88 PETER S. GROSSCUP 



increase in the people's bank deposits; but neither wealth nor 

 population has grown at anything like the pace taken by the 

 deposits. In the ten years following 1880 — a period during 

 which wealth and population had increased possibly 25 per 

 cent — the deposits had doubled. In the ten years following, 

 they have doubled again ; three quarters of the accretion — or 

 more than $3/250,000,000— being added since 1897. 



These figures show, of course, that as a people, we have 

 been prosperous — that the farmer, the merchant, the work- 

 man, have as never before, had out of their earnings a liveli- 

 hood and a large sum over. But this does not explain it all, 

 or nearly all. The men of this day are not less keen than those 

 of yesterday to make good bargains, to increase their posses- 

 sions, to share in the advancing prosperity of the land. They 

 know, too, as well as did their fathers, that it is not from idle 

 capital, but from invested capital, that any increases must be 

 looked for. They stand aloof, it is plain to me, not from lack 

 of wish, but from lack of desirable opportunity. It means, 

 if it go on, that the people at large will cease to be proprietors 

 in the industries of the land, and in thus ceasing, exchange the 

 active interest of proprietorship for the idle curiosity of the 

 bystander. 



A widespread withdrawal by the people at large from 

 general ownership in the properties of the country, cannot but 

 be fraught with the gravest dangers. A few of these are so 

 obvious that I need only indicate them. Such withdrawal 

 will diminish, if not destroy, popular interest in national pros- 

 perity; for, from those only who have a stake in prosperity, 

 can we expect great interest. It will kill off competition; for 

 the competitor of the trusts must itself be a trust, and there 

 will be no independent field from which to recruit the means 

 to create such competitor. It will discourage still further 

 the wage earner in any hope of becoming part owner; and 

 thus deepen and widen the existing gulf between wealth and 

 labor. It will sap to its foundation the real strength of gov- 

 ernment; for government must be built on the interests, as 

 well as the affections, of the people governed. An industrial 

 system subject to such indictment is a rising menace to free 

 government itself. 



