Now these individuals represent three of the principal methods that the privileged classes have invented by which to monopolize the accumulated wealth of the country. But let us analyze the processes, and see if it is wholly by their personal efforts that they gain this end.
Nobody pretends that Mr. Stewart ever produced a single dollar of his vast fortune. He accumulated it by dealing in the productions of others, which he first obtained at low rates, and then sold at a sufficient advance over the cost of handling to make in the aggregate a sum amounting to millions.
Now, I want to ask if all this is not arriving at the same result, by another method, at which the slaveholders of the South arrived, by owning negroes? In the case of the latter, the slaveholder reaped all the benefits of the labors of the negroes. In the former case the merchant princes, together with the various other privileged classes, reap the benefit of the labors of all the working-classes of the country. Every year the excess of the produced wealth of the country finds final lodgment in the pockets of these classes, and they grow richer at each succeeding harvest, while the laborers toil their lives away; and when all their strength and vigor have been transformed into wealth, which has been legally transferred to the capitalists, they are heavy with age, and as destitute as when they began their life of servitude. Did ever Southern slave have meaner end than this?
In all seriousness, is there any common justice in such a state of things? Is it right that the millions should toil all their lives long, scarcely having comfortable food and clothes, while the few manage to control all the benefits? People may pretend that it is justice, and good Christians may excuse it upon that ground, but Christ would never have called it by that name. He would even give him that labored but an hour as much as he that had labored all the day, but to him who labored not at all he would take away even that which he hath. And yet we hear loud professions of Christianity ascending from the pulpit throughout the length and breadth of the land. And when I listen, I cannot help exclaiming, “O, ye hypocrites, how can ye hope to escape the damnation of hell?”