The Evening Dispatch

UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION.

Fifty years since we had but two or three millionaires in this country. Then they were a very awe-inspiring set of fellows. Now they are so common that there are none to do them reverence.

While short on millionaires there were but few bread-riots, no starving poor, few suicides and our bank officials lived and died at a good old age, at home, not in Canada or in Paris. In those good old days a man with twenty five thousand dollars was a rich man, now a man with only that pitiful sum cannot hold up his head in society, and life insurance men, before they would take a risk on him, would want to bar suicide. Note the difference in morals between the old days and the new. We have a hundred robberies and burglaries to one then. Then a lewd woman was a rare avis, especially in domestic or private life. Now how many gilded and painted ghosts sit at every hearthstone almost in our gilded and painted society? How many women, seeing the power of money among the leaders of society, are willing to sell soul and body to procure it? How many men who would otherwise be reasonably honest, are now embezzlers or defaulters? One imagines if I had ten thousand in ready cash I would speculate and soon possess a million. It won't hurt the bank or the business if I use the ten thousand a short time. Thus are thieves made, and we assert fearlessly that it is the accursed and unnatural power given to money these latter days which is at the bottom of nearly all this species of crime.

If instead of falling down and worshipping the rich, or rather their too often illy gotten thousands, we were to investigate the means used in their accumulation we would rate the rich more nearly upon a reasonable basis, and riches would have far fewer charms for us.

We must set up other idols than riches. Fifty years since, honesty, integrity, cleanliness of living, utter trustworthiness and kindred noble qualities were rated of more worth than money. Money without honor had little value. Now men steal, overreach, and cheat all the early part of their lives, to acquire riches, build churches, endow hospitals and universities all the latter part in their vain efforts atone by such means for the sins committed in early life in their too ardent pursuit of riches. It must be but a sorry sort of happiness the millionaire enjoys when he recalls the oppressions of the poor, his dishonesty and cheating in the acquirement of riches. The great founder of the Christian religion knocked the black out of this subject in the brief contrast he gives us in the tale of Dives and Lazarus. That is a very forcible lesson, yet how few of us take it to our hearts while in pursuit of gold.

Our government has sinned in this thing most grievously in adopting policies designed to favor the rich while they serve to grind the faces of the poor; to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the strong and place them upon those of the weak. All the legislation we have had since the war, so far, has been in favor of the rich and the powerful and against the interest of the poor and the weak. We are reaping the fruits of this sin now in the general upgrowth of anarchy and lawlessness of all kinds. This is only history repeating itself, and the overturning of Rome will, if a change is not speedily made, have its counterpart in the destruction of this the latest and greatest republic with which humanity has experimented.