constrictor around her neck, was one of the great events of the day, because the newspapers devoted two columns to it, whereas scarcely any mention was made of armies of men being out of work.
MONEY AND HUMANITY.
As it was in 1908 so was it in the decades when the capitalists of one kind or another were first piling up wealth; they were the weighty class of the day; their slightest doings were chronicled, and their flimsiest sayings were construed oracularly as those of public opinion. Numberless people sickened and died in the industrial strife and in miserable living quarters; ubiquitous capitalism was a battle-field strewn with countless corpses; but none of the professed expositors of morality, religion or politics gave heed to the wounded or the dead, or to the conditions which produced these hideous and perpetual slaughters of men, women and children. But to the victors, no matter what their methods were, or how much desolation and death they left in their path, the richest material rewards were awarded; wealth, luxury, station and power; and the Law, the majestic, exalted Law, upheld these victors in their possessions by force of courts, police, sheriffs, and by rifles loaded with bullets if necessary.
Thus, to recapitulate, the Astors debauched, swindled and murdered the Indians; they defrauded the city of land and of taxes; they assisted in corrupting legislatures; they profited from the ownership of blocks of death-laden tenement houses; they certified to thieving administrations. Once having wrested into their possession the results of all of these and more fraudulent methods in the form of millions of dollars in property, what was their strongest ally? The Law. Yes, the Law, theoretically so impartial and so reverently indued with awe—and with force. From fraud and force the Astor fortune came, and by force, in the shape of law, it was fortified in their control. If a starving man had gone into any one of the Astor houses and stolen even as much as a silver spoon, the Law would have come to the rescue of outraged property by sentencing him