Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-03-16
JUsTUs scHwAB AND MODERN coE-
MUEISM.


fate of the Russian Emperor was nothing
less than a warning to those Americans
who have incurred the deadly hostility of
the Schwabites by prospecting and acquir-
ing great wealth Such men, he implied,
as Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, were marked
out for destruction, and their day of grace
would be short. We have no doubt that
scores of thousands of people read those
statements yesterday with mingled disgust
and contempt. We have no doubt that
numbers Of men who are proud to regard
themselves as patriots and reformers, and
who believe that it is becoming necessary
in some way to curb the influence of the
wealthy minority of operators and capt
talists, failed, in reading of Justus Schwab,
to recognize any point of contact between
the purposes of the class represented by
that staggering rufian, and the purposes
which they themselves are pursuing.
1t is equally certain that ii it had been
revealed to the French Encyclopedias
century ago, that the agencies they were
employing so exultingly and with so i'm
plicit faith in their benefcence, would
produce the Reign of Terror, and lead up,
through anarchy and national ruin, to a
sterner despotism than ever, they would
have shrunk amazed and incredulous
from the prospect, and would have dis
claimed all kinship with such tendencies
and such results. Could Rousseau have
| known that his sentimental humanitarian
ism would have been invoked to justify
the noyades of Carriere, the massacres Of the
Prisons, and the prolonged butcheries of
the Place de Greve, he, too. would have
scoffed at the prediction. But the men
who cow the seeds of revolutions are never
the men who reap the harvest, and it is
very seldom that the sewers know what
manner of crop they are preparing.
Justus Schwab may very well be taken
to represent the element of reckless destruc-
tiveness which always comes to the front
when the season of discussion has cul-
minated, when popular passion has been
thoroughly heated, and when the higher
intelligences which wrought the conversion
have at last lost their hold upon the
masses He stands for the Commune as
it appeared at Paris in 1893, and again in
1871. To-day, perhaps, this element is
comfortable, though it must be pointed out
that whoever suggests assassination as a
right and justifable resort is public
enemy, inasmuch as there are everywhere
weak and infammable natures capable of
being spurred on to crime by such sinister
suggestions. The man who talks of assas.
sination and couples the names of promi-
nent citizens with such talk, is mis-
chievous scoundrel, and ought to be in
dicted. But it is not the Justus Schwabs
from whom at present the main danger
proceeds. Their time has not yet come.
It is the well-meaning men who under the
specious disguise of public spirit are at
lacking the foundation principles of civil.
lied society, who are to be feared.
Nothing is SO easy as to promote agita-
ton against the rich. The reason of this
lies on the surface. The protest of human
nature against the inequalities Of condi-
tion, of capacity, of opportunity, is unceas.
ing, and where political power resides in
the masses there is always more or less dis
position to employ this power for the pur-
pose OF redressing the balance, or attempt
ing to redress it. The leaven of social
antagonism between the poor and rich
which destroyed the republics of Greece, ex-
lists to-day in American society, and it can
be so dealt with as to make it leaven the
whole nation. The nature of our institu.
tions renders it unavoidable that those who
seek political elevation should constantly
fatter the majority, should constantly re-
mind them of their sovereignty, and should
perpetually assure them that their will is
the supreme law of the land. And to-day
the tendency of this vast machinery of
| demagogism is toward the stimulation of
all the latent antagonism between the poor
and the rich. The very institutions upon
which our fathers most prided themselves,
the very liberty whose establishment they
regarded as their browning triumph, these
are now assailed under the pretext that the
public well-being demands such policy,
and propositions are advanced the adoption
of which would instantly destroy the SYM
metry of the political fabric, and insure its
swift collapse.
It has in years gone by been the not
vainglorious boast of Americans that their
institutions afforded free play to all hu.
man aspirations; that under these institu-
lions men could shape their own destinies
that no inequalities existed but such
as came from natural superiority; that
every prosperous citizen of this republic
was in the broad sense of the term self
made. But now a change has passed over
| the popular view, and all these ideas ap.
pear to be fading out of sight. To-day it
is claimed that the republic is menaced by
an excess of freedom that citizens are
developing, through a too sagacious use of
their opportunities, overshadowing power
that the free play of ability and enterprise
needs to be curtailed and restricted ; and
in fine that the people are somehow JUST.
fed in resuming possessions which are be-
coming too considerable to be safely held
by individuals. This is the doctrine of
con6scation, however concealed, and it is
a doctrine which has already found recog-
milton not alone upon the stump, not alone
in the wild debates of socialist clubs, but
in the decisions of the court of last resort,
the grave and dignifed Supreme Court of
the United States.
| But such doctrine, once admitted, can
not be prevented from spreading beyond
all original anticipation. With the ter
ribly elastic theory of popular sovereignty
behind it, rendered more formidable by the
Interpretation of demagogism, there is prac-
tically no limit to its extension. With a
political system ever increasing In corrup-