GREED AND ITS HARVEST by John Clark Ridpath

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 24, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 30.

GREED AND ITS HARVEST.

By John Clark Ridpath

[From “Harvest of Greed,” by the late John Clark Ridpath, in the Signs of the Times of Dec. 6, 1899.]

After the Revolution of 1776 we were not satisfied with liberty and independence. After the Civil War we were not content any longer to follow the primary industries and beautiful handicrafts by which our fathers became fellow-citizens and equals in a Commonwealth of Right. We made the fatal discovery that wealth can be accumulated more rapidly in the secondary and tertiary pursuits than in the noble pursuits of production. We found out that getting rich is difficult in the field and orchard, but expeditious in the streets. We adopted the principle that a sufficiency in this world is not enough. We proclaimed superfluity as the end and aim of life. We made it necessary that the sons of the desert should pluck ostriches in order that women may be respectable. We made it necessary that man should not have pleasure until he has ravaged the Kimberly diamond mines, and that he should not be “honorable” until he has bought an office. We made it necessary that society should learn the speech of an artificial life, should commit a code of inane platitudes, and convert hypocrisy into a fine art before a decent method of intercourse should be established. We poured oil on the fires of material ambitions, and disparaged the ambitions of the mind and heart. Not content with the existing crop of ergot, we scattered new germs of greed from the Penobscot to the Platte—and then sat down to await the harvest.

The seed of our social and national insanity has now germinated and grown to full stalk and efflorescence. The harvest is at hand. We have seen that the first Harvest of Greed was despotism—the domination of the few over the many—the renunciation of democracy. The second fruit of the harvest is the suppression, or the attempted suppression, of the intellectual life. Time was when the intellectual life was the glory of these our lands of freedom. Time was when the greatness of the mind was the greatness of the man. Time is when Greed, fearing the assagai of intellect, contrives to choke it into silence. Time is when the organic forces of society offer immense rewards for servility, and breathe out threatenings against all mental and spiritual insurrection. There has not been another time in the history of mankind when the organized agencies of civilization were turned so powerfully and so craftily against free thought, free speech, free literature, and free manhood.

The weeds of Greed are growing high. They are so high that man gropes in the jungle, and fears to speak, lest the echo of his voice shall arouse the enemy who never sleeps. Out of this attempted suppression comes paralysis. Only the strongest of the strong are able to stand up and defy the assailants of freedom. And yet freedom is the condition of intellectual excellence in all the world. The human genius flourishes only under conditions of free initiative and equality of rights. All the

great intellectual work has been done in epochs of emancipation and reform; it has never been done in the epoch of glory and retrogression.

This Is the Law of Life.

He who surfeits does not soar. The intellectual and spiritual age of man is the age when moderation reigns and when Greed has not yet been gratified. There never was yet in human history a time in which the present politics, economics, and social moods of the world were prevalent, when the human mind accomplished great works or dreamed of a glorious future.

The suppression of the intellectual life of men, of peoples, of races, comes swiftly in the wake of surfeit and glory. Art and literature flourish in the age of the primary industries; they languish in the age of commerce. Tyre and Sidon,—all the Phœnician States and the maritime States of Asia Minor,—perished without a book; for trade has no history. Egypt, when she became a maritime power, lost the history which she had made in the days of her independence. So also did Greece lose her splendid ascendancy when her commerce and conquest in the Alexandrian age took the place of the free and unique life of the great Hellenes. Socrates knew well enough how to plant fig orchards and how to gather the fruits; but if any one had proposed that he enter trade, he would have laughed an immortal guffaw, to be heard for centuries.

The age of Shakespeare was not the age of Disraeli. The one was the greatest genius of the world; the other was a jester, a literary mechanician. The age of Irving is not the age of Gould. The two men sleep in adjacent dust. The tomb of the latter is glorious; the tomb of the former is humble. The former was a prophet of humanity; the latter was the Genghis Khan of Greed.

Greed fills the granaries of the world with the threshed-out hopes and virtues of mankind. Greed has hedged the way of aspiration, and made the sincere truth of life read like a lie. In the lexicon of gain, truth and falsehood are the same word. In the Decalogue of Greed, the word not is nine times omitted, and in the fifth commandment the not is inserted. In the New Testament of Greed, the place of the Sermon on the Mount is marked only with a foot-note, which reads, “Omitted for business reasons.” By Greed, the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man have been placed on the Index Expurgatorius; and by Greed the Farewell Address and the Emancipation Proclamation are declared taboo.

By Greed the free, outdoor, industrious life of American people has been converted into a life of turmoil, beginning in competition and ending in fraud and faro. By Greed the great palaces of the avenue have been substituted for the humble homes of the people, and by Greed, the doors and windows of the palaces have been nailed up, while the occupants have gone off yachting to Norway and Venice. Within a single square mile of the New York City Hall, more than three hundred thousand human bodies are left to swelter, and three hundred thousand human souls are left to starve, through all the burning months of summer, while the cool sea washes but a few furlongs away, and the hills of Westchester are green, and the sky bends blue over the Tappan Zee and the Catskills.

Poverty, misery, filth, ignorance, degradation, depravity of life, and dishonor in death—such is the Harvest of Greed.

Greed has a prince for his son and heir, tramps for his grandchildren, and brigands and anarchists for his posterity.

If Shakespeare lived now, he would hardly write:—

“O what a world of vile, ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!”

It takes the perfume of all the way from three thousand to three hundred thousand a year now. The old-time competence is now penury; the old-time wealth but respectable poverty.

He that is proud of riches is a fool. For if he be exalted above his neighbors because he hath more gold, how much inferior is he to a gold mine?—Jeremy Taylor.