The impending crisis : $b conditions resulting from the concentration of wealth in the United StatesBouroff, Basil A.
History
The impending crisis : $b conditions resulting from the concentration of wealth in the United States
Bouroff, Basil A.
Trusts, Industrial; United States -- Economic conditions; Wealth
And who is after all accused? Who is searched? Whose character and
history of life is mercilessly scrutinized at the bars of charity? [SN:
HE IS REGARDED AS INFERIOR.] Again the same propertyless victims, the
same economic slaves, whose lives have been spent in working for the
owners of wealth, owners of property, of fortunes.
It is certainly not with Japan, nor even civilized England, where
primogeniture persists to reign, and where the hereditary noblemen [SN:
PRINCIPLES OF INJUSTICE.] equally continue to suck the energy of the
British and Irish people and of the peoples of their colonies that we
have to deal with. “In 1891 Great Britain and Ireland had had nearly
6,000,000 propertyless families[54];” and they have been accustomed for
centuries to spend more than half of their energy in favor of the lords
of property, who are the lords of nearly all resources of wealth in
Britain and in many other parts of the world. But we have to deal with
the people of the United States, whose fathers tried by all means to
escape the influence of primogeniture, and whose children have now
reached the same economic [SN: DIVIDOGENESURE.] condition of slavery,
but under a different title, viz., that of dividogenesure.[55] As its
definition here shows, the principle of dividogenesure involves both the
individual and class dependence of the needy upon the wealthy and
applies to the entire millions of the group of tenant families, as well
as to the group of mortgagor families of the 2d table.[56] For all these
families have been dividing the sole results of their labor or toil, in
one way or another, between themselves and their economic masters that
they wholly or partly depend upon. The subsequent chapters, however,
will better explain the situation of their dependence.
While here we shall but briefly indicate that dividogenesure, as a
principle of tacit reality, separates the people into two classes: 1st,
into individuals of multiple expenditure in each case, but with a
possible semi-income [SN: ECONOMIC CLASSES.] for supplying this
expenditure; and 2d, into individuals of also multiple expenditure for
living, but at the same time of multiple incomes sufficient to leave a
considerable net profit or balance for their future. This balance or
profit, in some cases, gradually amounts to millions of dollars’ worth
of wealth, remultiplying further incomes most rapidly; while the
individuals of the first class become absolutely dependent upon the
second even for the semi-income which may at any time be refused them on
account of too many individuals in need of resources for incomes
belonging to the second class.
And it further follows, that when the resourceless are admitted into the
sphere of dividogenesure, [SN: ONE SPHERE.] then their multiple
expenditure is meagerly supplied. But when they are refused admittance
into this sphere, then their unavoidable fate is starvation or falling
back into the realm of public relief for the unemployed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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