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.
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