STARVING AMID HEAPS OF GOLD
By Editor
WALL STREET is talking about “the menace of the gold flood,” and is telling us that “the banking community is being drowned in gold.” While the financiers thus have more gold than they know what to do with, we are informed that “New York faces the worst food famine in its history. Already the city’s poor are in unprecedented distress owing to the exorbitant prices of food and coal.” On a recent Sunday, it was stated from various pulpits in New York City, that thousands of men, women, and children were suffering; and it was conceded that “if remedies are not promptly found before winter sets in, starvation will exact a toll that will startle the world.” “Hundreds of persons,” we are informed, are appealing “to the churches for aid.” “Large numbers of children are attending school in a half-starved condition.” In some sections, from twenty to thirty per cent of the children are said to be underfed. The millionaire food speculator is charged with the responsibility, in a large measure, for these conditions, partly because he is withholding supplies of food in order to extort the highest prices, and partly because he is shipping supplies abroad, where high prices prevail. From London comes the word: “One of the troublesome features of the situation is, how to equalize matters between the rich and the poor. On the theory of ‘equality of sacrifice for all,’ which is a popular war watchword, the newspapers are making a sensation of luxurious menus in fashionable restaurants and homes.” Another statement reads: “The government has to deal, on the one hand, with increased consumption, due partly to the better scale of living practiced by a large section of the people getting unusual wages from war work; and on the other hand, with decreased imports and decreased home production.” These times are giving us strangely contradictory conditions,—rivers of gold in New York that are perplexing financiers, yet thousands of the people crying for bread; Europe drenched with human blood, yet the newspapers “making a sensation of luxurious menus in fashionable restaurants and homes.” This world has gone mad. The sensibilities of men are blunted. They do not seem to realize the tremendous portent of the conditions that are upon us. We cannot be far from the time when God will fulfill His word by saying to the men who are so insanely grasping for gold: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. . . . Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. . . . Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.” James 5: 1-7.