p. 10 | THE OUTLOOK by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 19, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 15.

THE OUTLOOK

By Editor

Watchman, what of the night?

Predatory Wealth—I

THE constant revelations in various quarters of our country do not indicate by any means that the millennium of honesty is at hand. There has just closed the suit of the Government against the oil trust before the Supreme Court of the United States. In his closing speech, Frank B. Kellogg, the counsel for the Government, declared that if the oil trust was sustained, great danger menaced the Government. He said:

"Let them combine, and let them use their money as they please, and I believe that this company and others like it will control the industrial affairs of this country before ten years have gone by; yes, before five years have passed; and if you remove the fear of the law, they will combine; they will control the country. We talk of the greatness of our country. What makes it great? Is it the trusts and their money?—No, it is the individual; thousands of individuals, each striving for himself and for his own progress, with the star of hope before him to lead him on. Take away that hope, give the corporations control, and you will have Socialism, and then anarchy and worse."

The next day the attorney-general of the United States, Wickersham, made his plea. His final word was, "It seems to me that if ever there was or could be a combination in restraint of trade, a combination for all time with a monopoly in perpetuity, it is before your honors now."

Mr. Wickersham besought the court "to root up this gigantic monopoly that threatens the very life of the nation, and to tear from it the fruits of its fraud."

Right upon this comes the report of the tobacco trust which is endeavoring to control not simply tobacco, but chemicals as well. It too is being prosecuted by the United States Government as an illegal combination in restraint of trade; but its net earnings for 1909 were given as $30,448,384 as compared with $28,700,000 the year before. After eliminating interest, etc., there remains over $20,000,000, or more than fifty per cent of dividend on the $40,000,000 of common stock outstanding.

It is such trusts as these, piling up their immense wealth, which are doing their part to the unsettling of stable conditions and arousing enmity in the hearts of men. Some of them stop at no schemes that will add to their profit. They purchase congressmen, legislators, councilmen. Take for instance conditions in our large cities. This has been demonstrated over and over again, until the nation is sick of it. Note the corruption in city councils which have been purchased by great monopolies. We have before us Pittsburg, at the present time, where threescore of councilmen have been indicted as guilty of receiving bribes. And the same charges are made, open and emphatic, in regard to cities without number throughout the entire United States. These evils are not confined to the New World. They are manifest in the Old World as well. Witness the same condition of Paris at the present time, and the revelations concerning the robbery of the government and of various classes in the misappropriation of funds from the confiscation of church property under the law. It would have been a mighty blessing indeed if the flood could have washed out that iniquity, but it takes a different cleansing than Seine water to do it.

The remedy for these things might be found in laws for the individual, not for trusts or institutions or combinations, but for the benefit of the individual man, faithfully administered. Such laws would prohibit all of these combinations in restraint of trade, and would necessarily make much more difficult the piling up of the great fortunes by which men are bought and sold. The selfishness of man's nature is always to combine and increase and gather for himself, and from this there is no political remedy which can save. The only remedy is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and that same Gospel in sure prediction tells us that the remedy for the world's ills lies in the second coming of Christ, of which the great heaping up and misuse of wealth are evidences of the near approach. James 5:1-8.