A FIFTEEN-THOUSAND-DOLLAR DINNER.
By T.
On January 27, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, 966 persons, mostly millionaires, participated in the third annual banquet of the National Association of Manufacturers. The gentlemen present represented a thousand million dollars of wealth. The dinner is said to have cost $15,000. The hotel in which the banquet was held is one of the most magnificently finished, decorated, and furnished structures in the world. The cost of this luxurious building was $10,000,000—a fitting banquet-hall indeed for the possessors of such vast wealth. It is a striking coincidence that the same New York papers which reported this splendid banquet, should also report the poverty that is occasioning the strikes among the cotton mills in New England. The report states that on investigation one man was found to be earning only $3.72 a week. Another could earn $4.20 a week. Two others, one of whom was married, earned only $3.00 each a week. A father of four children was working for $4.40 a week. His wife also was working and earned $3.79 a week. Such wages are certainly low enough to cause the question to be honestly asked, How can people live on such small amounts? And yet it was proposed to make a cut on this already meager pay. Representatives from the owners of these cotton mills must have been among the banqueters in New York. And who can conceive of a more striking contrast between wanton luxury on the one hand and almost hopeless destitution on the other? And how well it would be for the enormously wealthy, if, instead of planning to add to their millions that they now have, they would stop to consider and profit by a most remarkable Scripture admonition before it is too late! The scripture reads:— “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for [R. V., in] the last days. 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. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.” James 5: 1–6.
Observe the clearness of this scripture. The fact is plainly stated, “Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.” How forcible! Not merely an ordinary amount of wealth is acquired, but “treasure” is “heaped” together. And the text also says that it is “for the last days.” The Revised Version translates it, “in the last days.” And by what means is this “treasure” thus “heaped together”? Let Him before whose tribunal all the world is soon to be summoned make the answer: “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.” This text tells in no uncertain language to any one who will listen to it just what “this widening breach between capital and labor” means. It is one of the unmistakable tokens that we are in the “last days.” And if any one feels that he is under the crushing heel of wealth, instead of resorting to forceful measures for relief, let him be consoled by the promise that already his “cries” “are entered into the ears of the Lord of hosts.” And ever should we pray for the oppressing rich that they may turn from their evil before it is necessary for the divine decree to be pronounced, “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.”