The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1893-06-23
A GREAT QUESTION.
Ex-senator Ingalls, Discusses the
Social Malady.
The Poverty of the Poor Not Due to the
Wealth of the Rich. Nor Is the
Laborer Robbed by the EN-
ployment OF Capital

so substantial and palpable, so positive
and so readily apprehended as that
which accompanies and results from
the possession of money. The desire
for money is the most constant and
universal passion among men; not al
ways-seldom, perhaps-for its own
sake, but for its consequences, its eff
fects. what il commands and what it
brings. Millions care nothing for liter
airy fame, for the rewards of ambition,
for military glory, but every body wants
money. Manhood disregards the joys
of youth and age sinks into apathy that
is Indifferent alike to the pleasures of
love and the Civilizations of success, but
the need of money survives the decay
of the faculties and ends only with life.
Money intelligently employed means
cultivated leisure, books, travel, music,
congenial companionship. art, agree
able occupation, the delight of the
senses the best food and apparel, the
comfort and happiness of those beloved,
the felicity of benevolence and charity,
the relief of suffering, the power of do
ing good. skilled nurture in illness, con-
ISOLATION in bereavement and superiority
to the minor accidents of existence.
''Old age and poverty" says Shaks-
peare, "are an ill-matched pair" and
at any stage nothing is so melancholy,
SO wretched and depressing, as hope
less and helpless poverty. The man
whose daily bread for himself and his
family depends upon wages that an
employer may give or withhold at
pleasure. is not free. The alternative
between starvation and submission to
a schedule is slavery. Liberty is some
thing more than a name. He who de-
ponds upon the will of another for
shelter, clothing and food cannot be a
free man in the broad, full meaning of
that word. Freedom does not consist
in definitions. The declaration that
life, liberty and the pursuit of happi-
ness are the inalienable rights of every
human being makes no man independ-
emit The right to liberty is an empty
mockery and delusion, unless the power
to be free exists also. Freedom is not
merely the removal of legal re-
straints, the permission to come
or go Added to these must be
the capacity and the opportunity,
which only exemption from the
necessity of incessant daily labor can
bring. To paraphrase Shakespeare,
poverty and liberty are an ill-matched
pair. Freedom and dependence are in
compatible. The abolition of poverty
has been the dream of Missionaries and
the hope of philanthropists from the
dawn of time. The inequality of for
tunes and the obvious injustice of the
unequal distribution of wealth among
men have been the perplexity of philos-
ophers. 1t is the unsolved enigma of
political economy. Civilization has no
paradox SO mysterious as the existence
of hunger when there is an excess of
food-of want in the midst of superflu-
ity. That one man should have posses
sions beyond the capacity of extrav-
agance to squander and another, able
and willing to work, should perish for
want of embers, rags and a crust, rem
ders society unintelligible. 1t makes
the charter of human rights logo
griph. So long as such conditions con-
tinue. the key to the cipher in which
destiny is written is not revealed-the
brotherhood of man is phrase, justice
is a formula and the divine code is
illegible.
The evaporation of the poor at the
insolent ostentation of the rich has
overthrown empires. The relief of the
needy has been the object of statutes
human and divine. The complaints of
the wretched are the burden of history.
Job was a millionaire. Whether that
incompatible production bearing his
name rs parable or a biography, it is
of profound interest, because it shows
that the patriarch was occupied with
the same questions that disturb us
now. He describes, like a populist,
those who take the ass of the orphan
and the OK of the widow, remove the
landmarks, reap the fields and gather
the vintage of the poor, whom they de-
prive of their garments and leave naked
to the showers of the mountain and
the shelter of the rocks. The He
brew prophets reserved some of their
choicest maledictions for the extortions
and luxury of the rich, and Moses pre-
scribed regulations for the remission of
debts, the redistribution of lands and
the restriction of private fortunes. In
Rome. for centuries, the ownership of
real estate was limited to about 800
acres to each citizen, and the number
of cattle and slaves restricted to the
area cultivated. But the laws given by
the Almighty, through Moses, to the
Jews were as imperative as the codes
of Lycurgus and Licinius against the
indomitable energies of man and the
organic conditions of his being. At
the time of Cesar 1000 plutocrats prac-
tically owned the Roman empire, and
more than 500, 900 heads of families were
mendicants, supported by donations
from the public treasury. The same
struggle has continued through the
middle ages into the nineteenth CEN
tury. There is no remedy prescribed
to-day that has not been Intellectually
administered to innumerable patients
before; no experiment in finance and
political economy proposed that has
not been repeatedly tried, with no re-
suit but individual disaster and ma
tional ruin.
To admit that the ignorance, wretch
edness. disease, want, poverty and
degradation of society are inevitable
and irremediable is to impeach God.
To repeat the vain and paltry ex-
pedients which the experience of CEN
turtles has rejected as frivolous chimeras
and vagaries, is to acknowledge that
civilization is a failure and that mans
only refuge from the inirmities and
obstacles of his nature is in barbarisIn,
the equality of the savage, where all
fortunes and stations and conditions
are reduced to the level of the lowest
by the irresistible gravitation Of its