The Industrial Conflict in the Light of Revelation.
By Geo. W. Rine
CENTRALIZED WEALTH.—ITS PERILS.
Has it ever occurred to you, dear reader, that all the really great and vital events of human history were divinely foretold, many of them centuries before they took place? Do you know that the voice of history is the echo of the voice of God? Do you believe that the prophecies of our Christian Bible afford the only absolutely accurate and helpful solution of the perplexing social and economic questions of the day? “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” This being true, is it conceivable that He would not, for the good of His children, shed floods of the white light of truth upon every dark and difficult question of human history? Here is our Lord’s own assurance given through Peter: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your heart.” The inspired psalmist testifies: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” By applying to every important question that arises the “X-ray of prophecy,” we instantly clarify it with the divine light of reason and meaning. Meaning of Events Revealed Only through Prophecy.
Nearly all persons who speak or write for the enlightenment of the public have to some extent discussed the great monetary and industrial questions of our day. But the student of sacred prophecy, he who has concern for matters eternal as well as for matters temporal, can not but feel that by far the greater number of these thinkers for the public have missed the really and eternally vital lessons which present economic history so eloquently teaches. It is a cardinal and fatal mistake to attempt to deal with human problems apart from their relation to divine problems. Numerous books and theses purporting to treat of the philosophy of history have been given to the world. But after all the only absolutely dependable and infallibly accurate philosophy of human history that this world will ever have is the voice of Jehovah, expressed through “holy men of God” who “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” Had the Jews seen Jesus of Nazareth through the medium of their ancient prophecy, they would not have made the irretrievable mistake of rejecting Him as their Messiah, and of unwittingly crucifying the Lord of glory. Had they understood and believed the multiplied Messianic prophecies, they would have been overwhelmed with the proofs of the Messiahship of the Nazarene. Wealth Centralized in the Last Days.
In the previous article, I adduced from the Scriptures indisputable evidence that the enormous evolution of wealth in our day was, thousands of years ago, anticipated by the sure word of prophecy. Not only has the unprecedented increase of wealth “in the last days” been prophetically foretold, but also the marvelous degree to which that wealth is being concentrated in the possession of a few. It is not so much the amount as it is the coalescence and combination of riches that constitutes one of the chief marvels of the closing years of time. It is by no means the magnitude of a nation’s wealth, but its concentration, the inequality of its distribution, that always has been, and still is one of the greatest perils of society. It is the repeated verdict of history that the greatest menace to the stability and perpetuity of any nation is the amassing of its wealth in the hands of a few, while the great mass of its people, the actual wealth producers, become hopelessly impoverished. In his terrible warning and stinging rebuke to the “rich men” living “in the last days,” the apostle James, in prophetic anticipation, declares to them: “Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days.” Chapter 5:3, R. V. Everybody knows that nothing is regarded with more wonder and even amazement than the stupendous individual and corporate wealth of the present day. This present-day marvel, which everybody is talking or writing about, James foresaw, and foretold, in order that the world might know that “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” The apostle further declares that, as a result of the gold and silver being amassed, it would become “rusted,” and that the very rust would be a “witness” against these rich men in the day of judgment; for the rust is undeniable proof that they were laying up “treasures upon earth, where . . . rust doth corrupt,” and their treasures being on earth, their hearts were there also. The phenomenal growth of wealth, which marked the closing decades of the nineteenth century, was the subject of our study a week ago. It is a matter of almost universal knowledge that the same years witnessed a progressive concentration of wealth into relatively fewer hands, until now one-half of the people of the world own virtually nothing. The late Henry George once said that he would not have written the widely-famous book, “Progress and Poverty,” if it were not for the lamentable fact that “all the increased wealth that progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and to make sharper the contrast between the house of Have and the house of Want.” In an article contributed to one of our most conservative journals, about two years ago, a writer of national reputation affirmed that 25,000 persons own more than one-half of our national wealth, or about forty-eight billion dollars. One of the best-known American statisticians recently averred that one family in every one hundred families in the United States could buy out the other ninety-nine, and still have left a very generous margin. Twenty per cent of our total wealth is owned by one-two-hundredth of one per cent of the people. Estimated on the principle of partnership and brotherhood, this minute fraction of our population own more than 4,000 times their rightful share. Putting the same fact in different terms, one-seventh of the population possess more than forty-nine times as much as they would on the basis of equal distribution. “The Distribution of Prosperity” is the title of an article that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, a month or two ago, in which the writer makes this astonishing statement: “The present concentration of power in few hands makes the socialist’s dream realizable. Uncle Sam might walk into a room where, seated about a table, he might find Messrs. Morgan, Hill, Cassatt, Harriman, Schiff, Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Reid, and for good measure, three more. And Uncle Sam could, in five minutes, arrange for the purchase of all the railroads of the country.” Of course the writer means that Uncle Sam could do so if this coterie of railway magnates were willing to sell. About six years ago Senator Depew, of New York, who is himself a multimillionaire, admitted to a reporter for one of the great newspapers of Chicago, substantially the same startling fact. The Senator said: “There are fifty men in the city of New York who can in twenty-four hours stop every wheel on all the railways, close every door of all our manufactories, lock every switch on every telegraph line, and shut down every coal and iron mine in the United States. They can do this because they control the money which this country produces. The control of the money clothes its possessors with absolute power over a nation’s industries.” Referring to this remarkable admission on the part of Mr. Depew, a writer in the Arena exclaims: “What a travesty on the declaration that this is a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ when fifty men can make beggars of seventy millions of people in twenty-four hours!” In the World’s Work, for October, 1903, a contributor who is an authority on questions of finance, said that there are five millionaires in this country who represent the absolute control of railroad systems having a total issue of $6,750,000,000 of stocks and bonds. Mr. Eltweed Pomeroy, as long ago as 1896, in the Arena, gave statistical tables bearing on the distribution of wealth in Great Britain. By these tables it is learned that more than 68 per cent of the English people own less than two-thirds of one per cent of the nation’s property. Eighty per cent of the people own less than three per cent of the property; ninety per cent own less than eight per cent of it, while less than ten per cent of it own more than ninety-two per cent of the nation’s wealth. Again, one-fiftieth of the people own more than two-thirds of all the property of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Some of my readers probably recall the fact that Rome went to pieces when two per cent of her people became the sole masters of all her wealth. Practically one-half of all Scotland is now owned by seventy persons; 1,700 persons own nine-tenths of the wealth of that historic country. Less than 800 persons own one-half of all the land in Ireland. All the land of that unfortunate island is in the absolute grip of less than 4,000 persons. Discussing the unhappy lot of Ireland, the late James G. Blaine said in part: “Now mark you I am talking of the little island, not so large as Maine, and they pay a rental of $66,000,000 per annum, and they pay an imperial tax of $35,000,000 and a local tax of $15,000,000 more. There are $116,000,000 to be wrought out of the bone and flesh and spirit of the Irish peasant, and no wonder he lies crushed and downtrodden.” About eight years ago Dr. Josiah Strong wrote: “If 100 workmen could each earn $1,000 a year, they would have to work 1,500 years to earn as much as the annual income of the 100 richest Americans. And if a workman could earn $1,000 a day he would have to work until he was 547 years old, and never take a day off before he could earn as much as some Americans are worth.”4 (372) The Chicago Record-Herald, describing the business methods of one of the richest men in the United States, has this to say: “The truth is that Rockefeller has become a resistless force in the industrial world, and that he will proceed from one monopoly to another, regardless of all that is said and done to prevent. If he could live to the age of the patriarchs, the United States would come to be merely one of his appurtenances.” The official income of the German Emperor is $11,000 a day; the income of a half score of the “Captains of Industry” in our own country stretches all the way from $15,000 to $75,000 a day. The Kaiser has the titles and the honors, but our “captains” have the—power. Six years ago a leading newspaper of New York had a standing rule that the death of a man who left a million dollars behind him was to be chronicled on the first page. To-day nobody having less than $15,000,000 is entitled, in that paper, to that exquisite posthumous distinction. Ordinary one-millionaires, says a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, are so common that you bump against them in the street. Describing a banquet, at which he was present, in New York, he said it was not possible to throw a toothpick across the table without hitting a millionaire. A man whom nobody knew, died in a New York hotel a few months ago. When his will was probated it was discovered that he had left a fortune greater than was possessed twenty years ago by any American, excepting Mr. Vanderbilt or Mr. Astor. Not long ago a man named Jones died in Florida. He had come from Pittsburg, where he had made iron. He left $60,000,000. Obscure incidents like these show the rapidity with which property is becoming congested in the vaults of a few—how the rich are growing flamboyantly richer. Where the Fisks and the Drews and other Wall Street freebooters of a bygone generation operated in stock involving fifty to seventy-five thousand shares, the money king of to-day deals in whole railway systems, involving fifty to seventy-five millions of dollars, or he consolidates an entire industry into one corporation, having a capitalization greater than the national debt of the United States. Perils Incident to Centralized Wealth.
The famous Doctor Bushnell, in one of his sermons, said: “The distribution of wealth is a matter of more consequence to a state than its amount. When the Roman state was at the height of its wealth, there were not more than twenty landholders in all Italy; the rest of the people were dependents—an idle, thriftless, profligate race, ripe for every possible mischief and sedition. There could not be a more miserable condition in any state; it permitted no such thing as character, law, security, or domestic comfort.” In his famous Pittsburg address, in 1902, President Roosevelt declared: “Especially great and especially difficult are the problems caused by the growth and concentration of great individual, and, above all, of great corporate, fortunes. It is immensely for the interest of the country that there should be such individual and corporate wealth, as long as it is used aright, and when it is not used aright, then it becomes a serious menace and danger.” (Italics mine.) That exceptionally sober and conservative journal, the Springfield Republican, makes the following significant utterances, apropos of the colossal Carnegie fortune: “But the Carnegie example of excessive wealth accumulation is something not to be considered beneficial or worthy of encouragement. Such a fortune can not have been earned by its possessor. It has been piled in upon him from the earnings of countless numbers of other workers. It rests upon and has been built up through social injustice and the wrongful neglects or favors of the law; and while its disposition in the direction of public benefactions is in the direction of righting a wrong which has been done, and for which society rather than Mr. Carnegie is responsible, the account can not possibly even thus be fully squared; for the distribution can not be made a restoration of what is due, but must take the form of gratuities, and so stirs the spirit of mendicancy. “Such a fortune as this is demoralizing in its getting, and demoralizing in its best possible distribution.” What is here said respecting Mr. Carnegie’s mammoth wealth is just as pertinent to the other half dozen equally great American fortunes. The Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of Henry Ward Beecher’s old church in Brooklyn, in a lecture before the Federation of Women’s Clubs, voiced his convictions in reference to monopoly and monopolists in vigorous fashion: “God never meant,” he said, “that one man should control all of the oil and of the steel of this country; that the man of ten talents should crush out the one-talent man. And the ten-talent men are throwing away their chances. God never meant that there should be great monopoly of those things which are necessary to the comfort of the human being. He never intended that one man should control the oil and possess $100,000,000, while others had none.” Bishop Samuel Fallows, of Chicago, was heard, in 1899, giving utterance in the following trenchant terms, respecting the sinister results of centralized wealth and its incidental power: “Trusts are created aggregating nearly a score of billions of professed capital in less than a single year, some of them of the most reprehensible character, having no other end than to despoil the people. The moral effect of this all-consuming passion to become immediately and inordinately rich is beyond expression. It is eating like a canker into the very vitals of society. Our reformatories and penitentiaries are crowded with inmates in consequence of it.” “As nations grow rich,” writes Dr. Josiah Strong, “they are prone to become self-indulgent, effeminate, immoral. The physical nature becomes less robust, the intellectual nature less vigorous, the moral less pure. The pampered civilization of old had to be reinvigorated, from time to time, with fresh infusions of barbaric blood—a remedy no longer available. If we can not find in Christianity a remedy or preventive, our Christian (?) civilization and the world itself is a failure; and our rapidly increasing wealth, like the ‘cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold,’ will curse us unto destruction.” There is nothing more certain in all the universe than that Christianity does afford a “remedy or preventive;” but, except in mere theory, the great mass of humanity refuse to accept the principles of Christianity. And the uniform testimony of the great Source-Book of Christianity is that the unparalleled wealth of these days is one of the agencies which “will curse us [this present evil world] unto destruction.” Not until the kingdoms of this world shall have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, not until the glory of the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, not until sin and the author of sin shall be no more—not until then will equality, fraternity, liberty, justice, peace, righteousness, and happiness universally and eternally prevail and reign in this world of ours. The tyranny of concentrated wealth on the one hand, and social, economic, and industrial enslavement on the other, compassed the destruction in turn, of the successive cosmopolitan empires of Egypt, of Babylon, of Persia, of Greece, and of Rome. It was exactly the same status of things in France that bore her resistlessly into the maelstrom of the bloodiest revolution known in the history of man. Can any one, but the hopelessly prejudiced, deny that identical conditions have long since obtained and still obtain in our own country as well as in all the great nations of Europe? Like causes produce like results. The writer is not a pessimist, but a Christian optimist. We are living in a dark hour. But the darkest hour is ever the harbinger of the dawn. I would by no means say with Louis XV., “After us the deluge,” but, “After the deluge, the endless reign of justice in an endless world.” Then we shall have the sociability of universal love without “socialism.”