CHAPTER VI

THE POISON OF MATERIAL

PROSPERITY.

Material Prosperity, when it reaches a certain point, seems to develop a subtle poison. A spirit of selfishness develops with great wealth. Then, comes the struggle for Position, for Place, for Power! Then, Dishonest Practices! Then, the Protest of the Wronged and Plundered People! Then, Interneccine Strife! Then, the Final Struggle for Existence; and, at last, National Death. With the exception of this, a People may recover from any evil. Ignorance, Piracy, Robbery, and Violence of every description may be succeeded by Virtue, Patriotism, National Honor and genuine greatness, but where is there an example of a corrupt and mercenary People who have ever recovered their virtue and patriotism? Their doom has ever been the lowest state of wretchedness, slavery, and misery! Trodden down, scorned, obliterated from the list of Nations forever!

This poison was in the blood of Egypt.

About the time of Moses, a spirit of Greed, of Graft, of Selfishness took possession of her people. The struggle for Place, for Position, for Power began. Dishonesty, Domination, Oppression and Suppression of the weaker classes followed in successive steps. Sorrow and suffer

ing were everywhere. The cry of the wronged and plundered People was unheard or unheeded. Disintegration and Death had set their irrevocable seal upon the proudest of States.

Egypt Died.

The History of her death struggle is the sad and tragic story of that appalling Spiritual Darkness which finally and forever settled over the beautiful and sunlit land of the Pharaohs. From such a bondage, and from such a fate, did the socalled Israelites flee!

Like a far-off remembering of the Soul, it seemed to Vin that the preliminary stages in the disintegration, dishonor, and death of Egypt are now casting their shadows across the fairest portion of the western hemisphere.

CHAPTER VII

THE DISINTEGRATION OF STATES.

Great Wealth in the hands of a few members of society, accompanied by abject poverty on the part of the many, a spirit of Greed, of Graft, of Corruption, accompanied by base subserviency, has always preceded the corruption and downfall of States. The possession of vast private fortunes has always inspired the desire to control the forces of government and to dictate the policy of the Nation. The People never yet existed that could stand this strain. Sidon and Tyre, whose merchant princes possessed the wealth of kings; Babylon and Palmyra, the ancient seats of Asiatic luxury; Rome, laden with the spoils of a world, overcome by her vices rather than by the hosts of her invaders; these are a few of the more notable historical instances of the destructive influences of great wealth when controlled absolutely by a few members of society. "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, When wealth accumulates, and Men decay!" The influence of the clergy, observed Mr. Gibbon, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but, so intimate is the relation between the throne and the altar that the banner of the Church has very rarely been seen on the side of the People in their efforts to establish or maintain a free government. Indeed,

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until the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, Church and State were everywhere one and inseparable.

The tendency of popular institutions is toward despotism. Executive power constantly encroaches upon the rights and privileges of the people. It encroaches not alone with a conscious purpose, but because it is restless, unwearied, constantly drawn by the progress of events into new fields of contest. And whilst the encroachment of executive power may be scarcely perceptible at the outset, it is as certain and relentless as time itself.

Against this perennially increasing power of the executive, the people put forth immense strength only to end in as great weakness. Popular effort is misdirected. The people are wont to strike at the person of the Executive rather than' at the source of his authority; which is the principal reason why revolutionary movements so frequently prove abortive. Therefore it is that those popular movements, coming from those high mountains, which domineer over the moral horizon, Wisdom, Justice, Reason, Right, built of the purest snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after reflecting the sky in their transparency, after being swollen by a hundred affluents in the majestic course of triumph, suddenly lose themselves in quagmires, like the Nevada rivers in the sand.

Popular effort is exhausted and discounted in reviving things long since dead; in embalming

old dogmas, regilding faded shrines, restoring ancient superstitions, enforcing the worship of symbols as the actual means of salvation, tying the corpse of the Past, mouth to mouth with the living Present. Hence, it is one of the fatalities of Humanity to be condemned to continual struggles with Bigotry, with Hypocrisy, with Fear, with Envy, with Superstition, with Servitude, with the Pleas of Tyranny and the formulas of Error.

Despotism, seen in the Past, seems respectable. So, also, the mountain, bristling with volcanic rock, when seen through the haze of distance, seems blue, and smooth, and beautiful. The sight of a single dungeon is worth more to dispel illusions and create a proper estimate of arbitrary power than the most eloquent volumes ever written. The Rack, the Thumbscrew, the Iron Boot, the Infinite Instruments of the Inquisition should be preserved in Memoriam, forever. As an object lesson, they might do much to direct public effort rightly.

So Vin thought.

Unless Liberty be protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, a time will surely come to every commonwealth when it will be wholly governed by an ignoble oligarchy; an oligarchy, composed of professional politicians, of great financial institutions, of those enriched by huge bankruptcies, by arbitrary expansions and equally unwarranted contractions of the currency, by the depreciation of all securities, by