People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1896 — GRANDPA’S HAT. [ARTICLE]

GRANDPA’S HAT.

■arrlson the Beelpient of u Offer Barbarously MugilHrent. Benjamin H. Harrison was offered |IO,OOO by a/certain New York paper to write for it a gossipy letter of not less than 100 words each day from the reporters' gallery in the republican national convention. There are thousands of honest, sober, industrious laboring men engaged in producing wealth in this country who would gladly bind themselves to their masters during the remainder of their natural lives if their masters would agree to secure them in the possession of a job which would average them S3OO per year. Put these two facts together and then consider some other things in connection with them. Ten thousand dollars at the above rate would hire a man to grtib, plow, hustle lumber, shovel coal, or do any other ’ unskilled” labor —which, by the way, is always cheaper than ‘ skilled” , labor, tihough it is the humble mudsill upon which the latter depends for its support—thirty-three years and four months, at the end of which time the • unskilled laborer, if he had not died ' sooner, would be ready to fill a pau- , Per’s grave. Ten thousand dollars will buy, and , pay cash for, one of the finest 160-acre farms in the grandest agricultural i state in the Union; it will buy and ' pay cash for two stores better than the average stores of the country; it will buy, and pay cash for, ten of the average blacksmith, wagonmaker or carpenter shops of the country. At 6 per cent interest SIO,OOO will produce an annual income, without the slightest exertion on the part of its owner, as great as two of our unskilled laboring men can earn in the production of wealth by a hard year’s work and be just as fresh at the opening of its second year as it was at the beginning of its first. But what is perhaps more suggestive, SIO,OOO would have hired one hundred better, brighter and brainier men than Ben Harrison, either of whom would have sent better “copy” to the ; paper employing him than Harrison could. Then who or what is Benjamin Harrison, that he should be thus favored : above other men? Physically he is a little, short, pudgy ‘ fellow, a good deal after the style of ■ “Punch” in Punch and Judy, gray i bearded and gray haired and over 60 I years old. Mentally he is cunning enough to i “keep his plate right side up when it rains porridge” and to espouse the best paying side of any question in which he may be interested. It goes without the saying, since he has never produced a dollar’s worth of wealth in his life and is a corporation lawyer ever! ready to defend corporate interests, j right or wrong, that he is a plutocrat of the plutocrats; that he is not a multi-millionaire comes, not because he is troubled with the least qualms of conscience about the morality of the business of appropriating to his own use the wealth created by the working bees in the industrial hive, but solely because his cunning falls short of the degree necessary to make the opportunity of its acquirement a perfectly safe one. Strange as it may seem in a country where the majority is said to rule and where the humble producers outnumber the leeches in the proportion of a hundred to one. this cold-blooded parasite, who glories in the ability of capital to crush the life out organizations, has been general in the army, governor, United States senator, and president of the United States by virtue of votes cast by men whom and whose calling he holds in utter contempt, and it is because of the hope that the notoriety he has thus gained may be made to redound to its private gain that a plutocratic paper made him the offer noted above. Such men and such papers are fit representatives of a Christian (?) civilization which differs from the barbarism of the dark ages chiefly in the fact that it has transferred the right of man to possess himself of his neighbors’ property from his physical to his mental ability to do so. However, the day is not far distant when theft, whether accomplished at the end of a gun-barrel or the end of a contract, will be recognized for what it really is. Then the history of such men as Harrison and such offers as the above will be objects of a great curiosity and wonderment as the strangest relics of an earlier barbarism now is.