Heaping Together Treasures.
By Editor
In the Century for February is an article—"Topics for the Times"—which truthfully characterizes much of the extensive money-getting of the present day as systematized and legalized robbery. If any one will read the following extract from the article, and turn to the fifth chapter of James, and read that, he can scarcely fail to be struck with the graphic manner in which the treasure-heaping process is there described. The scene is there laid in "the last days," when the "coming of the Lord draweth nigh":— "Of the gigantic fortunes now held in this country, not a few have been gotten by legal robbery. Twenty years ago our millionaires could be counted almost on the fingers of our hands. To-day their enumeration would carry us into thousands. Since the new system of robbery was perfected, about twenty men have amassed fortunes, which taken together, exceed the debt of the nation. Twenty years ago many of these men were poor. Some of the new millionaires have grown rich honestly, but some of them have led a raid upon the production and the accumulated wealth of the country. So Napoleonic in its boldness and success has been the method of the master robbers, that rich men of better instincts have been dazzled by it, and have adopted it openly and independently, or have lent indirect co-operation and social credit to the robber-chiefs, and have shared in the plunder. Men of honorable reputations, who have been crowned with public honors, have countenanced these crimes as affording the surest way of adding to their unsatisfying fortunes of ten, twenty, or thirty millions. It is by no means our purpose to throw discredit upon the pursuit of wealth. Honest production, and the honest gains of wealth that is employed in the service of society, are the bulwarks of civilization. But we do say that examples of private greed are sapping the sources of public honor; examples of gigantic and countenanced robbery are undermining the foundations of public morality and corrupting the national character. "Our legislators have failed to see, or for private and corrupt reasons have winked at the fact, that the laws which were made to fit old-fashioned ideas of honor and morality, instead of protecting the public, are the strength and the protection of dishonest men. The old code of commercial honor is lost sight of in the complex transactions of stock-jobbers, who remain out of sight while their work is being done by scienceless factors; by lawyers skilled in discovering loop-holes in the law and in juggling with the law; by lobbies with money at the doors of legislatures; by paper shares and paper promises to pay; by cipher messages and spies, and by abusing the facilities of stock exchanges."