Your ShelfYour Projects

Incarnated Selfishness

4%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Feb 2, 1905

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 82, No. 5.

Read the full edition

Incarnated Selfishness

UNSELFISH love,—the love which gives itself freely for the benefit of others,—the love which makes it impossible for its possessor to be happy when others are unhappy without seeking to relieve their unhappiness,—the love which “seeketh not her own,”—the love which prompts to giving rather than to getting,—this is the vital principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Jesus “loved me, and gave himself for me.”
In contrast with this self-sacrificing love is that overmastering selfishness which is the tap-root of sin. It contradicts all that love says and does. It takes from others to benefit itself. It seeks happiness by methods which make others unhappy. Its basis of existence is to seek its own at all hazards. Its motto is, “It is more blessed to receive than to give.” This is the vital principle of the gospel of Satan.
In this last generation, and as an impressive sign of the approaching end of the great controversy between Christ and Satan, we may naturally expect to see worked out in human affairs such exhibitions of the satanic hideousness of selfishness as have never before been revealed. In this climax of the struggle there will be as nearly as possible the incarnation of selfishness, in the widest possible contrast with the incarnation of love. It is the world-wide repetition of the tragedy of Calvary, when Love was crucified between two thieves.
It has always been the desire of the few to compel the many to contribute to their own wealth and power, but there has been that restraint put upon this desire by apparently insurmountable difficulties—providential barriers—that in the world’s history Croesus has been the proverbial rich man. All this is now changed. The awakening of the human intellect which has come during the last century as a necessary experience in the preparation for the coming of the Lord, has resulted in those inventions which have solved old problems and created new possibilities. Self-interest has been quick to seize upon the advantages thus offered, in order to accomplish what has been the impossible in other times. As a consequence there are a few men to-day in this country who are taking toll from uncounted millions, and who are piling up such personal fortunes as almost stagger the mind to contemplate. The result has been stated in a recent magazine article in the following startling pronouncement: “It is only a matter of simple mathematics to ascertain the day, and that only a few years away, when ten men will be as absolutely and completely the legal owners of the United States and all there is of value in it, as John D.Rockefeller is the absolute legal owner of the large section of it of which he is to-day possessed.”
As a striking illustration of the concrete working out of these principles, we quote the following paragraphs introductory to a series of articles in Everybody’s Magazine, dealing with “The Greatest Trust in the World.” They contain a sermon for the thoughtful mind:—
In the free republic of the United States of America is a power greater than the government, greater than the courts or judges, greater than legislatures, superior to and independent of all authority of State or nation.
It is a greater power than in the history of men has been exercised by king, emperor, or irresponsible oligarchy. In a democracy it has established a practical empire more important than Tamburlaine’s, and ruled with a sway as certain. In a country of law, it exists and proceeds in defiance of law. In a country historically proud of its institutions, it establishes, unchecked, a condition that refutes and nullifies the significance of those institutions. We have grown familiar in this country with many phases of the mania of money getting, and the evil it may work to mankind at large; we have seen none so strange and alarming as this of which I write. Names change, details change; but when the facts of these actual conditions are laid bare, it will puzzle a thoughtful man to say wherein the rule of the great power now to be described differs in any essential from the rule of a feudal tyrant in the darkness of the Middle Ages.
Three times a day this power comes to the table of every household in America, rich or poor, great or small, known or unknown; it comes there and extorts its tribute. It crosses the ocean, and makes its presence felt in multitudes of homes that would not know how to give it a name. It controls prices and regulates traffic in a thousand markets. It changes conditions and builds up and pulls down industries; it makes men poor or rich at will; it controls or establishes or obliterates vast enterprises across the civilized circuit. Its lightest word affects men on the plains of Argentina or the by-streets of London.
Of some of the most important industries of this country it has an absolute, iron-clad, infrangible monopoly; of others it has a control that for practical purposes of profit is not less complete. It fixes at its own will the price of every pound of fresh, salted, smoked, or preserved meat prepared and sold in the United States. It fixes the price of every ham, every pound of bacon, every pound of lard, every can of prepared soup. It has an absolute monopoly of our enormous meat exports, dressed and preserved. It has an absolute monopoly of the American trade in fertilizers, hides, bristles, horn and bone products. It owns or controls or dominates every slaughter-house, except a few that have inconsiderable local or special trades. It owns steam and electric railroads, it owns the entire trolley-car service in several cities, and is acquiring the like property elsewhere. It owns factories, shops, stock-yards, mills, land and land companies, plants, warehouses, politicians, legislators, and congressmen.
It defies Wall Street and all that therein is. It terrorizes great railroad corporations long used to terrorizing others. It takes toll from big and little, it gouges millions from railroad companies, and cent pieces from obscure shippers. To-day it is compelling a lordly railroad to dismiss its general manager, to-morrow it is black-listing and ruining some little commission merchant. It is remorseless, tireless, greedy, insatiable, and it plans achievements so much greater than any so far recorded in the history of commerce that the imagination flags in trying to follow its future possibilities.
It fixes, for its own profit, the prices the farmer of the West shall receive for his cattle and hogs, and the prices the butcher of the East shall charge for his meat.
It fixes the price that the grower of California shall receive for his fruit, and the price the laborer of New York shall pay for his breakfast.
It lays hands upon the melon grower of Colorado and the cotton grower of Georgia, and compels each to share with it the scanty proceeds of his toil.
It can affect the cost of living in Aberdeen and Geneva as easily as in Chicago and New York.
It has in the last three years increased, for its own benefit, the expenses of every household in America. It controls or influences the prices of one half the food consumed by the nation. It has its share in the proceeds of more commodities of daily consumption than all other trusts, combinations, and monopolies together, and the prices of these it seeks to augment for its own profit.
It can make, within certain limits, the price of wheat, of corn, of oats, what it pleases; it will shortly be able to control the price of every loaf of bread.
Its operations have impoverished or ruined farmers and stockmen, destroyed millions of investments, caused banks to break and men to commit suicide, precipitated strikes, and annihilated industries.
So great is the terror it inspires in some quarters that citizens under the constitutional guarantees of freedom do not dare, even in the privacy of their offices or homes, to speak a word that this power would not approve of, and multimillionaires, railroad magnates, and captains of industry quail before it.
At every step of its progress it has violated national or State law, or both, and with impunity. It has been declared by federal and State courts to be an outlaw, and to have no right to exist. It has gone steadily on strengthening its hold, extending its lines, and multiplying its victims.
We are accustomed to think that the Standard Oil Company is the ultimate of monopolistic achievement; here is something compared with which the Standard Oil Company is puerile; here is something that affects a thousand lives where the Standard Oil Company affects one; here is something that promises greater fortunes and greater power than ten Standard Oil Companies. Reaching out, absorbing industry after industry, augmenting and building, by great brute strength and by insidious, intricate, hardly discoverable windings and turnings, day and night this monstrous thing grows and strengthens until its grip is at the nation’s throat.
I am quite well aware that my words may seem extravagant to the generality of readers; to those who know the history and actual operations of the American Beef Trust they will appear an understatement of galling and humiliating truths.
If the writer of this article establishes by convincing proof the truthfulness of the many counts in this terrible indictment, he may, as the editor says, “astonish the American people,” but that does not remedy the evil. The rejection of the truth of the gospel has made such a situation possible, and the remedy—well, the only remedy for a thoroughly gangrened limb is to cut it off. Evidence is increasing that the crisis of the world is just upon us.