,000,000 |
| 4,500 aggregating |
10,000,000,000 |
| 5,000 aggregating |
15,000,000,000 |
So five thousand men in this country actually own, as declared by Mr. Cleveland Moffett “(without counting what they9control), nearly one sixth of our entire national wealth,” which, if put into gold coin, would give them all the gold in the world, and leave more than one thousand million dollars ($1,000,000,000) still due them! The land is literally full of wealth, for the controller of the currency shows that the stock of gold in the United States is greater than that of any other land, while our banking power aggregates fourteen billions, as against twenty billions for all the rest of the world. Our national wealth is increasing, too, at a prodigious rate; and yet, in spite of phenomenal natural prosperity, what are the conditions of the masses?—Precisely what James, with prophetic vision, saw would come to pass in “these last days.” “The hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth.” “One eighth of the families in America receive more than one half of the aggregate income, and the richest one per cent receives a larger income than the poorest fifty per cent. In fact, this small class of property owners receives from property alone as large an income as half of our people receive from property and labor.”—“Distribution of Wealth,” by Chas. B. Spahr. While Mr. James Hazen Hyde has been traveling over the country in a private car worth fifty thousand dollars, and giving fancy balls and garden parties like those prior to French Revolutionary times, at almost fabulous cost, more than four million families get along on incomes less than four hundred dollars per annum, more than one half of America’s families on less than six hundred, and two thirds on less than nine hundred. So says “Waldron’s Hand-Book of Wealth.” Think what it means to bring up a family in a city on four hundred dollars per annum. For food, for clothes, for medicines, for furniture, for house furnishings—four hundred dollars a year! And these are not the poorest. Robert Hunter estimates that there are ten million even a little worse off than this! And he is corroborated by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor. Then what about a vast army of unemployed vagrants and tramps—the broken-hearted wrecks of humanity? Surely, a cry is ascending to heaven, as Holy Writ declared, not alone the “cry” of the weary and despairing, crushed and hopeless, dying in foul, dark rooms of tainted tenement-houses, but alike the “cry,” the hoarse, discordant notes of the maddened hosts of affiliated labor organizations. The rich becoming richer; the poor can not become much poorer, else annihilation, and a repetition of the last scenes of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Egypt, and Rome. Without the great fortunes that have so amazingly sprung up during recent decades, there would be no reign of luxury, no flaunting of feasts, no riots of extravagance, such as are daily chronicled in the public press. Again, the prophet sees this “wanton” condition, this effeminate, riotous, mad intoxication of the fleeting pleasures of life, and he connects it with “the coming of the Lord.” Great fortunes are as much of an evil to-day, and a menace to government and society, as in the days of Rome, when wealth gained supreme control. Civilization is besmirched with the corrupting influences of the money-mad Molochs of finance and commercialism. As a sure result we have the astounding iniquity and high-handed corruption of the insurance corporations, as revealed by the Armstrong Investigative Committee and the astute inquisitor, Charles C. Hughes; the corruption in politics, as shown by Mr. Lincoln J. Steffens; legislative corruption, as revealed by such men as Joseph Folk and Senator La Follette; the mailed fist of the railway trust, and the insatiable maw of its ingenious competitor, the beef trust, as disclosed by Ray Stannard Baker and Charles E. Russell. The public is amazed and dumbfounded with the astounding details of “graft,” corruption, and bribery on every hand—and all because of “the love of money.” Speaking of the iniquitous beef conspiracy, Mr. Charles E. Russell says: “No more extraordinary figure than J. Ogden Armour has ever appeared in the world’s commercial affairs, nor has any man, not even Mr. Rockefeller, conceived a commercial empire so dazzling.” The corrupting power of wealth and its combinations may be seen everywhere; ’tis a cancer, national in scope, and whose power is not to be measured, eating into the vitals of the nation, and threatening the destruction of the republic. The nation sees the difficulty and realizes the danger; it longs for a remedy, seeks for a deliverer. “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.” So writes the apostle. Then what must be the result—the sure result? Vast resources in the hands of unscrupulous plutocrats will work the undoing of the nation. “A triumphant plutocracy,” writes E. J. Shriver, “has enslaved the vast body of our people; and unless there is some relief, its weight will crush the bearers of the burden, or in the uprising of the latter will wreck the republic and bring such chaos as France saw in 1789.” Russell Sage recently denounced further consolidation of industry, and predicted that if it continues, “the result will be wide-spread revolt of the people, and subsequent financial ruin unequaled in the history of the world;” while Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, to a Buffalo Express reporter declared that in the event of the laboring classes failing to secure their rights by fair means we “should see a revolution in magnitude far surpassing the French Revolution of 1789.” This insatiable greed, the universal struggle for wealth, resulting in these colossal fortunes and industrial combinations of amazing magnitude, is, to the student of prophecy, a stupendous and significant sign upon the prophetic horizon, of the “end of the age” and the coming of Him “whose right it is” to reign, “the chiefest among ten thousand, and the one altogether lovely.” These things mean that the King is coming; coming in all the glory of the Father and the glory of the angels; coming, in the clouds of heaven; coming, startling fact, to separate the chaff from the wheat, and to gather the wheat into his garner, but the chaff will be burn with unquenchable fire. Reader, do you ponder these solemn matters? Are you ready for the issue? Have you made your peace with God? If not, why not make haste to make “your calling and election sure” and the righteousness of Prince Immanuel your very own by faith? For the signs of our times declare that Jesus is coming again. Behold, “the Judge standeth at the door.”