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Show THE RICH MAN'S BURDEN. It has been well said that one-half of the people peo-ple do not know how the other half live, but the revelation made by John D. Rockefeller of the burdens bur-dens of the millionaires makes it pertinent to observe ob-serve that the so-called "submerged tenth" is not the flotsam and jetsam of society, but they who are bound slaves to Croesus. The man of many millions mil-lions rises in meeting to remark that men like himself him-self are in the shafts and that the people are cracking the whip over them as they drag their load through life. By reason of the subtle attraction attrac-tion of business, that comes to be clarified into altruistic al-truistic devotion to the needs of their fellowmen, the Rockefellers find themselves slaves of the whee'l. When Dante pictured the fate of they who in the inferno are compelled to roll the Sysiphus stone up. the hill, that ever rolls back upon them with crushing crush-ing force, he was accurately picturing the plight of the unfortunate men who, whether they like it or not, must give unremitting labor to humanity though crushed by the task. This is a most pathetic bit of Argonautian philosophy. phil-osophy. It changes the divine right of President Bacr, the philosopher of the coal famine, into the divine destiny of Mr. Rockefeller, the philosopher of the oil frauds. It is interesting to note how the end of rapacity is always the plea of justification, of necessity and of beneficence. But the weak part of the philosophy of Mr. Rockefeller is its failure to take account of the specifications in the public indictment of himself and his methods It matters little to the people that, having grown monstrously plethoric, he has retired from active administration of his interests and is only a "stockholder." The Standard Oil monopoly is his creation, and his was the sagacity and shrewdness that organized that instrument, for the reaping of vast, unearned increments in-crements for the Itmeiit of the few from the purses of the millions. When men like Mr. Baer and Mr. Rockefeller lay aside their prating of divine purpose pur-pose and human necessity and face their actual performances per-formances these are found to be the kind that the courts can deal with in exactly the same fashion as they do with common assault and burglary. If Mr. Rockefeller could eat a dozen meals and were to dress in gold-leaf garments, with changes of raiment a score of times a day, he would no more be an instance of self-aggrandizement run riot than he is at present, with his bad indigestion and his unostentatious attire. Complaint is not made of the overfeeding and dressing of multimillionaire monopolists, but of the underfeeding and under-dressing under-dressing of the many who contribute to their opulence. opu-lence. In one. breath Mr. Rockefeller avers that the money of the country is widely, if not evenly, distributed, and implies that this is true of the Standard holdings; in the next he states that, had he desired, he might have converted his holdings into gold and gone to some other country to live, thus making confession that his proprietary rights in industry are vast and paramount. When halos are sold a hundred million of dollars dol-lars a head Mr. Rockefeller may become a high saint, but so long as money cannot buy reputation he must continue to be regarded as disgracefully, if not disgustingly, rich. |