Wealth, Poverty, and National Character
THINKING men are talking very plainly concerning the condition of things in this country as disclosed during the past two years. Speaking at Cornell University, President Jacob Gould Schurmann said:— The idle rich are an excrescence in any properly organized community. And in a democratic republic, in which every man has a vote, be assured that the rights which convention grants to property would be swept away if the propertied classes become idle, luxurious, selfish, hard-hearted, and indifferent to the struggles and toils of less fortunate citizens. The vice of the age is that men want wealth without undergoing that toil by which alone wealth is created. The love of money and the reckless pursuit of it is undermining the national character. Stewart L. Woodford, formerly minister to Spain, in an address at the commencement exercises at the Northwestern University, said:— It is not in the slum, the tenement-house, the fetid atmosphere of the places where the poor half live, that anarchy and socialism are bred. It is the way that you and I treat the poor—the way we spend our money, make use of our money, the disregard of law on the part of great corporations, the business principle that might makes right—that fosters these creeds and endangers the state. . . . Were not our forefathers more scrupulous in the matter of their social duties than we? Is there not in this generation a growing disposition to construe the law for one's self, to obey it when it suits our purpose, to disregard it when it inconveniences our ambitions? Reverence for law is the corner-stone upon which all our commerce is founded. If it falls into decay, the nation is in peril. Mr. Woodford might have added that regard for God's law is the basis of regard for civil law, and that the contempt cast upon God's law, in which many ministers have led, has done more than any other one thing to bring all law into contempt. The harvest of past sowing is now being reaped. At the commencement exercise of Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler is reported as saying that the protests now being made are not confined to the visionaries, but that many of the most cautious classes have begun to distrust the capacity of society as now organized to protect itself against freebooters and to prevent law and justice being made powerless before the greed for gain. E. A. Hitchcock, the secretary of the interior, in an address at the Harvard University commencement dinner said:— While it is historically true that this is the home of the physically brave, it is a question in my mind whether it is not too much the land of the free and too little the land of the morally brave; in other words, whether or not in various directions license has taken the place of liberty, and corruption has run riot at the expense of patriotism. These are serious statements by men who think seriously. Their unintentional testimony to the fulfilment of the prophecies concerning the last days is very forcible. Their views read like a commentary upon James 5:3, 4: “Your gold and your silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” The rich are taking just the course to bring confusion and destruction upon the world.