The Growing Wealth Inequality
By W. N. G.
In a speech delivered in the United States Senate in 1891, Mr. John J. Ingalls drew this truthful picture of the financial situation in this country:— “By some means, some device, some machination, some incantation, honest or otherwise, some process that can not be defined, less than the two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession—and have kept out of the penitentiary, in spite of the means they have adopted to acquire it—of more than one-half of the entire accumulated wealth of the country. That is not the worst, Mr. President. It has chiefly been acquired by men who have contributed little to the material welfare of the country, and by processes I do not care in appropriate terms to describe. A financial system under which more than one-half of the enormous wealth of the country, derived from the bounty of nature and the labor of all, is owned by a little more than 30,000 people, while 1,000,000 American citizens, able and willing to toil, are homeless tramps, starving for bread, requires adjustment. A social system which offers to tender virtuous and dependent women the alternative between beggary, prostitution, and suicide, is organized crime, for which some day unrelenting justice will demand atonement and expiation.” It is also true that from the day of that utterance to the present time, the situation has been growing worse and worse, notwithstanding the fact that the government has been making more and more religious pretension. Within that period we have had the “Christian nation” pretension uttered by the Supreme Court; we have had the Sunday closing of the Chicago Exposition pretension by Congress; we have had the declaration by Congress that Sunday is the Sabbath of the fourth commandment; and we have had the Supreme Court’s decision that the most tyrannical of all the state Sunday laws is constitutional. In this last act especially we have the direct refusal of the government to sustain its citizens in their religious rights. In all these things we see it demonstrated that the more religious pretension there is on the part of the government, the more tyranny and oppression prevail in every walk of life, and “evil men and seducers wax worse and worse.” W. N. G.