is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This is the conception of God that Paul has given us, “the God in whom we live and move and have our being;” this is the conception that the book of Wisdom gives us, “as the Divine Spirit who filleth the world.”

And to this conception of God, Evolution has no antagonism, but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its favor. Evolution, in fact, instead of removing the Deity from us, brings him close about us; sets us face to face with his daily activities. The universe is but the body of which God is the soul; “the Interior Artist,” as Giordano Bruno used to say, who from within moulds his living shapes of beauty and power. What else, in fact, is Evolution but the secular name for the Divine Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting off the old and putting on the new; constantly busy from the beginning of time to this very day moulding and forwarding his work?

Not long ago I came across the mental experience of a working geologist which well illustrates this. “Once in early boyhood,” says Mr. James E. Mills, “I left a lumberman’s camp at night to go to the brook for water. It was a clear, cold, moonlight night and very still, except the distant murmuring of the Penobscot at some falls. A sense of the grandeur of the forest and rivers, the hills, and sky, and stars came over the boy, and he stood and looked around. An owl hooted, and the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men were all asleep, and the conditions were lonely enough. But there was no feeling of loneliness; for with the sense of the grandeur of creation, came the sense, very real and strong, of the Creator’s presence. In boyish imagination, I could see His almighty hand shaping the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the sky overhead, and making trees, animals, and men. Thirty years later I camped alone in the open air on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moonlight night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches were on the warpath. An owl again hooted; but again all loneliness was dispelled by a sense of the Creator’s presence, and the night of long ago by the Penobscot came into my mind, and with it the question: What is the difference to my mind between the Creator’s presence now and then? To the heart, it was very like, but to the mind very different. Now, no great hand was shaping things from without. But God was everywhere, reaching down through long lines of forces, and shaping and sustaining things from within. I had been travelling all day by mountains of lava which had cooled long ages ago, and over grounds which the sea, now far off, had left on its beaches; and with the geologist’s habit recalled the lava still glowing and flowing, and the sea still rolling its pebbles on the beaches. But now I knew it was by forces within the earth that the lava was poured out, and that the waves which rolled the pebbles were driven by the wind and the wind by the sun’s heat. And the forces within the earth and the heat within the sun come from still further within. Inward, always inward, the search for the original energy and law carried my mind, for He whose will is the source of all force, and whose thought is the source of all law is on the inside of the universe. The kingdom of God is within you.”

“Now this change from the boyish idea of God creating things from without, to the manhood’s view of God creating and sustaining all things from within,” is indeed as this working geologist so well says, “the essential change which modern science has wrought in the habit of religious thought. From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step in the development of science has cost the giving up of some idea of a God creating things as man shapes them from without, and has illustrated the higher idea of God reaching His works from within. Every step has led toward the truth that life and force come to the forms in which they are clothed from God by the inner way; and by the same way, their law comes with them; and that the forms are the effects of the force and life, acting according to the law.”

This is certainly a most noble, uplifting conception of the world. But how, perhaps it will be asked, can we find justification for such a view of the Divine Spirit as indwelling in nature? It is a question worth dwelling upon, and when we carefully ponder it, we find that one of the phases of the evolution philosophy that has been a chief source of alarm is precisely the one that lends signal support to this doctrine of Divine Indwelling.

Evolution is especially shrunk from, because it connects man so closely with nature; our souls are traced back to an animal origin; consciousness to instinct, instinct to sensibility, and this to lower laws and properties of force. By the law of the correlation of forces, our mental and spiritual powers are regarded as but transformed phases of physical forces, conditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes; and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is most literally its mother.

To many minds this is appalling. But let us look it candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We will recall in the first place, the scientific law, no life but from proceeding life. Let us recollect next the dictum of mechanics, no fountain can rise higher than its source. The natural corollary and consequence of this is “no evolution without preceding involution.” If mind and consciousness come out of nature, they must first have been enveloped in nature, resident within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is one with the force that stirs the sense and grows in the plant, then that sea of energy that envelops us is also spirit.

When we come to examine the idea of force, we find that there is only one form in which we get any direct knowledge of it, only one place in which we come into contact with it, and that is, in our own conscious experiences, in the efforts of our own will. According to the scientific rule, always to interpret the unknown by the known, not the known by the unknown, it is only the rational conclusion that force elsewhere is also will. Through this personal experience of energy, we get, just once, an inside view of the universal energy, and we find it to be spiritual; the will-force of the Infinite Spirit dwelling in all things. That the encircling force of the universe can best be understood through the analogy of our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will, of Spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent men of science,—Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter, and Le Conte. There is, therefore, no real efficient force but Spirit. The various energies of nature are but different forms or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power; the laws of nature, but the wise and regular habits of this active Divine will; physical phenomena but projections of God’s thought on the screen of space; and Evolution but the slow, gradual unrolling of the panorama on the great stage of time.

In geology and paleontology, as is admitted, Evolution is not directly observed, but only inferred. The process is too slow; the stage too grand for direct observation. There is one field and only one where it has been directly observed. This is in the case of domestic animals and plants under man’s charge. Now as here, where alone we see Evolution going on, it is under the guidance of superintending mind, it is a justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on under similar intelligent guidance. Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of science that we see precisely such guidance in nature. There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, as I said, that would conduct species upward rather than downward. To account for the steady upward progress we must resort to a higher Cause. We must say with Asa Gray, “Variation has been led along certain beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” We must say with Prof. Owen, “A purposive route of development and change, of correlation and inter-dependence, manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession of races as in the development and organization of the individual. Generations do not vary accidentally in any and every direction, but in pre-ordained, definite, and correlated courses.” This judgment is one which Prof. Carpenter has also substantially agreed with, declaring that the history of Evolution is that of a consistent advance along definite lines of progress, and can only be explained as the work of a mind in nature.

The old argument from Design, it has been frequently said of late, is quite overthrown by Evolution. In one sense it is: i.e. the old idea of a special purpose and a separate creation of each part of nature. But the divine agency is not dispensed with, by Evolution; only shifted to a different point of application; transferred from the particular to the general; from the fact to the law. Paley compared the eye to a watch; and said it must have been made by a divine hand. The modern scientist objects that the eye has been found to be no hand-work; it is the last result of a complicated combination of forces; the mighty machine of nature, which has been grinding at the work for thousands of years. Very well; but the modern watch is not made by hand, either, but by a score of different machines. But does it require less, or not more intelligence to make the watch in this way? Or if some watch should be discovered that was not put together by human hand, but formed by another watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by another watch, further back, would the wonder, the demand for a superior intelligence as the origin of the process be any the less? It strikes me that it would be but the greater. The farther back you go, and the more general, and invariable, and simple the fundamental laws that brought all things into their present form, then, it seems to me, the more marvellous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear, each bodily organ, when recognized as a climax to whose consummation each successive stage of the world has contributed. How much more significant of purposive intelligence than any special creation is this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules, this complex system of countless interwoven laws and movements, all driven forward, straight to their mark, down the vistas of the ages, to the grand world consummation of to-day? What else but omniscience is equal to this?

All law, then, we should regard as a divine operation; and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine ought, then, to be most orderly and true to nature. Religion, as far as it is genuine, must, therefore, be natural. It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native instincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from our belief. Recognizing in man’s spirit a spark of the divine energy, “individuated to the power of self-consciousness and recognition of God,” as Le Conte aptly phrases it; tracing the development of the spirit-embryo through all geologic time till it came to birth and independent life in man, and humanity recognized itself as a child of God, the communion of the finite spirit with the infinite is perfectly natural. This direct influence of the spirit of God on the spirit of man, in conscience speaking to him of the moral law, through prophet and apostle declaring to us the great laws of spiritual life and the beauty of holiness,—this is what we call revelation. The laws which it observes are superior laws, quite above the plane of material things. But the work of revelation is not, therefore, infallible or outside the sphere of Evolution. On the contrary, one of the most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expression. But from age to age it gains in clearness and elevation. In religion, as in secular matters,—it is the lesson of the ages, that “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”

How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to compress the broadening vision of modern days within the narrow loopholes of mediæval creeds. “There is still more light to break from the words of Scripture,” was the brave protest of Robinson to the bigots of his day. And as we say Amen to that, we may add: “Yes, and more light still to come from the whole heavens and the whole earth.” If we wish to see that light and receive the richest rewards of God’s revealing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow bravely forward.

As we look back upon the long path of Evolution up which God’s hand has already led humanity; as we see from what lowliness and imperfection, from what darkness and grossness God has led us to our present heritage of truth and spiritual life, can we doubt, that, if we go forward obediently, loyal to reason, we shall not find a new heavens and more glorious, above our head, a new earth and a nobler field of work beneath our feet?

THE IRRIGATION PROBLEM IN THE NORTHWEST.

BY JAMES REALF, JR.

Unless artesian irrigation is introduced extensively in the central part of both Dakotas, their future, unlike their skies, will be heavily clouded. True, the valley of the Sioux, a strip about seventy-five miles wide from the eastern border, of which Sioux Falls is the chief city, and the valley of the lower Missouri about the same extent south of this, of which Yankton is the metropolis, have never had a crop failure. Also, the Red River Valley in North Dakota, about ten thousand square miles, which contains the famous Dalrymple farm and produces the best wheat in the world, has the same unblemished record as an agricultural area. But these fertile and fortunate sections suffer from the general effect on the country of the drouths in the Jim Valley adjacent, which have been severe for four years and are increasing in severity. In the James or Jim Valley, as it is generally called, the year 1887 showed a partial crop failure, 1888 a little more, 1889 and 1890, a total loss.

Of course, every country is liable to crop failure at times, and must be till man makes his own weather, which will, no doubt, some day be done to an extent now unguessed. Nor is the record of three grievous years out of ten in the agricultural history of a section so very bad, except just in the way it has happened here, with a continuous and cumulative effect. But the central Dakotans have been disheartened, and the cumulative and often, perhaps, exaggerative, reports of their condition spread over the country have checked immigration into the States for the past two years, and thus retarded the growth of the fortunate valleys.

This deplorable condition lately attracted the attention of a young Yale graduate, who is editing an evening paper in Sioux Falls, and he began to collect the views of experts on the question of artesian irrigation.

Mr. Tomlinson, of the Argus Leader, had, probably, no idea of the mass of literature with which the theme was potential, and the way the papers, even outside the State, have followed his lead must be flattering to him both as an editor and public-spirited citizen. My indebtedness to Mr. Tomlinson for some of my facts being thus cheerfully acknowledged, let me plunge in medias res into the turbid waters of the irrigation problem.

Shall we make it “rain from the earth, when the sky fails”? is now, thanks to an editor, the great Dakotan question. It is a question of many facets. What does it cost, will it pay, is it safe, or must it ultimately poison the ground by sowing the land with salt like a vandal conqueror, and creating a Sahara for immediate posterity? Finally, if it is to be done on a proper scale, how shall the burden of the introduction be borne; by the township, the county, the State, the nation, or by private enterprise? Let us take up these points seriatum. Professor Upham, of the United States Geologic Survey, a man of unquestionable honesty and no mean authority generally, thinks that the cost alone demonstrates the futility of attempting the artesian system. He bases his opinion on the Jamestown well, which cost $7,000. Yet if, as there seems to be no doubt, irrigation will increase the wheat crop by at least ten bushels an acre, even this large expense would be warranted by the increase in land value. But it is probably not known to Professor Upham that wells between Jamestown and Huron are being sunk now for half, in some cases one-third, and in a few cases one-tenth of his reckoning. So with this change of former figures, the question of cost may be said to cut no figure. But will it pay permanently, and to what extent? Prof. G. E. Culver answers this question with great ability. He says positively that it will not materially change climate nor by attraction increase appreciably the annual rainfall, though he thinks it may tend to equalize the distribution of the rainfall. As to climate one might be inclined to disagree with him. There has certainly been a great change in the climate of Utah since irrigation was begun there, and an appreciable change in some parts of Southern California, though not in Colorado, as far as can be learned. It is a well-known fact that rain storms follow the course of streams, and as a system of irrigation multiplies universally the evaporation of a region, besides multiplying small streams and enlarging others, and as hollows would often be ponded by the waste water, an increase in the area watered by local showers is naturally to be expected. Moreover, the burning winds that so often scorch the crops will be somewhat softened by traversing so much moist ground and so many streams. Trees, too, grow more readily in the moistened land, and in turn protect the land from the hot winds. Given a proper system of irrigation in operation for twenty-five years, and the epithet, treeless, need not be applied to Dakota.

Let us consider irrigation a moment historically. Certainly half of the world’s population depend on it to-day. Modern Egypt has the most extensive system ever known, except the one recently unearthed in India, so massive in construction and vast in stretch that one writer has declared it would take the entire wealth of the British Empire to put it again in order. The Egyptian system cost $200,000,000, and two, sometimes three crops, are raised for one of former times.

No division of the United States has a better credit in commercial circles than Utah, and this is not due to the peculiar institution of polygamy, but to the perfect system of irrigation. The careful husbanding of the waters that come down the Wahsatch Range on mountains, has transmuted a dreary desert of sand and sage brush into what most travellers regard as a garden, and what possibly to the faithful appears symbolically a Paradise.

Senator Stewart, of the United States Irrigation Committee, stated that he had inspected nearly every irrigated region of the world, and knew of no place supplied by so vast a reservoir of water, with either the volume or the pressure of the artesian belt of Dakota. Much of the land in the Jim River Valley is comparatively level and susceptible of sub soil irrigation. It would take from two to three years to put the land in prime condition and to make each acre that is now valued at from three to ten dollars, worth fifty, at least, and probably seventy-five.

Now, $5,000,000 would more than cover the cost of the suggested irrigation in the Northwest—a mere trifle, if the certainty of crops is thereby guaranteed. Nor is the certainty of crops the only object to be considered. According to dealers in Sioux City, Iowa, the quality of cattle, shipped from some places in Clay and Yankton Counties since the introduction of irrigation, has increased twenty-five per cent., which appears not improbable when we note the difference between the warm, sweet flow of artesian water and the icy, brackish stuff of a prairie slough.

The next and really the most important question—for man should not work for the present and immediate future without the keenest regard to the rights of posterity—is whether, under Dakotan conditions, artesian irrigation is safe; whether there is not danger of its poisoning the ground. Professor Upham unhesitatingly declares that on account of the alkaline and saline properties in these artesian waters a continued use of them for many years would render the land worthless. The assertion is a rounder one than scientific men generally make, and must be received with caution, though emanating from so high a source, for many samples of South Dakotan waters, tested at Brookings, have shown no alkaline reaction at all, and the professor’s reasoning seems to rest chiefly upon the North Dakotan waters, which for some reason show larger saline percentages than the South. Then, too, he proceeds on the theory that a yearly supply of one foot of water is necessary, whereas half that amount during the dryest year, supplied through the five growing months, would insure good crops. Four inches last July would have saved the harvest. But anyway the entire amount of saline matter in South Dakotan waters, according to Prof. Lewis McLouth, does not, on the average, exceed one fifth of one per cent. after substracting all inert substances, such as sand, clay, limestone, and iron ores; so that, if six inches of water were applied to the lands, and all evaporated on the surface, the salty crust would be one 1/160 of an inch thick. But as a part of the water would run off into the streams, and much of it, diluted with rain-water, would soak into the ground, the salty ingredients would be mixed at once with at least a foot of the surface earth, and would form less than one fifteenth of one per cent. of the weight of that soil. These ingredients are salts of lime, magnesia, potash, and soda. Now Dr. Bruckner, in an analysis of some soil in Holland, which he pronounces remarkably rich, says that it contains over fifteen per cent. of these same ingredients, or two hundred and twenty-five times as much as six inches of artesian water would give to a foot of Dakotan soil within a year. So it would take two hundred and twenty-five years for this soil to acquire as much of these saline ingredients as the rich soil of Holland already possesses.

We might go further into this subject and show that every ingredient of these artesian well salts is a necessary food for many plant tissues; but even if the accumulation of salty substances were thought dangerous, it is to be remembered that during five of the ten years since the settlement of the Jim Valley, the rainfall has been ample, and if this average should continue, the land could be allowed to rest from irrigation for one half of the time so that the floods of rain-water would wash away the surplus saline matter.

Enough has now been said to show that in South Dakota, at least, no harm is likely to accrue to the soil under five hundred years, if South Dakota chemists are to be trusted. By that time chemistry will have advanced from an analytic to a creative science, and if what was once ignorantly termed “The Great American Desert” should suddenly lapse into a saline state, a speedy cure for that condition may be counted on with confidence.

Dismissing, then, this danger as something too dim in the distance to be regarded even as ultimately certain, we are confronted with a really grave question—a question fraught with serious immediate peril, if answered practically in the way it seems likely to be, unless patriotic Dakotans coöperate to prevent it. How shall the burden of the cost be borne? The farmers individually are mostly too poor, and in the Northwest, which the oppressions of the railroads and the teachings of Donelly have honeycombed with tendencies to State socialism, the first answer is, “By the State, of course.” But the need of action in this matter is pressing, and the State of South Dakota certainly is too poor at present, for her debt-limit, under her constitution, is already reached.

For the counties to attempt it would be equally difficult, for many persons not directly benefited would be forced to share the expense, and under the pressure of continued hard times an irrigation rebellion might result and most certainly dissatisfaction as to the location of the wells would ensue. There is another plan against which none of these objections can be raised. A bill has been introduced in the legislature, providing that when thirty voters shall so petition, the State engineer of irrigation shall select proper sites for nine six-inch or sixteen four and one half inch wells. An election shall then be held to vote bonds of the township. If they carry, the supervisors shall have these wells sunk, and shall rent the water to such farmers as wish it, at a sum in no case exceeding a pro-rata share of seven per cent. of the value of the bonds, the title to the water to go with the title to the land so long as the rent is paid.

The details of the bill are carefully worked out, and it would seem that this plan is feasible. It will enable the present owners to retain their land, and to water it at reasonable cost, while those benefited will bear the expense.

But the great danger is that what is known as private enterprise, which in the West has been as a rule simply the legal twin of highway robbery, will seize the situation which this irrigation problem so temptingly presents. Some of the investment companies are already becoming aware of the possibilities, and are taking advantage of the farmers by buying their land at a nominal price, and it is not improbable that speculators within a year will appropriate (“convey” the wise it call) vast stretches in the Jim Valley, crowding out the present owners and keeping the land comparatively idle for years. This is the peculiar peril of the Dakotas, and the Farmers’ Alliance would do well to spend some of their superfluous energy on a co-operative plan of introducing irrigation, else they will be at the mercy of a greedy crowd of embryo Jay Goulds. There is, indeed, no reason why the nation, if it can appropriate money for river and harbor bills, should not appropriate so small a sum as $5,000,000 to an enterprise of such moment as this, and if the Republican party had a dying glimmer of their olden shrewdness, they would have tightened their relaxing hold on the affections of the Dakotans by a measure of this kind. But so cumbersome is our present system of republican government, that it would take too long in this case to set governmental aid in motion. So, as it is, the Dakotas are between the devil of drouth and the deep sea of further capitalistic oppression, their only hope of a fair solution lying in the township scheme.

Before parting with this theme, as indicative of what might be done with the drouth belt of the Dakotas, the following table deserves a comparative glance. It consists of the tax lists of several California counties before and after the application of irrigation.

A few words more on the first question of cost, which is one a practical mind is always asking and re-asking. The Aberdeen Daily News, which ought to know, for there are several wells in its neighborhood easy to study, states that a six-inch well can be put down for less than $2,300, and that any of the principal wells at Aberdeen, Hitchcock, Redfield, Woonsocket, Huron, or Yankton will irrigate six hundred and forty acres, which would bring the cost to less than $4.00 per acre for twelve inches of depth during the growing season. Mr. Hinds, of the Hinds ranch, has been charging adjacent farmers, however, only $1.00 per acre for water from his well, and considers it a paying investment. I cannot resist the temptation of closing this brief inquiry into and commentary upon this most important question by citing a picturesque passage from the Aberdeen Daily News:—

This vivid writing, this rhetoric of artesian force, may be the result of an editorial fancy that has long bestridden a western boom, instead of tame old Pegasus; but, leaving out the manufacturing prospectus, there can be no gainsay of the statement that, with a million acres of the opulent Dakotan soil under the brilliant Dakotan sun, tended by two thousand artesian wells, the great drouth belt of the Northwest would be the richest agricultural area in the world.

REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN.

There is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career around the globe, from the most ancient recorded time, beginning in barbaric tyranny and robbery of the toiler, advancing with the power and wealth of nations, and flourishing unchecked in modern civilization, sapping the strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity, impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence, stimulating with alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth and power, and making abortive the greater part of what saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for human redemption. But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and never arrested by the Church, which assumes to obey the sinless martyr of Jerusalem, and to war against all sins, yet has never made war upon this giant sin, but has fondled and caressed it so kindly that the pious and conscientious, believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of its enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened people shall pour their hot indignation upon the crime and the unconscious criminals.

This crime which the world’s dazzled intellect and torpid conscience has so long tolerated without resistance, and which antiquity admired in its despotic rulers, splendid in proportion to the people’s misery, is that misleading form of intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the elements of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander and destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other purpose than to uplift the man of wealth and humiliate his humbler brother. That purpose is a crime; a crime incompatible with genuine Christianity; a crime which was once checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only for a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless motive as in its wanton destruction of happiness and life to achieve a selfish purpose.

This feature of social ostentation, its absolute cruelty, has not attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On the contrary, the crime is cherished in the higher ranks of the clergy, and an eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying an absurdly expensive church, actually preached a sermon in vindication of LUXURY—defending it on the audacious assumption that it was right because some men had very expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should be gratified. A private interview with John Wesley would have been very edifying to that clergyman, as the more remote example of the founder of Christianity had been forgotten.

That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a crime becomes very apparent by a close examination of the act. There would be no harm in building a $700,000 stable for his horses, like a Syracuse millionaire, or in placing a $50,000 service on the dinner table, like a New York Astor, if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar represents an average day’s labor, for there are more toilers who receive less than a dollar than there are who receive more.9 Hence the $700,000 stable represents the labor of a thousand men for two years and four months. It also represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand dollars would meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the cost of the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven hundred lives, and affirms that the owner values it more highly, or is willing that seven hundred should die, that his vanity may be gratified.

This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars would save not one but many lives in the Irish famine. It would save more than a score of lives in New York, if diligently used among those who are approaching the Potter’s Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dead of New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per cent., an institution that would permanently sustain educating to a virtuous manhood, two hundred and fifty of the waifs gathered in from the pollution of the streets, sending forth fifty redeemed ones every year. When $700,000 is squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed, by destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable to stay the march of disease, of crime, and of death.

The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning out half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life authorize him to destroy it?

It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm’s length, or looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in diamonds in a Washington court circle,—all of which I hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is. “Twenty-four hours in the slums” (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a night and a day—yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards.” Such is life in New York. What it is in “Darkest England,” as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire’s metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling landlords10 worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive’s cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.

The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the universities patronized by the wealthy.

New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule “whatever is most costly is most fashionable.” Nor is the cost the only evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an evening’s lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng, almost within hearing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the utterly destitute every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday.

Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the nature of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked to read in parallel columns the crushing agonies of famine and pestilence, and the costly revels of aristocracy, or the millions wasted on royal families, that manifest about as much concern for the suffering million as a farmer feels for the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is surprised or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for poverty, famine, and pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda could offer a pearly and jewelled carpet, ten feet by six, costing a million of dollars, as a present to the woman who had pleased his fancy.11 How many lives and how much of agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents pays for a day’s labor? Twenty million days’ labor is a small matter to a petty prince.

Criminal ostentation stands ever in the way of man’s progress to a higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a greater mastery of nature’s forces, and thus emancipate the race from poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England’s three millions of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.12

The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their thoughts, and the grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, “If the governments of the world would spend on scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men, or rather in making preparation for killing men and then not doing it, the secrets of the earth would be laid bare in a time inordinately short.” But this very warlike ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt—the desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on the road to insanity.

The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this country to public life, as was scandalously displayed in the twenty million State House job at Albany (which our arithmetic makes equivalent to twenty thousand lives) and renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive13 (except in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it arrested by the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and a hundred thousand dollar tomb for an individual eminent only by wealth is but a fashionable matter of course to-day. Against this my moral sense revolts. Had I the wealth of Crœsus, or the power of Napoleon, I could not consent to the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a funeral and monument, was the effort to destroy as much as possible, and take from the resources of benevolence that which might gladden a thousand lives. To look back from the enlightened upper world upon such, a monument of base selfishness, would be the hell of conscience; but a simple rose or hawthorn over the couch of the abandoned form would harmonize well with the sentiments of heaven.

What is it but a matter of course, and fashionably proper for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?14 Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and we cannot ignore it or disregard it. Has any human being a right to look on at human suffering, and turn away contemptuously? to see men drowning and refuse to throw them the plank which lies conveniently by? to pass by the chamber of dying, with loud, unseemly revels? to titter and laugh alongside of the grave where an unrecognized brother is being buried? to feast upon costly wines and far-fetched elaborate viands at tables overloaded with fresh flowers and artistic gold, while the pallid faces of a hundred hungry ones are looking on, and who are not even recognized so much as the dog that receives a bone? To know that the city is attacked by a powerful army and refuse either to enlist for its defence, or to contribute means to help the defenders, would not be tolerated; but to do such things is precisely what selfish and unfeeling wealth demands, and what the aroused conscience of humanity will, ere long, forbid. It refuses to establish the industrial and moral education for all which would protect society from the invading forces of pauperism, crime, and pestilence. It refuses to suspend its costly royal revels until the voices of hunger and despair are silenced. It refuses to moderate its giddy round of fashionable frivolity and ostentation in the very presence of death, in the tenements where human life is reduced to less than half its normal length, so that death and revelry confront each other in the city.

I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the millionaire, we do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save the drowning; we do not even require you to be a manly man and bestir yourself before a life is lost; but we do say that the drowning man shall not be doomed to drown by your indifference? but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him, or a plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used, even if you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You have no vested rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth. It can order you in times of danger to all to place your body for the protection of the city in the path of the cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your life for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members to be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave your piles of hoarded gold and silver to accumulate as a magazine of corruption and danger to society? No, Mr. Millionaire, poverty, pestilence, and crime, are making war upon society and tumbling their slaughtered thousands into Potter’s Fields. And if the commonwealth does not demand your personal service, but simply demands that you shall not make perpetual for the sake of ostentation all of the present unnatural inequality, you are surely treated justly and kindly.

When the planter objected to General Jackson’s using his cotton bales as a rampart for the defence of New Orleans, tradition says the General ordered him to take a musket and stand behind them as a common soldier. At present we ask only your superfluous cotton bales, and it would not be wise for you to oppose our demand. The people remember the unholy distinction of classes thirty years ago, which enabled a favored few patricians to flourish as vampires on the commonwealth, while the plebeians were giving it their sufferings, their blood, and their lives, and hence they seek justice through our enormous system of pensions.

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.

Our wealthiest are beginning to have incomes of over $5,000,000 a year, and it is very plain from the concentration of this wealth that a few wealthy men who could easily form themselves into close and secret corporation, will in time outweigh the entire republic, as Mr. Shearman says that 250,000 families are already a three fourths financial majority.

It was thought that this was impossible in our republic because we had no law of primogeniture, but we have another kind of geniture that is very effective. Recent statistics have shown that the very wealthy inhabitants of Fifth Avenue, New York, have in one year but one eighteenth as many children as the same number of families in the poorer neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Thus poverty multiplies itself rapidly, while wealth concentrates and needs no primogeniture to hold it together, because its numbers do not increase; and a similar fact, but not so extreme, appears in the reference to our Back Bay region in our own statistics, and in the statistics of Philadelphia. Thus it seems that we are destined to have the richest aristocracy by far that the world has ever dreamed of.

We know that concentrated wealth is power—and that great power is always dangerous to its neighbors. Like the slumbering power of dynamite, we are unwilling to have it near us, no matter how well guarded. I hold, therefore, that a republic has a right to guard itself against such dangers as much as the city has a right to prohibit the establishment of powder magazines in the centre of its population.

The profound and prophetic mind of Abraham Lincoln presaged this, and he said: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war. God grant that my suspicion may prove groundless.”

Wealth has a natural tendency to grow into an overwhelming power, for a million of dollars well managed will become $1,000,000,000 in a century and a half, and there are millionaires to-day who may become billionaires in forty or fifty years. But this growth has always been kept down by a generous or prodigal consumption, by ostentatious luxury, by profligacy, by pestilence, and by war. Yet when these checks are diminished; when, as in our republic, the danger of war is removed; when the generous consumption is hindered by wide-spread poverty; when pestilence is checked by sanitary improvements, and industry is enforced on the millions by daily necessity, then that growth of wealth which has been interrupted every few years in the old world by war, tyranny, taxation, standing armies, ignorance, and disease, will advance in our country as a mighty flood, impelled by the rains from heaven. The flood from heaven which is enriching us is the inspiration of genius in every form of science, art, and mechanical progress, which doubles and redoubles our productive power. We must look to human wisdom for the means of regulating the flow that it may act as a fertilizing rain, and not as a devastating flood, wasting the hillsides into barrenness, and sweeping away the bulwarks that the wise have erected.

It is no rhetorical exaggeration to speak of accumulated and unequal wealth as a dangerous flood. All ancient history proves it to be a danger. Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, and India, have shown by their terrible record how wealth in a few hands has ever proved a curse instead of a blessing to society. The pyramids of Egypt, an awful monument of the blood and toil of slaves, are a gloomy record of the senseless ostentation of despots, yet who ever speaks of the pyramids as the monuments of a crime?

Immense wealth for personal use is not a normal desire. It is an unsound, unhealthy appetite, resembling that of gluttony and darkness—an appetite that grows by what it feeds on and becomes insatiable.

It is an unsound appetite, for the increase of wealth already beyond all human wants, adds nothing to a man’s comforts or happiness—it adds only to his cares, which it increases, to his selfishness, which it intensifies, and to his power of indulging arrogance and ostentation. It impairs his sympathy with his fellowman, and inflames his egotism.

The superfluous mass of wealth serves only to supply an overruling power destructive to the social rights of others, and a haughty ostentation that humiliates fellow-citizens. It is, therefore, a hostile and dangerous element in a republic, although a few may hold great wealth and resist its insidious influence.

Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to man and injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature that the fittest shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not the fittest, for through the centuries they do not survive. The extremely wealthy are dying out, for they do not have children enough to maintain their numbers. It is our duty so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. They are twin evils; extreme wealth indicates extreme poverty, as mountains indicate valleys. Wealth, corruption, and despotism, are grouped together in history, as liberty has been grouped with equality, simplicity, hardihood, the mountain and the wilderness.

Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to reform, its method of opposition being corruption, and these characteristics are intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth everywhere gives power to monopolize the face of the earth, and thus establish a hereditary nobility; for the landlords of millions of acres are the most substantial and formidable lords that society knows, and nowhere in the world have there been greater opportunities to establish such an aristocracy, which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one thousand dollars per capita, represents not the increased wealth of the masses but the enormous accumulations of a few. Our gain of about two thousand millions annually, does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the republic? If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it is corpulence instead of strength.

Our social system has the elements of decay already as conspicuous as in the tuberculous patient. Invention increases the power of wealth instead of increasing the resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses machinery and diminishes the relative value of the man by making him a machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from the independent shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his neighbors, to the mere tenth of a shoemaker who if dislodged from the factory is helpless. The independence of the hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing. Population is gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. At this moment a strike of 150,000 is threatened. But it is not merely the laboring classes, for all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive let loose and flying wildly over the railroad. If there were no other formidable danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself a fatality. When a thousand millions enter the field they enter as master, in the Standard Oil fashion. They can buy out or crush out, as they may choose, every competitor in the field they may seize. There is not a single form of industry which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is established, demand what prices they please for that which they alone can supply. Can we imagine the conventional brother Jonathan held down by the throat with iron grip, and his pockets open to the holder, or will he rebel before the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how well it is fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire country. Ten years more will introduce the struggle. The struggle must come, for plutocracy is advancing to universal absorption, and labor is becoming defiant, and well it may, for the COMMONWEALTH represents not money but man, and when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the nation’s wealth, assumes the practical government, the commonwealth with a firm hand will thrust it aside; but will it be a peaceful change, will the conquerors yield to the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its sleeping victims while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy, or anything going on but the natural legitimate and healthful development of trade; and the medical corporations called colleges in seizing a stern monopoly of the healing art, assure us that it is only for the benefit and protection of the dear people who have not sense enough to distinguish between a successful and an unsuccessful doctor, and have so unpardonable a partiality for those who cure them cheaply without college permission. There is nothing too small for monopoly to grasp, not even the cheap dispensing of established remedies from the druggist’s counter.

It is a just and patriotic sentiment which looks with apprehension upon the great and irresponsible power developed by extreme wealth, which lifts the wealthy far above society, enabling them to indulge in profligate luxury, and to squander in a single evening’s pleasure (or display without pleasure) an amount that would make life prosperous to a hundred suffering families, or on a single piece of architectural splendor, enough to complete the education of the entire youth of a city—wealth enabling them to rival the despots of Europe in social ostentation, while almost within hearing of their revelry, ten or twenty thousand are suffering from want of employment, want of health, want of education, want of industrial skill, which society did not give them, suffering the slow death that comes through debility, emaciation, and disease, from toil and poverty, the sufferer being sometimes a woman in whom all the virtues have blossomed only to perish in the chilling atmosphere of poverty.16 This may be utterly senseless talk to those in whom the sentiment of brotherhood is dead, but it expresses sentiments to which millions respond, and it is refreshing to see that these statements, which at last have found free expression through The Arena, are also beginning to find a home in the minds of public leaders, whose voices will compel attention. I allude to the philanthropic expressions of the Emperor of Germany, and to the language of Mr. Gladstone, who shows that the necessity of philanthropic action on the part of the wealthy is increased by their changed attitude, as they are becoming more isolated from the people, and no longer take that friendly personal interest in their tenants and employes of every grade, which was formerly common. In this country, social ostentation is a great power to increase this separation of ranks, and the book of Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” ought to be studied by every wealthy citizen as well as by reformers. Herbert Spencer, in a recent thoughtful essay, refers to this increasing interest in social welfare thus: “He is struck, too, by the contrast between the small space which popular welfare then occupied in the public attention, and the large space it now occupies, with the result that outside and inside Parliament, plans to benefit the millions form the leading topics, and every one having means is expected to join in some philanthropic effort.” This is because the millions demand it, and they who, like the writer, have for half a century been interested in behalf of the millions, may now be listened to.

The enormous wealth developed in our republic, in which a single city holds a thousand millionaires, controls the press, controls legislation, and teaches the ambitious to sell themselves to the wealthy who are the controlling power. Under such influences arises that moral insensibility which, in New York, could squander twenty millions on one building, while half the children were out of school, and a large portion of the insane were left wallowing in indecent filth, worse than that of a hog pen, as shown in the Albany Law Journal.

In presenting these views, I am not assailing millionaires as men more objectionable or censurable than any other class. It is not true that the mere ability to gain wealth implies moral inferiority, for it implies many substantial and honorable qualities. Reverse the social ranks, give the wealth to the poor, and our condition would not be improved, perhaps it would be much worse. The fault lies in our social system of struggle and rivalry, and while that system generates, as it always has, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, we must combat these two evils, and to control them is the purpose of this essay. Whether a better social system is possible that would PREVENT them, is not now under consideration, but surely there must be a system which will make unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty impossible, for such conditions are incompatible with a permanent, peaceful, and prosperous republic. As well might we expect a successful voyage from a ship with four-fifths of its cargo on the upper deck, as from a republic top heavy with millionaire capital. Can we believe that republics are forbidden by the laws of progress and evolution; that they must, as Macaulay maintained, come to a fatal crisis? I trust not. But does not our social system, inherited from barbarism, built up on the hot ashes left where the fires of war have desolated, necessarily develop that inequality which has swept the great empires of antiquity to their doom. When all the wealth of the nation has fallen into the possession of two per cent. of the population, the period of danger has arrived. Five per cent. of our population had, in 1880, absorbed four fifths of the national wealth, and at present, according to the careful statistics of Mr. Shearman, less than two per cent. hold seven tenths of our wealth, and are rapidly advancing to nine tenths, their progress being assisted by the indirect taxation which places the burden of government on the shoulders of poverty. Popular ignorance of public affairs has tolerated this, and has tolerated a financial system far worse, which has given capital all possible advantage of labor. We are drifting in the rapids; how far off is our Niagara? But labor is roused, and a change in our system of taxation is imminent.

Unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty are the necessary results of the warlike stage of progress, which develops the conquerors and the conquered in the great battle of life. Unnumbered centuries of tribal and international war have developed to high perfection the wolfish and tigerish instincts of humanity. What is called peace is a state of financial war. Beneath the smooth skin of the civilized man, we find the wolf in undiminished vigor. The triumphant wolf rides in his chariot; the conquered wolf sleeps in the open air along the alleys, wharves, and streets; but what cares the wolf triumphant for that? for the 30,000 homeless in London? The policeman’s club, or the bayonet, is the only thing that keeps down riot and arson, and the uncertainty of the result is all that hinders the French, German, and Russian wolves from turning a continent into a pandemonium. Is Europe truly a civilized country? Not if tried by an ethical standard. Von Moltke, the great man of Germany, who has so recently passed away, considered war a permanent institution.

In this wolfish stage of human development, altruism is almost unknown, except as an eccentricity. It is safe to say, as a general rule to which there are not many exceptions, that no man is fit to be entrusted with any more than he needs for his own comfortable existence. Every dollar beyond that sum is wasted in his hands. He has not the faintest conception that he is a trustee of all such wealth, responsible to heaven for its use. As he cannot consume it, he can but squander it to gratify his vanity, and lift himself to a position from which he can, or thinks he can, look down upon his fellows. The leading idea of the average citizen is to construct a palace that will cost ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as much as the residence that would be amply sufficient and pleasant.17 His talent for the destruction of wealth grows by indulgence, and thus the millions that the financial conquerors have won from the conquered are thrown into the blazing flame of ostentation, and might as well be thrown into a literal conflagration. Such is the humanity with which we have to deal at present. Wealth, no matter who holds it, does not restrain the destruction of the resources of the commonwealth, but the growl of the suffering millions may, and may lead to a recognition of the grand truth that everything beyond the demands of human comfort is a sacred trust for humanity, and with the millions thus aroused, I believe it may be possible to introduce laws which will gradually change the entire condition of society, and leave in this broad land neither an American prince nor an American beggar—a change which will be a greater forward movement than that of 1776.

The leading purpose of such legislation will be the controlling of that lawless selfishness, which wantonly destroys all in which the community is interested; which on the prairies exterminates the buffalo, in the mountains and forests destroys the timber, bringing on as a consequence the drouth, floods, and desolate barrenness, under which a large part of the old world is suffering; which would exterminate the seals if government did not interfere, and would infect every city with pestilential odors of offensive manufactories; which would destroy the people’s national money for the benefit of private bankers, and pervert all the powers of government for the benefit of monopoly and organized speculation.

May we not look to that struggle for justice which to-day assumes the forms of Nationalism, Farmers’ Alliance, People’s Party, Knights of Labor, and Land Nationalization, to accomplish this purpose and emancipate the present from the barbarian ideas of the past?

(To be concluded in July Arena.)