People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1895 — A Condition. [ARTICLE]

A Condition.

Rockefeller has $175,000,000; Stub Peters has a wife and nine children. Rockefeller and Peters both work hard —one to care for his millions, the other to keep his family from starving. On« cursed with too much; the other curse* because he lacks enough. Both industrious; both thrifty; both slaves. A few years both will go away. One to—the other to —. Both will leave families. The family of the one nursed in luxury to effeminacy, will gradually yield an existence and go out In silence; the family of the other, the prey of temptation, chased by gaunt want from refuge to refuge, will fly at lash for temporary surcease of pain and woe, to a life of dishonor. Crim€ will at last be their only resort. A few escapades; death, prison, the gallows, and the curtain will drop. Twf families will have gone out forever. Strong and good blood coursed through the veins of both at the beginning ol their career, yet darkness and obliv ion will soon claim them all. Why this mockery of human aspirations and human consecration? Aye. That is the question this generation of meD and women is called upon to answer A social system, based upon greedgiving to the shrewdest the monopoly of life’s opportunities, by a strange fatality damns those who take advantage of the unjust conditions it decrees. As a consequent of the wreckage oi the one class, the other contemporaneously goes out to a certain destruction. Dismal death obliterates every scion of every family. Ruin to all decreed. Ruin to all decreed in the immutable law which curses with its persistent evolutionizing energy the selfish systems of humanity. Greed ia transitory; it is error. Ethics is permanent; it is truth. The story of man is the demonstration that selfishness destroys those who grow fat over its gain and indulgences, as well as those who suffer by the consequent injustice. Men go out under the doomladen operation of this infinite law Families vanish; nations struggle and succumb and civilizations perish. AIJ history amplifies, and is a commentary upon the statements herein made.Progressive Age.