of my country. As a result of
the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in
high places will follow, and the money power of the country will
endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the
people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic
is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my
country than ever before, even in the midst of the war. God grant that
my suspicion may prove groundless."

Wealth has a natural tendency to grow into an overwhelming power, for a
million of dollars well managed will become $1,000,000,000 in a century
and a half, and there are millionaires to-day who may become
billionaires in forty or fifty years. But this growth has always been
kept down by a generous or prodigal consumption, by ostentatious luxury,
by profligacy, by pestilence, and by war. Yet when these checks are
diminished; when, as in our republic, the danger of war is removed; when
the generous consumption is hindered by wide-spread poverty; when
pestilence is checked by sanitary improvements, and industry is enforced
on the millions by daily necessity, then that growth of wealth which has
been interrupted every few years in the old world by war, tyranny,
taxation, standing armies, ignorance, and disease, will advance in our
country as a mighty flood, impelled by the rains from heaven. The flood
from heaven which is enriching us is the inspiration of genius in every
form of science, art, and mechanical progress, which doubles and
redoubles our productive power. We must look to human wisdom for the
means of regulating the flow that it may act as a fertilizing rain, and
not as a devastating flood, wasting the hillsides into barrenness, and
sweeping away the bulwarks that the wise have erected.

It is no rhetorical exaggeration to speak of accumulated and unequal
wealth as a dangerous flood. All ancient history proves it to be a
danger. Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, and India, have shown by their
terrible record how wealth in a few hands has ever proved a curse
instead of a blessing to society. The pyramids of Egypt, an awful
monument of the blood and toil of slaves, are a gloomy record of the
senseless ostentation of despots, yet who ever speaks of the pyramids as
the monuments of a crime?

Immense wealth for personal use is not a normal desire. It is an
unsound, unhealthy appetite, resembling that of gluttony and
darkness--an appetite that gro