Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
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eloquently described as "the progress of civilization," as "material prosperity," and "unexampled wealth," or, more modestly, as "the rise of the industrial middle class," becomes, when we look into it with eyes purged from economic delusions, the creation of a "lower and lowest" class, without land of their own, without homes, tools or property beyond the strength of their hands; whose lot is more helplessly wretched than any poet of the Inferno has yet imagined. Sunk in the mire of ignorance, want and immorality, they seem to have for their only gospel the emphatic words attributed to Mr. Ruskin: "If there is a next world they _will_ be damned; and if there is none, they are damned already." .--- Have all these things come to pass that the keeper of a whisky-shop in California may grow rich on the spoils of drunken miners,
and great financiers dictate peace and war to venerable European monarchies? The most degraded superstition that ever called itself religion has not preached such a dogma as this. It falls below fetichism. The worship of the almighty dollar, incarnate in the self-made capitalist, is a deification at which Vespasian himself, with his "_Ut puto, deus fio_," would stare and gasp.
"And this remarkable article concludes with these words of prophecy:
The agrarian difficulties of Russia, France, Italy, Ireland, and of wealthy England, show us that ere long the urban and the rural populations will be standing in the same camp. They will be demanding the abolition of that great and scandalous paradox whereby, though production has increased three or four times as much as the mouths it should fill, those mouths are empty. The backs it should clothe are naked; the heads it should shelter, homeless; the brains it should feed, dull or criminal, and the souls it should help to save, brutish. Surely it is time that science, morality and religion should speak out. A great change is coming. It is even now at our doors. Ought not men of good will to consider how they shall receive it, so that its coming may be peaceable?
"And here," Max added, "is the great work of Prof. Scheligan, inwhich he quotes from _The Forum_, of December, 1889, p. 464, aterrible story of the robberies practiced on the farmers by railroadcompanies and money-lenders. The railroads in 1882 took, he tells us,one-half of the entire wheat crop of Kansas to carry the other halfto market! In the thirty-eight years following 1850 the railroadinterest of the United States increased 1580 per cent.; the bankinginterest 918 per cent., and the farming interest only 252 per cent. Aman named Thomas G. Shearman showed, in 1889, that 100,000 persons inthe United States would, in thirty years, at the rate at which wealthwas being concentrated in the hands of the few, own _three-fifths ofall the property of the entire country_. The _American Economist_asserted, in 1889, that in twenty-five years the number of people inthe United States who owned their own homes had fallen fromfive-eighths to three-eighths. A paper called _The Progress_, ofBoston, in 1889, gave the following significant and prophetic figures:
The eloquent Patrick Henry said: "We can only judge the future by the past."
Look at the past:
When Egypt went down 2 per cent. of her population owned 97 per cent. of her wealth. The people were starved to death.
When Babylon went down 2 per cent. of her population owned all the wealth. The people were starved to death.
When Persia went down 1 per cent. of her population owned the land.
When Rome went down 1,800 men owned all the known world.
There are about 40,000,000 people in England, Ireland and Wales, and 100,000 people own all the land in the United Kingdom.
For the past twenty years the United States has rapidly followed in the steps of these old nations. Here are the figures:
In 1850 capitalists owned 371/2 per cent. of the nation's wealth.
In 1870 they owned 63 percent.
"In 1889, out of 1,500,000 people living in New York City, 1,100,000dwelt in tenement-houses.
"At the same time farm-lands, east and west, had fallen, intwenty-five years, to one-third or one-half their cost. StateAssessor Wood, of New York, declared, in 1889, that, in his opinion,'in a few decades _there will be none but tenant farmers in thisState_.'
"In 1889 the farm mortgages in the Western States amounted to threebillion four hundred and twenty-two million dollars."
"Did these wonderful utterances and most significant statistics," Iasked, "produce no effect on that age?"
"None at all," he replied. "'Wisdom cries in the streets, and no manregards her.' The small voice of Philosophy was unheard amid theblare of the trumpets that heralded successful knavery; the rabbleran headlong to the devil after gauds and tinsel."
"Have there been," I asked, "no later notes of warning of the comingcatastrophe?"
"Oh, yes," he replied; "ten thousand. All through the past centurythe best and noblest of each generation, wherever and whenever theycould find newspapers or magazines that dared to publish theirutterances, poured forth, in the same earnest tones, similarprophecies and appeals. But in vain. Each generation found thecondition of things more desperate and hopeless: every yearmultiplied the calamities of the world. The fools could not see thata great cause must continue to operate until checked by some higherpower. And here there was no higher power that desired to check it.As the domination and arrogance of the ruling class increased, thecapacity of the lower classes to resist, within the limits of law andconstitution, decreased. Every avenue, in fact, was blocked bycorruption. juries, courts, legislatures, congresses, they were as ifthey were not. The people were walled in by impassable barriers.Nothing was left them but the primal, brute instincts of the animalman, and upon these they fell back, and the Brotherhood ofDestruction arose. But no words can tell the sufferings that havebeen endured by the good men, here and there, who, during the pastcentury, tried to save mankind. Some were simply ostracised fromsocial intercourse with their caste; others were deprived of theirmeans of living and forced down into the ranks of the wretched; andstill others"--and here, I observed, his face grew ashy pale, and themuscles about his mouth twitched nervously--"still others had theirliberty sworn away by purchased perjury, and were consigned toprisons, where they still languish, dressed in the hideous garb ofignominy, and performing the vile tasks of felons." After a pause,for I saw he was strangely disturbed, I said to him:
"How comes it that the people have so long submitted to these greatwrongs? Did they not resist?"
"They did," he replied; "but the fruit of the tree of evil was notyet ripe. At the close of the nineteenth century, in all the greatcities of America, there was a terrible outbreak of the workingmen;they destroyed much property and many lives, and held possession ofthe cities for several days. But the national government called forvolunteers, and hundreds of thousands of warlike young men, sons offarmers, sprang to arms: and, after several terrible battles, theysuppressed the revolution, with the slaughter of tens of thousands ofthose who took part in it; while afterwards the revengeful Oligarchysent thousands of others to the gallows. And since then, in Europeand America, there have been other outbreaks, but all of themterminated in the same way. The condition of the world has, however,steadily grown worse and worse; the laboring classes have become moreand more desperate. The farmers' sons could, for generations, becounted upon to fight the workmen; but the fruit has been steadilyripening. Now the yeomanry have lost possession of their lands; theirfarms have been sold under their feet; cunning laws transferred thefruit of their industry into the pockets of great combinations, wholoaned it back to them again, secured by mortgages; and, as thepressure of the same robbery still continued, they at last lost theirhomes by means of the very wealth they had themselves produced. Now asingle nabob owns a whole county; and a state is divided between afew great loan associations; and the men who once tilled the fields,as their owners, are driven to the cities to swell the cohorts of themiserable, or remain on the land a wretched peasantry, to cont
end forthe means of life with vile hordes of Mongolian coolies. And all thisin sight of the ruins of the handsome homes their ancestors onceoccupied! Hence the materials for armies have disappeared. Humangreed has eaten away the very foundations on which it stood. And ofthe farmers who still remain nearly all are now members of ourBrotherhood. When the Great Day comes, and the nation sends forth itscall for volunteers, as in the past, that cry will echo in desolateplaces; or it will ring through the triumphant hearts of savage anddesperate men who are hastening to the banquet of blood anddestruction. And the wretched, yellow, under-fed coolies, withwomen's garments over their effeminate limbs, will not have thecourage or the desire or the capacity to make soldiers and defendtheir oppressors."
"But have not the Oligarchy standing