In this Irish famine which provoked the land
agitation, there is nothing that is peculiar. Such
famines on a smaller or a larger scale are constantly
occurring. Nay, more! the fact is, that
famine, just such famine as this Irish famine, constantly
exists in the richest and most highly civilized
lands. It persists even in "good times" 'when
trade is "booming;" it spreads and rages whenever from
any cause industrial depression comes. It is kept under,
or at least kept from showing its worst phases, by
poor-rates and almshouses, by private benevolence and by
vast organized charities, but it still exists, gnawing in
secret when it does not openly rage. In
the very centers of civilization, where the machinery of
production and exchange is at the highest point of
efficiency, where bankvaults hold millions, and
show-windows flash with more than a prince's ransom,
where elevators and warehouses are gorged with grain, and
markets are piled with all things succulent and
toothsome, where the dinners of Lucullus are eaten every
day, and, if it be but cool, the very greyhounds wear
dainty blankets – in these centers
in wealth and power and refinement, there are always
hungry men and women and little children. Never
the sun goes down but on human beings prowling like
wolves far food, or huddling together like vermin for
shelter and warmth. "Always with You" is the significant
heading under which a New York paper, in these most
prosperous times, publishes daily the tales of chronic
famine; and in the greatest and richest city in the world
– in that very London where the plenty of meat in
the butchers' shops seemed to some savages the most
wondrous of all its wonderful sights – in that very
London, the mortuary reports have a standing column for
deaths by starvation. ...
Last winter I was in San Francisco. There are in San
Francisco citizens who can build themselves houses that
cost a million and a half; citizens who can give each of
their children two millions of registered United States
bonds for a Christmas present; citizens who can send
their wives to Paris to keep house there, or rather to
"keep palace" in a style that outdoes the lavishness of
Russian grand dukes; citizens whose daughters are golden
prizes to the bluest-blooded of English aristocrats;
citizens who can buy seats in the United States Senate
and leave them empty, just to show their grandeur. There
are, also, in San Francisco other citizens. Last winter I
could hardly walk a block without meeting a citizen
begging for ten cents. And, when a charity fund was
raised to give work with pick and shovel to such as would
rather work than beg, the applications were so numerous
that, to make the charity fund go as far as possible, one
set of men was discharged after having been given a few
days' work, in order to make room for another set. This
and much else of the same sort I saw in San Francisco
last winter. Likewise in Sacramento, and in other
towns.
Last summer, on the plains, I took from its tired
mother, and held in my arms, a little sun-browned baby,
the youngest of a family of the sturdy and keen Western
New England stock, who alone in their two wagons had
traveled near three thousand miles looking for some place
to locate and finding none, and who were now returning to
where the father and his biggest boy could go to work on
a railroad, what they had got by the sale of their
Nebraska farm all gone. And I walked awhile by the side
of long, lank Southwestern men who, after similar
fruitless journeyings way up into Washington Territory,
were going back to the Choctaw Nation.
This winter I have been in New York. New York is the
greatest and richest of American cities–the third
city of the modern world, and moving steadily toward the
first place. This is a time of great prosperity. Never
before were so many goods sold, so much business done.
Real estate is advancing with big jumps, and within the
last few months many fortunes have been made in buying
and selling vacant lots. Landlords nearly everywhere are
demanding increased rents; asking in some of the business
quarters an increase of three hundred per cent. Money is
so plenty that government four per cents sell for 114,
and a bill is passing Congress for refunding the maturing
national debt at three per cent, per annum, a rate that
awhile ago in California was not thought exorbitant per
month. All sorts of shares and bonds have been going up
and up. You can sell almost anything if you give it a
high-sounding corporate name and issue well-printed
shares of stock. Seats in the Board of Brokers are worth
thirty thousand dollars, and are cheap at that. There are
citizens here who rake in millions at a single operation
with as much ease as a faro-dealer rakes in a handful of
chips. ...
Nevertheless, prosperous as are these times, citizens
of the United States beg you on the streets for ten cents
and five cents, and although you know that there are in
this city two hundred charitable societies, although you
realize that on general principles to give money in this
way is to do evil rather than good, you are afraid to
refuse them when you read of men in this great city
freezing to death and starving to death. Prosperous as
are these times, women are making overalls for sixty
cents a dozen, and you can hire citizens for trivial sums
to parade up and down the streets all day with
advertising placards on their backs. I get on a horse-car
and ride with the driver. He is evidently a sober, steady
man, as intelligent as a man can be who drives a
horse-car all the time he is not asleep or eating his
meals. He tells me he has a wife and four children. He
gets home (if a couple of rooms can be called a home) at
two o'clock in the morning; he has to be back on his car
at nine. Sunday he has a couple of hours more, which he
has to put in in sleep, else, as he says, he would
utterly break down. His children he never sees, save when
one of them comes at noon or supper-time to the horse-car
route with something for him to eat in a tin pail. He
gets for his day's work one dollar and seventy-five cents
– a sum that will buy at Delmonico's a beefsteak
and cup of coffee. I say to him that it must be pretty
hard to pay rent and keep six persons on one dollar and
seventy-five cents a day. He says it is; that he has been
trying for a month to get enough ahead to buy a new pair
of shoes, but he hasn't yet succeeded. I ask why he does
not leave such a job. He says, "What can I do? There are
a thousand men ready to step into my place!" And so, in
this time of prosperity, he is chained to his car. The
horses that he drives, they are changed six times during
his working-day. They have lots of time to stretch
themselves and rest themselves and eat in peace their
plentiful meals, for they are worth from one to two
hundred dollars each, and it would be a loss to the
company for them to fall ill. But this driver, this
citizen of the United States, he may fall ill or drop
dead, and the company would not lose a cent. As between
him and the beasts he drives, I am inclined to think that
this most prosperous era is more prosperous for horses
than for men. ... read
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