Distinguished orators vied with one another in extolling his wonderful benefactions,6 and the press showered encomiums upon him as that of the greatest benefactor of the age. To them this honestly seemed so, for they were trained by the standards of the trading class, by the sophistries of political economists and by the spirit of the age, to concentrate their attention upon the powerful and successful only, while disregarding the condition of the masses of the people.
The pastimes of a king or the foibles of some noted politician or rich man were things of magnitude and were much expatiated upon, while the common man, singly or in mass, was of absolutely no importance. The finely turned rhetoric of the orators, pleasing as it was to that generation, is, judged by modern standards, well nigh meaningless and worthless. In that highflown oratory, with its carefully studied exordiums, periods and perorations can be clearly discerned the reverence given to power as embodied by possession of property. But nowhere do we see any explanation, or even an attempt at explanation, of the basic means by which this property was acquired or of its effect upon the masses of the people. Woefully lacking in facts are the productions of the time as to how the great body of the workers lived and what they did. Facts as to the rich are fairly available, although not abundant, but facts regarding the rest of the population are pitifully few. The patient seeker for truth—the mind which is not content with the presentation of one side—finds, with some impatience, that only a few writers thought it worth while to give even scant attention to the condition of the working class. One of these few was Matthew Carey, an orthodox political economist, who, in a pamphlet issued in 18297, gave this picture which forms both a contrast and a sequel to the accumulations of multimillionaires, of which Girard was then the archetype:
A STARK CONTRAST PRESENTED.
"Thousands of our laboring people travel hundreds of miles in quest of employment on canals at 62-1/2 cents to 87-1/2 cents per day, paying