Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1900-12-07
DOLLAR ABOVE ALL
BISHOP POTTER POINTS OUT
EVILS OF GREED FOR
MONEY
COMMENTARY ON TENDENCIES.
'.Divorce, Crime and Corruption in All
Our Cities Have One Root, the
Lust for Money

New York, Dec. 7.-Bisnop Potter lee
tIred last night at New Haven, on
Wealth and Commonwealth
II choose this subject because of it's
paramount Importance" he said. ''Di-
Norce, crime and corruption in all our
cities have one root, the lust of money.
IAe one eager. dominant hunger which
salutes us from one end to another of
our broad land is the passion. the hum
ger, the greed of gain.
challenge what method you will. in
the complicated web of our Industrial.
political or social life. and you will find
the question of gain behind. Listen to
what scandal you may in the haunts of
politicians, in camps of soldiers, in the
halls of fashion, the final standard in
the whole business may be expressed
by a dollar mark.
Listen to the talk of children as they
measure and compare the elders. Hear
a group of young girls, whose fresh
youth one would think ought in the
matter of their most tender and sacred
affections to be as free from sordid in
stinct as from the faint of a goddess
cNnic.sm, and you will find that they
have their price and are not to be had
without it any more than a circus. or a
slave in the market of Bagdad.
Go where you may, talk with whom
you will, the clergy estimating the
promise of a field for spiritual labor.
With a woman rating the claims of other
women upon their social recognition,
with heads of great universities para
lyzed with fright lest the indiscretions
Of some outspoken professor who tells
his age, the truth in an hour when it
sorely needs it. shall cut down the rev
enues of the college. 1t is no matter.
the commercial question is at the bot
tom of it and decides usually all the
others.
I'VE read the other day Of a woman at
the horse show whose attire was a dress
made of tn skins of unborn lambs. What
do you think of such a thing. Is this
not a relic of barbarism? The situa-
ton, grave and threatening as it is to all
that is best in a nations life. is the re-
suit of causes that are not far to seek.
They are to be found in the spirit of
the age, in the conditions of our ma
tional life and in the standard of our
personal values.
w may shout till VIZ are black in the
face that we are the greatest and
braNest, the biggest and strongest anu
the richest nation in christendom, but
there comes a strange awe in the heart
a. We turn back ana read of what kind
OF stuff the first Corners to these shores
mainly We're.
In England a man of science dis
covers an antiseptic dressing for gun
shot wounds, another discovers a star,
another the mysteries of deep sounding
and these are lifted presently to the
peerase. Here men of science deive and
oiscovr and enrich their age and we dis
tinguish them too often only by disput-
ing their achievements or by r~eproach-
ing without reWarding them. If ma
terial wealth be the end of being. if ac-
emulation be the worthiest aim of hui
man ambition. if the palaces or the buy
ing of legislatures be the final and high
est distinction possible to modern man
hood, then we must needs look them in
the face. If the country has undergone
what is nothing more or less han a
gigantic revolution; huge aggressions of
capital which have practically taken
from the hands of the Individual the in
dependent disposition of his labor and
have introduced into his existence such
a paralyzing undertaint as to bother his
comforts and his future and gradually
widening the breach that separates
classes from classes and the COMPETE
tons that while they cheaper the neces-
stiles of life, increase the dement's OF
perplexity and uncertainty as to how
great multitudes may obtain them all
these are features of our modern situa-
ton, full of danger.
For one, l ave no hope that any
mechanism of legislation. any system
of socialism, any scheme of grian
distribution or taxation will in the re-