masses have gained immeasurably in all the comforts and conveniences of life, in social position, in political power, in freedom from care, in health and happiness.
The coming conflict between proletariat and plutocrat is a favorite theme with socialistic writers. According to these, wealth is per se criminal, and its chief employment the oppression of the poor. I claim that modern experience proves the antithesis of this statement, which selects exceptional instances of financial crimes and attempts to use these as a blanket with which to smother all the good deeds and grand undertakings in which capital is ever engaging. Patriotic sentiment also protests against such statements. The aid of capital has been the means within little more than a century of raising the United States of America from the condition of an insignificant agricultural colony, which was not permitted under monarchical rule to manufacture the simplest articles for home consumption, into the greatest workshop of the world, and has placed it in the front rank of wealth and power among nations.[1]
Capital has stimulated the inventive faculty of the people and thereby aided the operative in many instances to emerge from the condition of the laborer into that of the capitalist. Very many, perhaps a majority of employers in this country, are men who have risen from the ranks of labor.
The reckless denunciation of wealth by foreign socialistic agitators is the chief danger confronting the industrial class in America to-day, since it tends to retard investment of capital in industrial enterprises, and thus to restrict the employment of labor. It is far easier for the agitator to "kill the goose that lays the golden egg" than it is for the mischief-maker to turn his hand to honest labor. The' free soil of America is not adapted to the growth of such noxious weeds, and the sooner such pernicious doctrines are eradicated the sooner will our industrial population reap the rewards to be gained in the returning prosperity for which it has so long and patiently waited.
- ↑ The first spinning jenny ever seen in America was secretly imported from England and exhibited in Philadelphia in 1775. In 1774 the British Parliament enacted stringent laws prohibiting the exportation to America of textile machinery. It was provided (by 21 George III, chap. 37) that "any person who packed or put on board, or caused to be brought to any place in order to be put on any vessel for exportation, any machine, engine, tool, press, paper, utensil, or silk manufacture of the kingdom, or goods wherein wool, cotton, linen, or silk are used, or any model or plan of such machinery, tool, engine, press, utensil, or implement, should forfeit every such machine, etc., and all goods packed therewith, and £200, and suffer imprisonment for one year." In 1782 a law was enacted which prohibited, under penalty of £500, the exportation or attempt to export "blocks, plates, engines, tools, or utensils used in, or which are proper for, the preparing or finishing of calico, muslin, etc." The same act prohibited transportation of tools employed in iron and steel manufactures.—United Slates Tenth Census, vol. ii, p. 587.
