The Indiana State sentinel. [volume] (Indianapolis) 1868-1895, 1892-05-04

ont of the great American doll baby. The
celebration of American liberty is a mock
erv.
Thirty years ago one could count the
men of this country who owned a million
dollars on ones finger tips. Today there
are seventy fortunes in the United States
OF more than twenty millions each. Peo-
pie with only a million or two OF dollars
each are numbered by the thousands.
The city of Chicago has over 200 persons
with
Fortunes of One to Fifty Millions Each
A local paper points with pride to the
fact that every dollar of the wealth of
these gentlemen has been made within
the past fifteen years.
The city by the Golden Gate furnishes
illustrations even more striking of this
commendable rapidity. A citizen with
only few hundred thousand dollars has
made two millions in day.
New York furnishes a still more striking
illustration. Six months before his death,
it was known in the commercial world
that, by the shrinkage of values, Commo-
dore Vanderbilt had lost nearly fifty mil
face of that dread hour which swung be-
hind him the gates of earthly fortune, the
great Millionaire, by a single gigantic
stroke, regsined the lost stake. Hanging
to life bv the evelds, he quietly manipu-
lated few railroads. game he we'll I'M
derstood He secretly depressed the value
of their stocks Then he sent agents into
the market TO buy them up at wholesale.
The stock, being in demand, rose to IN
precedented worth. Then Croesus un-
loaded astonshed the world, and died
with the greatest private fortune known
TO history intact
This is what a diving man can do in New
York under the laws OF American indus
try. But the fifty millions in the purse of
the Millionaire represented the wreck of
the little fortunes of thousand innocent
men and women, while IA hundred gam
blers of Wall-st. fattened on the spoils.
Our present system Of national economy
has given to millionaire gamblers and rail
road monarchs the power to lay an en-
barge on the wheat fields of the prairies,
and with a stroke of the pen to make fam
inc crouch in the streets OF our cities. 1t
has made tender women toll for the pit
lance of beggars, or flee TO prostitution for
bread 1t has made 100000 of social
lists on American soil. 1t has made the
anarchist and tramp IL has handed over
10 merciiess corporations the gigantic in
dustries of the nation. 1t has enfeebled
the sense of national honor 1t has made
pillage for private greed of the resources
of mighty and generous people. 1t has
kidnapped Tor monopoly the government
of the United states.
30 much for eighteenth-century political
economy in nineteenth-century civiliza-
= l. & ....sf 4 4.
serts in the dawn OF the twentieth century
that
Man Is Merchandise
his heart and brain to be bought and sold
in the cheapest market, like bundle of
old furs.
An eloquent pen has written: 1t is the
morality of the Roman coliseum. II that
savage arena they pitted man against his
fellows to struggle with grievous and
CHASTITY wounds to the death. When the
gladiator fell he hailed the bloody tyrant
who had devoted his death, "Morituri to
saludamus Cesar" That, too, is the cry
of the dying workingman to the Cesar of
civilization as he falls in the murderous
coliseum OF competitive labor-men pitted
against their fellows by the alternative of
life or death-men pitted, by the struggle
for bread, against steam and steel-a
thousand times more pitiless than the
steel of the Romans.
That struggle filled tho arena OF holt
day; ours Is the perpetual conflict over. the
amphitheater of a continent
The Christian cannot accuse the pagan.
The murder OF his civilization is slower;
its method is finer. It's horrors are tenn
pered to the sensitive nerves of genera
ton whose lips are moist with the profess
sions of the doctrine of the lowly Nazar-
inc; but beneath this thing called modern
civilization-beneath this travesty Of
science that names itself industrial com
petition-there lies a barbarism more pa
gan. a stupidity that is infinite
Victor Hugo said:' "The paradise Of the
rich is the hell OF the poor" Under the
American flag there should be no hungry
men. On American soil there should be
no want
The millions of thinking men and
women who have begun to make answer
say that this state OF things has a cure,
and that this cure is for each man to give
his labor to his fellow-man, and TO take
from the common product of labor the
means for his own life