p. 8 | ONE MAN OWNERSHIP

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 5, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 23.

ONE MAN OWNERSHIP.

The Springfield Republican quotes a little speech from Mr. John D. Rockefeller at a Fifth-avenue Sunday-school, in which he said:—

“I am engaged in a business that for thirty years has paid out each working day an average of $60,000 or $70,000 in money, or about $22,000,000 or $23,000,000 each year to laboring men. For thirty years of the forty that I was in that particular business, the aggregate so paid was between $600,000,000 and $700,000,000. And that I regard as the best kind of giving.”

But the Republican queries whether Mr. Rockefeller’s fortune is not as much a gift from those who labored to produce it. That paper says:—

“Mr. Rockefeller is credited with owning a majority of the stock of the Standard Oil Company. This stock now has a market value of over $800,000,000, of which nearly $300,000,000 has been added on since the November election. If he owns nothing else whatever, he must therefore be worth some $400,000,000, and his share of the Standard Oil employment or wages paid during thirty years we may thus place at say $350,000,000, and his share of the average number of workmen employed must have been about 20,000. Hence it is made to appear that while paying out $350,000,000 to 20,000 men, he has paid to one man, himself, some $400,000,000, and under these circumstances he might well choose some other subject for a public address than the credit still due him for giving honest work to other men. It smacks too much of an assumption of one-man ownership, not only of the bounties of nature, but of everybody dependent thereon. The great captains of industry fill a needful place and perform valuable services, for which, in many cases, they are vastly overpaid; but when they presume, as apparently in this case, to be the primary creators of wealth and work, and that there would be no work without them, they arrogate just a trifle too much to themselves.”

But one-man ownership of all things is the spirit of the natural man; it is the ambition which ruled Lucifer. Mr. Rockefeller is not alone in the ambition.