Confiscations; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
The millionaire merchant will doubtless take advantage of his right to
divide his business among his relatives and friends. Naturally they
would give him the management, but the instinct to be master is strong
within us all, and this would soon break up and scatter that dangerous
accumulation. Then there would be more Market streets and Broadways.
Every dollar of business that would be taken from the one or two
principal thoroughfares, which is all that is now found in any of the
cities, would mean an increase of value in the property of the street
where this transfer business is carried on. And this increase in the
value of city property would continue on out to the city's limits; and
the limits themselves would be extended further out to find room for
habitable homes for the human beings that are supposed to live in the
tenements. There can be no question but what merchandising would spread
itself more over the cities if this limited ownership of capital was in
force; and this spreading out will give employment to all in bringing
about the change; and prosperity, such as goes with plenty of work, will
take the place of the wretched misery and want that now fill all the
soup-house infected cities of the country. There will be no impairment
in the value or need of the big "dailies" that are published in these
centres of population. They will simply be owned by more people and read
by more, and the improvement in the times being of a stable and
permanent character their circulation will be free from the rise and
fall with which they are now only to well acquainted, and the cheap-John
business into which so many have gone, in the last few years, wheedling
the ten cents and the dollars out of the child-like poor for worthless
truck, can be thrown into the waste basket with the last offer of money
for a Wall Street editorial. It is a mistake, by the way, to think we
are a nation of readers. Man is an interesting animal where-ever found,
the desire to know what he has done and is doing is strong in us all,
but even the little county paper is beyond the reach of many. The
writer, who is a common toiler like the rest, finds the moving world a
sealed book to him, for he cannot spare the needed dollar, and live. And
those editors who will fiercely rend and tear, with all the power of
their trained brains and skilled pens, at this vital need of our times
may live to see the day when they too will believe this world is round,
and that calling the original believers fools, thieves, scoundrels,
rascals, and enemies to civilization was a repetition of an old mistake.
It will be the day when they can be our guides, philosophers, and
friends without the itching palm stuck out behind. It will be the day
when we can accept, without doubt or a curl of the lip, the admonition.
from the sixteen stories of steel, because we will then know, that the
conscience of the man within is not itself all awry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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