Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1923-06-19
IS THE WORLD GROWING
WORSE?
By DR.. Frank Crane

ny LII. Ildlk AlduG
There is considerable number of apostles
Of unrest and protest who bark all night
under the worlds window their dismal cries
that the world is growing worse.
Their particular complaint is against the
successful everywhere. They love failures,
adore tramps,S prostitutes and slobs They
continually present these types to us in
novels and upon the stage, and demand our
sympathy with them.
One would gather from a deal Of current
literature that any business man who saves
his money and sticks to his job and gains d
competence is miserable bourgeois wretch,
and a hypocritcaI enemy TO his race.
AS a matter of fact, the rich men of today
are a better class of people than were the
rich men of any preceding age.
Ed Howe calls attention to the largest
of the pyramids in Egypt, built by an old
king as a tomb, that his greatness might be
advertised after his death
This pyramid contains, he says, no less than
100000 blocks of stone of an average weight
of II TONS The blocks must have been pulled
and pushed up an inclined plane of earth,
and it is calculated that it would take 1O0,-
600 men twenty years to build the pyramid
which was merely tombstone to mark the
grave OF an ancient r1ch man.
Thousands of other tOmbs were built by
the magnificent ones of the past And mil
lions of poor nameless wretches sweat out
their unhappy lives to construct them.
In the present age rich men are doing
more to improve the condition of the COM
mon mass of people than the favored ones
at any other time have done.
In England the rich men are being so
heavily taxed that they are no longer able to
maintain their great estates, and are selling
out.
In the United States, wealthy men are
taxed 60 per cent or 70 per cent of their in
come
John D. Rockefeller, who has been called
the richest man in the world, is probably
doing more good to the human race through
his educational foundations and his insttu-
lions for removing the causes of disease than
any that ever lived that is any man
that used money.
The EOor and not the rich dominate the
Congress and the Senate of the United States
and the Parliament of England.
The poor and not the rich have brought
Russia to rack and ruin.
We are living in the days when the advan-
tages of literature disseminated among
the Millions when the education of the peo-
pie is not only provided for but insisted upon
when the vast spaces of Australia and Amer
lea welcome and reward any man, however
poor, so long as he will work
This is q poor mans age, and the day of
the poor mans opportunity.
The trouble with it is that never before in
the history of mankind were the shiftless
thriftless lazy and dissipated more despised
and less wanted.
If some of these decriers of modern life
and protagonists of pessimism had lived in
the days of Alfred the Great of England
Louis the Fourteenth of France, or Philip the
Second of SPAIN to say nothing of the days
of Cheops of Egypt or OF Augustus Of Rome
instead of being educated at public expense
and given every opportunity to make decent
living and protected by courts and parlia.
ments in their liberties, they would have
been lashed to their tasks by slave drivers,
had their noses slit by hereditary masters,
and their ears nailed to the doorpost for the
glory and amusement of some king or noble |
whose career we now regard as so picturesque |
and interesting. !