previous next

The ‘criminal rich.’

So it comes to pass we have them, who from the official pinnacle are branded as ‘the criminal rich.’ Anarchy answereth to anarchy, lawlessness at the bottom to lawlessness at the top. The grand triumph of our universal suffrage would seem to be a rediscovery of the ways and means whereby banded capital can hurl as the abject instrument of power, a servile proteletariat. Benjamin Harrison was entitled to know whereof he spoke, when on the 22nd of February, 1898, referring to the speech: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stay half slave and half free,’ he gave as present paraphrase; ‘This country cannot stay half taxed and half free.’ This is the reality; the other has done yeoman service to accomplish the reality. This creates the ruling class, whose reason for existence is, in place of reciprocal welfare, to ordain a reciprocal rapine; of which the ultimate promise is the Asiatic system, whereunder the tax-payer shall have no rights which the tax consumer will be bound to respect. It is the old eternal conflict between government as a trust and government as a spoil. Magnitude has taken root as magnanimity. As conclusion of the whole matter, the Washington Post of August 14, 1906, has this to say: ‘Let us be frank about it. The day the people of the North responded to Abraham Lincoln's call for troops to coerce sovereign States, the republic died, and the nation was born.’

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Abraham Lincoln (1)
Benjamin Harrison (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
August 14th, 1906 AD (1)
February 22nd, 1898 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: