Patricians would retain commanding superiority of wealth for power and ostentation, but the people object to this power and scorn the ostentation.
The immense concentration of wealth by syndicates, corporations, and trusts alarms us all, because we see in it a formidable danger to the republic.[15] Colonel Higginson admits the evil, but denies that any method of counteracting it is known, yet it may easily be shown that we have several effective methods.
[15] It is not only in the strong language of many political meetings, conventions, and the independent press, that this danger is recognized, but in that wealthy and conservative body, the United States Senate, it is distinctly recognized and frequently expressed; the language of Senators Ingalls, Stewart, Call, Gorman, Vest, Berry, and others, shows that they are alarmed and would warn their colleagues.
Senator Call, of Florida, said:--"It is well for the people to form some idea of the extent to which the powers of the government are becoming subject to the control of a very small number of people, and the extent to which these powers are becoming absolute, despotic, monarchical, almost as much so as the Czar of Russia.
"The present system places the control of the wealth of this country in the hands of a very small number of persons, an almost infinitesimal portion of the people; gives them money to buy those who represent the people."
Senator Berry said:--"So much injustice has been done to the people, so many wrongs have been perpetrated in the interests of wealth and capital by the passage of unjust laws, that the people are in open revolt to-day, and they have a right to be; they have determined to have relief, and they are entitled to it."
Senator Stewart said:--"If there is no reason nor humanity in the possessors of accumulated capital there is power in revolution."
Senator Gorman, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said:--"We stand to-day, Mr. President, upon a financial volcano. The labor of the country appeals through every channel it can to this administration and this Congress to stay the awful wreck that is threatened."
The eloquent address of Senator Ingalls presented still more forcibly and fully the evils of plutocracy, which is "threatening the safety if it does not endanger the existence of the republic," by "the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital." "The conscience of the nation is shocked at the injustice of modern society. The moral sentiment of mankind has been aroused at the unequal distribution of wealth, at the unequal diffusion of the burdens, the benefits, and the privileges of society." "At this time there are many scores of men, of estates, and of corporations, in this country, whose annual income exceeds, and there has been one man whose monthly revenue since that period exceeds the entire accumulations of the wealthiest citizen of the United States at the end of the last century." "By some means, some device, some machination, some incantation, honest or otherwise, some process that cannot be defined, less than a two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession and have kept out of the penitentiary, in spite of the means they have adopted to acquire it, of more than one half of the entire accumulated wealth of the country. That is not the worst, Mr. President. It has been chiefly acquired by men who have contributed little to the material welfare of the country, and by processes that I do not care in appropriate terms to describe." "The people of this country are generous and just, they are jealous also, and when discontent changes to resentment, and resentment passes into exasperation, one volume of a nation's history is closed and another will be opened."