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Page 41
"Why not enroll the whole world, and have a great army in civil life,
constantly under command, with the nature of its wants and their form of
gratification fixed or regulated by--well, by a majority of these dough
men? That's the only way I know for the people to get rid of a
circulating medium, and live."
He paused for a moment, both in his locution, and in his walk back and
forward across the floor. Then he resumed both:
"I do not know of anything quite so idiotic as is this howl directed
against the possession of wealth. I myself am a poor man: if I do not
earn a living each year, I go hungry or go in debt. But I would not
trade off my chances of a competency and of wealth--a reasonable
ambition for every man in England and America--no, not to see every rich
man on earth starve--or even sent to hell. This howl is the mark of a
plebeian, or at least of a wickedly childish cast of intellect. I know
of nothing quite so foolish, and of nothing half so brutal. The
Jew-baiting folly is a phase of the same nonsense. It is foolish,
because if the possession of capital is denied to the men who can best
acquire and hence best continue to employ it, then commercial
civilization must take a back seat--in fact, go, and go to stay; and
this means abject poverty for everybody but a handful of state and
church aristocrats. It is brutal, because it is unreasoning and
mistakenly vindictive. It is the howl of the mentally weak--of the mob;
and the mob is always brutal.
"If we are to suppress those whose possessions evidence a past or a
present performance of some service that the world demanded and paid
for, we cast aside the useful of the earth: we know that their
possessions were gained, not from the pauper, but from those who held
material wealth; and I know, and can most solemnly swear, from personal
experience, that in this world nobody gets anything for nothing.
"Oh, the first French revolution! The French revolution was all right.
The fight was not against commercial wealth, but against a corrupt
church, state, and social order. And nobody maintains that the
commercial class is immaculate: every class should come under the
regulation of good statutory law. I only claim that it would be wrong
and foolish to take away in whole or in part the accumulations of the
commercial class. With us the only wealthy citizens are commercial
people, and those who have acquired wealth through them, for with us
here, at this time, the wealthy owners of realty are commercial men who
have put their surplus money into land. Oh, yes: control them; but it's
not the business men of the world who need the most looking after."
And with that he shot out of the room and down the stairs; and I soon
after retired to rest.
The FOURTEENTH Chapter
The next evening at an early hour Arthur was seated in the least
conspicuous corner of my room, a spot which he seemed to have selected
as his own; and, as usual, Doctor Bainbridge entered promptly at eight
o'clock. After the customary minute or two of thoughtful quiet, and a
glance at the map of Hili-li, which each evening I kept spread on my
table in the centre of the room, Bainbridge continued his recital:
"Last evening brought us to the moment when the rescue party, having
entered Volcano Bay, were about to land at the foot of the great
mountain, called Olympus--the Hili-li synonym for Mount preceding the
name Olympus when the peak, some eight miles high, was referred to. Now
if you will examine this map with a little care you will observe here,
near the inner extremity of Volcano Bay, an apparently narrow inlet
passing directly into the mountain-side. This does not represent an
inlet from the bay, but an outlet from Crater Lake, a very deep lake,
the surface of which is several thousand feet below its banks, the lake
being on the top of the mountain, just south of Mt. Olympus, and
emptying into Volcano Bay. This outlet is a small stream at the bottom
of a chasm which cannot correctly be represented on my map, as it is
relatively very narrow, being only from ten to one hundred feet in
width. This chasm is what we here term a canyon, or _ca�on_, the walls
of which in this instance rise perpendicularly from the water to the
average height of ten thousand feet. The paths up the mountain are on
the sides of this outlet--not close to the water, but winding in and out
along the mountain-side above, there being a passable way on each side
of the canyon from the bay to the lake, the distance from bay to lake
along either path being, in its tortuous course, about thirteen miles.
At Crater Lake the mountain rises to a height of about six miles, the
surface of the lake being about four miles above the sea level, its
banks some ten thousand feet in height. A perfectly straight line down
the mountain-side would measure about eight or nine miles.
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