REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES. BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN. THERE is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career around the globe, from the most ancient recorded time, beginning in barbaric tyranny and robbery of the toiler, advancing with the power and wealth of nations, and flourishing unchecked in modern civilization, sapping the strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity, impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence, stimulating with alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth and power, and making abortive the greater part of what saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for human redemption. But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and never arrested by the Church, which assumes to obey the sinless martyr of Jerusalem, and to war against all sins, yet has never made war upon this giant sin, but has fondled and caressed it so kindly that the pious and conscientious, believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of its enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened people shall pour their hot indignation upon the crime and the unconscious criminals. This crime which the world's dazzled intellect and torpid conscience has so long tolerated without resistance, and which antiquity admired in its despotic rulers, splendid in proportion to the people's misery, is that misleading form of intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the elements of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander and destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other purpose than to uplift the man of wealth and humiliate his humbler brother. That purpose is a crime; a crime incompatible with genuine Christianity; a crime which was once checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only for a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless motive as in its wanton destruction of happiness and life to achieve a selfish purpose. This feature of social ostentation, its absolute cruelty, has not attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On the contrary, the crime is cherished in the higher ranks of the clergy, and an eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying an absurdly expensive church, actually preached a sermon in vindication of LUXURY-defending it on the audacious assumption that it was right because some men had very expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should be gratified. A private interview with John Wesley would have been very edifying to that clergyman, as the more remote example of the founder of Christianity had been forgotten. act. That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a crime becomes very apparent by a close examination of the There would be no harm in building a $700,000 stable for his horses, like a Syracuse millionaire, or in placing a $50,000 service on the dinner table, like a New York Astor, if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar represents an average day's labor, for there are more toilers. who receive less than a dollar than there are who receive more.* Hence the $700,000 stable represents the labor of a thousand men for two years and four months. It also represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand dollars would meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the cost of the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven hundred lives, and affirms that the owner values it more highly, or is willing that seven hundred should die, that his vanity may be gratified. This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars would save not one but many lives in the Irish famine. It would save more than a score of lives in New York, if diligently used among those who are approaching the Potter's Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dead of New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per cent., an institution that would permanently sustain educating to a virtuous manhood, two hundred and fifty of the waifs gathered in from the pollution of the streets, sending According to J. R. Dodge, there are five million agricultural laborers in this country whose wages do not average over $194 a year. forth fifty redeemed ones every year. When $700,000 is squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed, by destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable to stay the march of disease, of crime, and of death. The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning out half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life authorize him to destroy it? It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm's length, or looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in diamonds in a Washington court circle,- all of which I hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is. "Twenty-four hours in the slums " (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a night and a day- yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards." Such is life in New York. What it is in "Darkest England," as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire's metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling land Is lords* worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive's cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births. The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the universities patronized by the wealthy. New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule "whatever is most costly is most fashionable." Nor is the cost the only evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an evening's lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng, almost within hearing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the utterly destitute every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday. Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the nature of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked to read in parallel columns the crushing agonies of famine and pestilence, and the costly revels of aristocracy, or the Fifteen to forty per cent. is the usual profit exacted on tenement-house property, according to witnesses before a Senate Committee,- forty per cent. being common. Is not this the plunder of poverty by wealth? Has Ireland anything approaching this or resembling the horrid conditions in New York? "All previous accounts and descriptions" (says Ballington Booth) "became obliterated from my memory by the surprise and horror I experienced when passing through some of the foul haunts and vicious hotbeds which make up the labyrinth of this modern Sodom." "How powerless" (said Mr. Booth) "are lips to describe or pens to write scenes which baffle description, and which no ink is black enough to show in their true colors." millions wasted on royal families, that manifest about as much concern for the suffering million as a farmer feels for the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is sur prised or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for poverty, famine, and pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda could offer a pearly and jewelled carpet, ten feet by six, costing a million of dollars, as a present to the woman who had pleased his fancy.* How many lives and how much of agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents pays for a day's labor? Twenty million days' labor is a small matter to a petty prince. CRIMINAL OSTENTATION stands ever in the way of man's progress to a higher condition, like a wasting disease that comes in to arrest the recovery of a patient. All schemes of benevolence, all efforts to gain a greater mastery of nature's forces, and thus emancipate the race from poverty and pestilence, languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of the resources consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress, obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort, decency, and intelligence, England's three millions of submerged classes who live in destitution and misery.† The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their thoughts, and the grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "If the governments of the world This love of ostentation has much to do with the degradation of India. The silver money which should be in circulation is hoarded up or used for silver ornaments. A wedding in that country is not marked by proper preparation for the duties and expenses of conjugal life, but by a display of jewelry and silver. A thousand rupees' worth must be furnished by the bride, and two thousand by the bridegroom, if they are able to raise so much, and sometimes they raise it by going in debt beyond their ability to pay. This love of ostentation marks an inferior type of human development. †These suggestions are not offered in a hostile spirit. The writer fully realizes the large amount of moral sentiment and fervent piety assembled in the Church to uplift society in this country, but he deeply regrets that it is not more enlightened in ethics and in doctrine, and that the Church has never got rid of its ancient taint, mentioned by the Apostle James, that the brethren paid more respect to the man with a gold ring than a man in cheap clothing. |