486 



CONSERVATION 



bulk of all this wealth, and nearly 

 90,000,000 people controlling the rest. 

 It has been stated that one per cent of 

 the population actually owns or controls 

 ninety per cent of all this wealth, and 

 the 100 men known, for want of a bet- 

 ter name (or worse), as Wall Street, 

 who control the larger part of these 

 vast assets, constitute from one eight- 

 thousandth to one nine-thousandth part 

 of one per cent of the population of 

 the United States. This is why they 

 are able to produce a world panic, 

 felt to the uttermost reaches of civiliza- 

 tion, in the midst of an unparalleled and 

 unexampled prosperity. 



This first decade, also, among this 

 coterie of dollar-getters, found one man 

 (and we are by no means certain that 

 he was the richest man in the country) 

 whose annual income is greater than 

 the combined wealth, in total capital, 

 of every millionaire in the United States 

 before the Civil War. 



This is the economic paradox pre- 

 sented by the first decade of the twen- 

 tieth century. 



A few people began to ask some 

 questions as to why there was no money 

 in circulation during this unexampled 

 prosperity ; why in the midst of it it 

 was possible for a stock gamblers' panic 

 to be perpetrated ; why nobody for 

 months could borrow money on any 

 security whatever to conduct legitimate 

 business ; and why men could not draw 

 their own money out of the banks in 

 larger sums than £10 at a time. 



The New York financiers chose am 

 inconvenient time for the panic. In 

 forcing this panic the stock-gamblers 

 made their first fatal blunder. They 

 got the American people to wondering 

 whether, after all, their prosperity were 

 not a good deal like that of the fly de- 

 scribed by Josh Billings, which had ac- 

 quired a half-barrel of molasses. A 

 few of the more disinterested and far- 

 sighted saw in this stock-gamblers' 

 regime an immediate and overshadow- 

 ing menace to the very existence of the 

 American Republic. This menace is 

 financialism. It is not commercialism, 

 not even the materialism which consti- 

 tutes, unfortunately, the basis of the 



American idea of life. It is an insolent 

 and irresponsible gambling and wreck- 

 ing game, beside which the Louisiana 

 lottery was a Sunday-school — a game 

 run by creatures whose only distinction, 

 and apparently whose only aim lies in 

 the heaping up of what others need, and 

 they cannot use — a game destitute of 

 soul or spirit, unless it were the spirit 

 of Demylus at the Greek banquet, who, 

 wishing all the fish for himself, spat in 

 the dish. 



When, by a series of revelations in 

 the business worlds or, more accurately 

 speaking, in the financial world, it be- 

 came evident, through these revelations 

 appearing in instalments, with appall- 

 ing punctuality, that these vast and 

 grewsome hoards had been heaped up 

 by methods which could not compare 

 favorably with those of the late Cap- 

 tain Kidd (inasmuch as he was willing 

 to take some chances, and invested him- 

 self with certain shreds of romance) 

 the American people began to sit up 

 and rub their eyes. It began to be 

 apparent to them that American insti- 

 tutions were being developed rapidly, 

 and almost solely, for the benefit of the 

 financial classes. Those without the 

 financial instinct, how^ever able in other 

 walks or realms of life, suddenly found 

 themselves in danger of slavery or ex- 

 tinction. One eight-thousandth of one 

 per cent now ruled this blessed democ- 

 racy. Life on the financial or acquisi- 

 tive plane, under individualism, means 

 that the strong win and the weak per- 

 ish. This, being interpreted, means 

 that the financial strong win and the 

 financial weak perish, and the inevita- 

 ble issue is a financial despotism. Free 

 competition had broken its backbone 

 carrying its own fat, and had crawled 

 into the sarcophagus of billionaireism 

 to die and rot. That which De Tocque- 

 ville had feared had come to pass in 

 America — democracy had issued in des- 

 potism. The dream of the Jefiferso- 

 nians and the eighteenth-century revo- 

 lutionists had not been fulfilled. The 

 laisscz-foirc millenium had not ar- 

 rived. We found we had been devel- 

 oping the wrong kind of democracy — 

 the democracy of individualism. For 



