THE POSSIBLE DANGER IN AMERICA. T HE Western and Southern States
of the Union have revolted against property. If things were always what they seem, which in America they very often are not, that would be the meaning of the course which the Convention of the Democrat party now sitting in Chicago has resolved by heavy majorities to pursue, and even as it is the proceedings are of the deepest interest to all Englishmen. There is, at all events, a chance that Governor Altgeld of Illinois, who is ruling the Conven- tion, may get his way, and may nominate and carry his candidate ; and if he does, the loss to the British investor will run up to tens of millions, while the blow to democracy throughout the world will be the most severe that it has endured in this generation. The silver men have completely captured the Democrat Convention, they have obtained—it is said by revolutionary means—a two- thirds majority, and they have accepted, and are about formally to issue, a platform, about the meaning of which there can be no mistake. They have no notion of "fool- ing around" their object. They not only declare that silver ought to be made legal tender at a ratio of 1 to 16, that is, at nearly double its commercial price, without waiting for any international agreement, but they avow their intention of vitiating if they can all contracts for payment in gold, thus, as they openly acknowledge, reducing all debts by one-half, while increasing equally the price of all commodities produced in America. They specifi- cally refuse to all holders of United States bonds the option of demanding gold, and they declare that a gold standard is a British device, favoured also by the Eastern States, for plundering the American people. They demand, moreover, such a revision of the Constitution as will make an Income-tax, which has recently been disallowed by the Supreme Court, fully legal, and do not conceal in their speeches that they intend it should be graduated and heavy. They in fact declare that they will by law deprive the creditor class of half its property, that they will fine the rich for being rich, and that they regard capitalists, bankers, and all who adhere to a gold standard as foes of the body of the people. Their enthusiasm in the cause is indescribable, and their violence and contempt for their own rules, which have been most marked, show that they think they have a peremptory mandate, and that in their judgment the electors are determined to wait no longer, but to enforce their views if necessary by revolutionary means, including, if that cannot be avoided, the expulsion of the Eastern States from the Union. It is carefully recorded that "sectional feeling" has much to do with the extreme character of the resolutions, and that the Western delegates are treating the East in a way and with language which indicate both contempt and hate, thinly concealed under an assertion repeated every ten minutes, that the East is "the bond-slave of the London moneylenders."
Views of this kind strike Englishmen of property as so nearly insane that they attach to them less importance than they deserve. They are, in fact, unable to believe that a majority can be found anywhere in America holding such opinions, and expect that at the polls the Silver party will be hopelessly defeated. We also expect that, because we still believe that the American people is one of the "peoples of the Bible," and will not knowingly do anything which Christianity forbids ; but we are more alarmed than most of our contemporaries. We know too well that the "American opinion" spoken of in this country is nothing but the opinion of the Eastern States, now far outweighed in importance by the West. We cannot forget that these " wild " delegates were elected, in spite of very heavy expenditure by the gold men, in order to defend these wild proposals. We see that these pro- posals are moderate when compared with views like those of Mr. Altgeld, Mr. Boies, and Mr. Tillman, and that Mr. Altgeld is the elected Governor of Illinois (population three millions and a quarter), that Mr. Boies is the Governor of Iowa (population nearly two millions), and that Mr. Tillman, besides being Governor of North- Carolina, is the accepted mouthpiece of the whole Populist party, which throws a heavy vote in at least six States. We have noted for years in the West the in- crease of " Socialist " feeling as regards all property except freehold land, and the popularity of all de- nunciations of trusts, railway companies, banking cor- porations, and great private owners of capital. We have not forgotten that fan wild experiment known as the Bland Act, which ordered, a national purchase of all surplus silver, was received with enthusiasm in the West, or that the arguments for that Act were said to be as much dictated by Socialist feeling as by the interest of the Silver Kings. And we cannot overlook the fact that the majority of citizens in the West are small freeholding farmers, one-third of them mortgaged, whose incomes have been nearly cut in two by the fall in agrieulturai prices, who pay three sets of taxes, those of the distric!P, of the State, and of the nation, who have for yea,_ attributed their difficulties to insufficient coinage, and who are penetrated beyond any population in the world with the view that they have as citizens of the Americat, Republic a right to material ease and exemption from anxiety. We are unable, therefore, to feel confident that such a population, conscious of irresistible weight in the Union, may not, under pressure of economic cares, rise as the French peasantry did against what they conceive to be unjust exactions, and insist that their rulers shall at least try to equalise more clearly the material position of all classes. The mass, sheltered by the ballot, may vote that way, and if they do there is no power in the Eastern States to resist them, and no means of averting a panic- among property-holders which would have all the dis- astrous effects of a redistribution of property. As we have repeatedly said, we do not think the movement will go quite so far, because of American belief in the binding force of the Eighth Commandment, but we never remem- ber the external signs of a possible economic convulsion to have been so menacing.
What an amazing occurrence a Democrat victory on the lines of this Convention would be, and what a rebuke to the wisdom of the wise ! The revolt against property, so long predicted in Europe, would have broken out first. of all in a country without a Monarchy, without a privi- leged class, and amid a population every man of whom is a, voter, and can possess himself without payment of suf- ficient land. All the ideas of all the older Liberals of Europe have been realised in America, and if the Chicago delegates represent a majority they have all, as regard& the safety of property, been realised in vain. Property., except in the form of freehold farms, is more seriously threatened than in France or Germany or Austria, and it is threatened by persons who are all educated in free schools, possessed of the suffrage, sufficiently fed, and living in houses which are their own rent free. All the con- ditions tending to social quiet are present in the West, yet the social disquiet is as intense as in the oldest country of effete Europe, and displays itself in efforts which are at all events more likely to be successful than those of European Socialists. Hatred to the rich, as bitter as any felt in the world, has spread itself in a country where, outside a limited and usually alien residuum in the great cities, no one is abjectly poor, and poverty is at all events supposed to convey no stigma. Even to-day the wise are saying that wealth is safer in America than in Europe, that the millionaire across the Atlantic is rather admired than hated, that only in America can wealth flaunt itself without risk of stirring up anti-social passions. Yet in Chicago we have six hundred: delegates, representing, it is believed, a majority of Western men, and their whole tone, their one animating enthusiasm, is defiance to the rich, and they accept as leader Mr. Altgeld, who would apply the sponge to All national debts, and who pardoned Anarchists because he thought the social conditions almost of necessity produced anarchism. We suppose the explanation is that wealth is matter of comparison, that where none are hungry all desire exemption from care as acutely as the hungry desire food, that wishes spur on men to envy as strongly as necessities. It must be so, or that Convention could never have been elected ; and what a lesson it is to the dreamers who think that if certain forms of suffering, most of them pecuniary, are extinguished in the world, universal society will enjoy a millennium of rest. There is no rest, and in this world none is coming. The truth is, as it always was, that man does not live by bread alone, that his imagination is at least as strong as his reason, and that while he has an aspiration which is gratified only for his neighbour he will be capable of letting the poison of envy affect his heart and brain. Imagine the freeholders of Illinois banding themselves together to scale down debts by law, because they think their creditors too rich ! Jack Cade, one remembers with a start, was not a townsman.
Previous page
