Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century

displaced. He grows still larger; he has the head,shoulders and limbs of a man and the waist of a child. He is amonstrosity. He dies. This is a picture of the world of to-day, boundin the silly superstition of some prehistoric nation. But this is notall. Every decrease in the quantity, actual or relative, of gold andsilver increases the purchasing power of the dollars made out ofthem; and the dollar becomes the equivalent for a larger amount ofthe labor of man and his productions. This makes the rich man richerand the poor man poorer. The iron band is displacing the organs oflife. As the dollar rises in value, man sinks. Hence the decrease inwages; the increase in the power of wealth; the luxury of the few;the misery of the many."

  "How would you help it?" he asked.

  "I would call the civilized nations together in council, and devisean international paper money, to be issued by the different nations,but to be receivable as legal tender for all debts in all countries.It should hold a fixed ratio to population, never to be exceeded; andit should be secured on all the property of the civilized world, andacceptable in payment of all taxes, national, state and municipal,everywhere. I should declare gold and silver legal tenders only fordebts of five dollars or less. An international greenback that wasgood in New York, London, Berlin, Melbourne, Paris and Amsterdam,would be good anywhere. The world, released from its iron band, wouldleap forward to marvelous prosperity; there would be no financialpanics, for there could be no contraction; there would be no moretorpid 'middle ages,' dead for lack of currency, for the money of anation would expand, _pari passu_, side by side with the growth ofits population. There would be no limit to the development ofmankind, save the capacities of the planet; and even these, throughthe skill of man, could be increased a thousand-fold beyond what ourancestors dreamed of. The very seas and lakes, judiciously farmed,would support more people than the earth now maintains. A millionfish ova now go to waste where one grows to maturity.

  "The time may come when the slow processes of agriculture will belargely discarded, and the food of man be created out of the chemicalelements of which it is composed, transfused by electricity andmagnetism. We have already done something in that direction in theway of synthetic chemistry. Our mountain ranges may, in after ages,be leveled down and turned into bread for the support of the mostenlightened, cultured, and, in its highest sense, religious peoplethat ever dwelt on the globe. All this is possible if civilization ispreserved from the destructive power of the ignorant and brutalplutocracy, who now threaten the safety of mankind. They are like theslave-owners of 1860; they blindly and imperiously insist on theirown destruction; they strike at the very hands that would save them."

  "But," said Maximilian, "is it not right and necessary that theintellect of the world should rule the world?"

  "Certainly," I replied; "but what is intellect? It is breadth ofcomprehension; and this implies gentleness and love. The man whosescope of thought takes in the created world, and apprehends man'splace in nature, cannot be cruel to his fellows. Intellect, if it isselfish, is wisely selfish. It perceives clearly that such a shockingabomination as our present condition cannot endure. It knows that afew men cannot safely batten down the hatches over the starving crewand passengers, and then riot in drunken debauchery on the deck. Whenthe imprisoned wretches in the hold become desperate enough--and itis simply a question of time--they will fire the ship or scuttle it,and the fools and their victims will all perish together. Trueintellect is broad, fore-sighted, wide-ranging, merciful, just. Someone said of old that 'the gods showed what they thought of riches bythe kind of people they gave them to.' It is not the poets, thephilosophers, the philanthropists, the historians, the sages, thescholars, the really intellectual of any generation who own the greatfortunes. No; but there is a subsection of the brain called cunning;it has nothing to do with elevation of mind, or purity of soul, orknowledge, or breadth of view; it is the lowest, basest part of theintellect. It is the trait of foxes, monkeys, crows, rats and othervermin. It delights in holes and subterranean shelters; it will notdisdain filth; it is capable of lying, stealing, trickery, knavery.Let me give you an example:

  "It is recorded that when the great war broke out in this countryagainst slavery, in 1861, there was a rich merchant in this city,named A. T. Stewart. Hundreds of thousands of men saw in the war onlythe great questions of the Union and the abolition of humanbondage--the freeing of four millions of human beings, and thepreservation of the honor of the flag; and they rushed forward eagerfor the fray. They were ready to die that the Nation and Libertymight live. But while their souls were thus inflamed with great andsplendid emotions, and they forgot home, family, wealth, life,everything, Stewart, the rich merchant, saw simply the fact that thewar would cut off communication between the North and thecotton-producing States, and that this would result in a rise in theprice of cotton goods; and so, amid the wild agitations ofpatriotism, the beating of drums and the blaring of trumpets, he sentout his agents and bought up all the cotton goods he could lay hishands on. He made a million dollars, it is said, by this little pieceof cunning. But if all men had thought and acted as Stewart did, weshould have had no Union, no country, and there would be left to-dayneither honor nor manhood in all the world. The nation was saved bythose poor fellows who did not consider the price of cotton goods inthe hour of America's crucial agony. Their dust now billows the earthof a hundred battlefields; but their memory will be kept sweet in thehearts of men forever! On the other hand, the fortune of the greatmerchant, as it did no good during his life, so, after his death, itdescended upon an alien to his blood; while even his wretched carcasswas denied, by the irony of fate, rest under his splendid mausoleum,and may have found its final sepulchre in the stomachs of dogs!

  "This little incident illustrates the whole matter. It is notIntellect that rules the world of wealth, it is _Cunning_. _Muscle_once dominated mankind--the muscle of the baron's right arm; andIntellect had to fly to the priesthood, the monastery, the friar'sgown, for safety. Now _Muscle_ is the world's slave, and _Cunning_ isthe baron--the world's master.

  "Let me give you another illustration: Ten thousand men are workingat a trade. One of them conceives the scheme of an invention, wherebytheir productive power is increased tenfold. Each of them, we willsay, had been producing, by his toil, property worth four dollars anda half per day, and his wages were, we will say, one dollar and ahalf per day. Now, he is able with the new invention to produceproperty worth forty-five dollars per day. Are his wages increased indue proportion, to fifteen dollars per day, or even to five dollarsper day? Not at all. _Cunning_ has stepped in and examined the poorworkman's invention; it has bought it from him for a pittance; itsecures a patent--a monopoly under the shelter of unwise laws. Theworkmen still get their $1.50 per day, and _Cunning_ pockets theremainder. But this is not all: If one man can now do the work often, then there are nine men thrown out of employment. But the ninemen must live; they want the one man's place; they are hungry; theywill work for less; and down go wages, until they reach the lowestlimit at which the workmen can possibly live. Society has producedone millionaire and thousands of paupers. The millionaire cannot eatany more or wear any more than one prosperous yeoman, and thereforeis of no more value to trade and commerce; but the thousands ofpaupers have to be supported by the tax-payers, and they have nomoney to spend, and they cannot buy the goods of the merchants, orthe manufacturers, and all business languishes. In short, the mostutterly useless, destructive and damnable crop a country can growis--millionaires. If a community were to send. to India and import alot of man-eating tigers, and turn them loose on the streets, to preyon men, women and children, they would not inflict a tithe of themisery that is caused by a like number of millionaires. And therewould be this further disadvantage: the inhabitants of the city couldturn out and kill the tigers, but the human destroyers are protectedby the benevolent laws of the very people they are immolating on thealtars of wretchedness and vice."

  "But what is your remedy?" asked Max.

  "Government," I replied; "government--nationa
l, state andmunicipal--is the key to the future of the human race.

  "There was a time when the town simply represented cowering peasants,clustered under the shadow of the baron's castle for protection. Itadvanced slowly and reluctantly along the road of civic development,scourged forward by the whip of necessity. We have but to expand thepowers of government to solve the enigma of the world. Man separatedis man savage; man gregarious is man civilized. A higher developmentin society requires that this instrumentality of co-operation shallbe heightened in its powers. There was a time when every manprovided, at great cost, for the carriage of his own letters. Now thegovernment, for an infinitely small charge, takes the business offhis hands. There was a time when each house had to provide itselfwith water. Now the municipality furnishes water to all. The same