WEALTH MEANS IMPERIALISM.
It needs no argument; it is self-evident. Democracy is born of equality in the social scale. Wealth controls men. It differentiates between the wealthy and the poor. It brings into one class the men and women of fortune, into another the sons and daughters of toil and poverty. Wealth fosters extravagance on the part of the rich; in order to imitate the fashions of the wealthy, those in every other way equal become also extravagant, and ambitious to be wealthy. Ambition soon to be rich is responsible for the great gambling mania manifest everywhere, from the games of “pitch-penny,” “policy,” and “craps” to the huge dealings in the stock exchange pits of New York and Chicago. The imperial power connected with this vast wealth passes computation. It controls parliaments, congresses, legislatures, municipal councils, and courts. The noted historian, the late John Clark Ridpath, thus expressed it in 1898:— Not a nation in the world is exempt from the dominion of the Universal Monarchy. The political autonomy of every one has been surrendered, openly or covertly, to the will of a ruler whom none have seen, but before whom every state and principality, every republic, and kingdom, and empire, bends a supple knee. More than twenty thousand millions of war debt resting upon the nations of the world! Twenty thousand millions of debt, and every dollar of it owned by the invisible Empire! The interest at four per cent. amounts to eight hundred millions of dollars a year. And it is intended that this principal and this interest account shall run forever. While civilization continues—as long as mankind shall be organized into nations—so long will this intolerable incubus rest day and night on the labor of the world. Under the horrid nightmare every workingman in every country under the sun becomes and remains a slave. It is needless to say that such a debt will absorb the entire property of the world. It will drink the ocean dry. It will suck up, at the rate of eight hundred millions a year, the whole wealth of mankind, and then demand another planet to satisfy the vacuum in its infernal maw. But since this utterance, look at Spain; look at the expense of the war with China; look at England paying the price that staggers humanity, increasing debts, binding stronger the bands of slavery to the “Invisible Empire.” The imperialism of capital has given birth to the imperialism of labor, offspring unwelcome. The young king in the labor ranks is training for power. When he can force the democratic workmen to submit to his imperial, dictatorial sway, with this army he will attack the money-king. As the editor of a great Eastern paper recently said: “A vast power ‘is this power of labor monopoly, and one that may ‘be as dangerous, more dangerous, than all the ‘monopolies of finance. . . . Great new problems ‘confront the people in this trust age. The greatest ‘of these is not the problem of financial control. It ‘is the problem presented by the possibilities of a ‘labor trust more dangerous and aggressive than any ‘other.’” But this is the fruit of the imperialism of wealth. There is one question paramount to all these, the question of submission to the coming Ruler. For know this that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men.” Men may now acknowledge Him or not, as they will; He is testing them as to their right to rule with Him eternally. Those who acknowledge Him now, who bow to human imperialism in no form, who stand in the manhood of Jesus Christ, will with Him reign forever. Those who submit to this present world and its spirit will pass with it into oblivion. The great question of each and all is the right relation to the King of the Universe.