Prodigality and Wastefulness
IT is asserted, on good authority, that the taxes of the world have been doubled since 1897. The bonded indebtedness of the world, largely for war preparations, is in round numbers $37,000,000,000. When the war in Europe is over, this sum will certainly be increased from one fourth to one half or more. Referring to this condition of increasing debt, Dr. Jordan says that “instead of living beyond our means, we are living beyond the means of the fourth generation,” and then he adds, “There is certainly a dangerous portent in a prosperity that rests on taxing the future, and in the steady inflation of values, because we waste so large a percentage of all our increments of effort.” And the doctor quotes Leroy-Beaulieu as having declared that “the world has rarely before been so badly governed. Its financial affairs are ‘in the hands of incurable prodigals and improvident experimenters.’” Statements of this character coming from men who are making no particular study of the prophecies, and who therefore can not be said to be trying to make out a case, are strikingly significant when placed alongside such utterances as we find in the fifth chapter of James, where the prophet calls attention to the heaping together of treasure in the last days, and to the wanton prodigalities and extravagant luxuries of those who are spending their money in sensual pleasures without any realizing sense of the conditions into which they are plunging the world. Men may justly be alarmed over what is confronting us, particularly in the field of finance, where so much is involved in the rapidly increasing debts of the leading cities, as well as of the nations in which these cities are located. Much of this increasing debt in cities is due to downright dishonesty. Everybody recognizes and deplores this fact. Much of the increasing debt of the nations is due to the preparations for war. Such things can not continue without world-wide bankruptcy and world-wide ruin. Some men try to get comfort out of the thought that similar conditions have existed in the world before, and that regardless of the evil portents, the world has always moved along in some way, and risen above it. But as was recently stated by Mr. Balfour at the lord mayor’s banquet in London, “We live in times for which there is no precedent.” This is literally true. History furnishes no precedent whatever for the times in which we are living. Never before was the world a single neighborhood through the instrumentalities of the telegraph, the railroad, and the steamship; and our problems to-day are not neighborhood problems, but world problems. It behooves the sober-minded people of this generation to think; and the more they think, the more they will recognize the fact that there is no light ahead for us unless we can find it through the inspired prophets, who were enabled by divine vision to pierce the future. But turning to these, the future is all lighted up, and we may know, if we will, what the conditions of this time portend, and what will be the outcome.