UNDER the caption of “Our Fast Age,” the Oakland Daily Transcript, of the 19th, well says:—
“The greed of gain; the passion for wealth; the eager and all-absorbing rush after riches, is sapping up all the generous and pure feelings of our natures, as a race. We can’t find time either to be comfortable or happy. Especially is this the case with Americans, and more especially is this applicable to the people of the Western Coast. If riches did but add one drop of happiness to the cup of life, then we might; with some reason pursue them. But the experience of the world has been, that riches add but care and bitterness to life, especially so when that is the main object of life, to the shutting out of all that is good, and pure, and noble beside. Our very civilization has become a mercenary engine, polluting our society in all its ramifications. Merchandise is made of religion; salvation is bought and sold for a price; and toll is exacted at the very gate of Heaven. The people of this fast age cannot stop to do a good deed; our lives are made tread-mills of drudgery and feverish excitement; the days are all too short, and the nights too long for our slavish work; like Bunyan’s man with the muck-rake, we see not the crown of happiness within our reach; but with eyes and soul intent upon raking together riches, which are but muck and straw compared to the higher life for which we were created—our heads become frosted and our forms bent with immature age, and the fruits of life, like the fruits of the Dead Sea, crumble to ashes in our grasp. We live too fast; the years come and go like the weaver’s shuttle, because we have no time to enjoy the days as they are passing. The mania for wealth has filled our land with fraud, corruption, and dishonesty, public thieving and wholesale robbery, until we know not whom to trust. The mania for riches is filling our insane asylums with crazed unfortunates; and peopling our grave yards with victims of self-murder. It has become a disease; a plague! Let us stop for just one short moment and reason together! Put on the brakes and slow up in this down grade to misery and perdition! Life is too short to be thus squandered, you can take nothing with you when you die. Naked you came into the world, and naked you must return. Then why not make the life worth living for; and the world happier and better that you have lived.”