The Mason County journal. [volume] (Shelton, W.T.) 1886-1927, 1894-11-30

formers, and other classes Of agitators
who claim as their purpose the i'm
provement of the condition of the
toiling masses, make great mistake
in their indiscriminate attacks upon
wealthy men. They assume that all
large fortunes have been wrongfully
wrung from labor and that they are
detrimental to the general welfare of
the community. Now there are rich
men who have made their fortunes by
superior ability and enterprise with
out in any way robbing the public or
expressing the poor. Their possession
enables them to aid charities, church
es and various movements for the gen.
eral good. But there is also another
class of rich men who have amassed
fortunes by obtaining some sort of
power to tax the community unduly.
AS an example eff this latter class let
us take a man who has obtained as q
gratuity from some growing town an
exclusive gas franchise, water fran
chise or street railway franchise. He
capitalizes the franchise which he gets
for nothing at an imaginary value,
issues bonds to that in addition to the
actual Of constructing his plant and
then sits down and makes the public
pay for the service he gives a sufficient
sum annually to yield interest, not
only on the money actually invested
invested in the plant, but also upon
the supposed value of what the pub
lie has given him for nothing in his
exclusive right to occupy the streets
with his pipe or rails. Such a man is
bird of prey and there are a great
many of them in this country.
Society has right to put stop to
the building up of great fortunes in
this way.
Let us now take an example of the
other class of men of wealth. An
energetic man possessed of good
business faculties observes an out
cropping of stone. He carefully ex-
amines it quality and notes it's loca-
ton in relation to railways and to
growing towns where stone will be
needed. He buys the land, opens the
quarry, employs a hundred men, paws
a good price for labor, and in the
course of ten or fifteen years, enlarg-
ing his business and making prudent
investments of his savings, he becomes
rich man. Has he injured anybody
by accommodating his wealth? Has he
robbed or taxed the public for his pri-
vate gain? He has sold his product
IN competitive market for what it
would bring. He has paid the rates
demanded as wages by the union of
stonecutters. 1t is absurd to say that
such man should come in for a
share of the eXecratlOn which the self
styled refOrmers are all the time aim
ing at the rich. Instead of public
enemy this man is a public benefactor.
By his foresight and enterprise he has
converted the stone that formerly Law
hidden and useless in the ground into
food, clothing, shelter, fuel and null
titude of comforts and Injuries for a
hundred labocing men and their
families.
The error of the men who think
they have a heavenly call to reform
the social order is that they never dis
criminate. They make a general as
sault upon capital as if capital were
in itself an evil instead of good
thing. They assail rich men as a
class merely because they are rich,
without without reference to the
means by which their wealth was OBJ
tanned or the ways in which they use
it. Thus they discredit themselves
and their arguments with people of
sense. Every right thinking person
knows that a rich man is not necessa-
rily robber. He knows that the
well-to-do people in any community
will size up pretty we'll on the score of
character, morals, kindness and hui
manity with the people who have
little or nothing Most of them gain
ed their property by superior business
ability and not by greed and voraci-
ty.-Northwest Magazine