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| James Roscoe Day. |
Cortland
Evening Standard, Saturday, October 17, 1896.
PAGE TWO—EDITORIALS.
Another Clergyman Speaks.
Only a few days since The STANDARD published
the admirable letter of Archbishop Ireland to some of his Catholic friends. The
urgent necessity of the hour and the patriotic motives which led the archbishop
to speak to his fellow citizens on their political duties have had their
influence with clergymen of other communions, who have lifted their voices also
in protest against riot, anarchy, repudiation, dishonesty, the degrading of
judicial authority and ruin to the business and financial standing of the
nation—for all of which the Chicago [Democratic] platform declares, and to the
bringing about of which William J. Bryan stands pledged.
Of all the clergymen who have followed the
dictates of conscience and patriotism in declaring in favor of whatever is true
and honest and of good report in the present presidential struggle—which is
far more than a mere political contest—none have spoken braver, better, more
wisely, truthfully or forcibly than Chancellor Day of Syracuse university in
the brief address to his students which is published in full in the Syracuse
newspapers. Such a president of an educational institution cannot help training
his boys to be good men, good citizens and true patriots, rather than dudes,
dilettantes or cultured nobodies, too nice to face a disagreeable duty, or too
cowardly to grapple with forces which threaten the ruin of the nation. The head
of Syracuse university has commanded the respect of everyone whose respect is
worth having—both for himself and for the institution over which he presides—by
what he has so well and bravely said. We publish his words in full:
It is alleged that college people are theoretical
and have but little practical sense in affairs. It is also sometimes asserted
that we take scant interest in the conditions of the outside world. Sometimes these
allegations are based upon somewhat of fact, and sometimes they are made by demagogues
who find it difficult to use college men. For whatever he is or is not the
college man is an independent thinker. He deals so much with exact science and
exact methods that he refuses to obey the mere party whip. He wants to know
what are sound principles, what the ethics of the cause. Strange if college men
do not know affairs. They are citizens, taxpayers, voters. They are close
students and observers of all forms of human thought and activity.
That you students shall not lose in Greek
and Latin, in science and philosophy, in literature and art, the chief end of
all these things, namely, symmetrical manhood, and the noblest citizenship is our
earnest purpose and desire. This wish shall justify the few remarks which I
make this morning. The objective point in college education is manhood and
citizenship, the character and the service.
Before you finish your courses you will study
ethics, civic economics and sociology. You will study them in an atmosphere into
which the professional politicians have not hurled the dust of low party
strife.
It is in this way that you ought to study
your country always. This will differentiate you from the partisan as a sound
or sate thinker. You will not be popular with the ward party boss, but never
mind, he is not a permanent institution at any rate not in his present form.
You will not be taken by the old political saws and senseless claptrap which
constitute so much of the demagogue's stock argument and exciting appeal. Such,
for instance, as ''the rich are growing richer and the poor are growing
poorer." This is a favorite alliteration with persons who would close the century
with a revolution like that which closed the last one in France. Sad, if it were
true, for it means a chasm, and so castes. But it is not true. Nothing untrue is
more untrue. The rich are not growing richer, notably is that true in our country.
The rich have been growing poorer for a half decade. Their income has been cut down
in a startling manner. I lived in the metropolis of the wealthy of this country
for years and have irrefutable proof that capitalists have been failing by the thousands,
and that no man has been more imperiled or driven as a class to closer quarters
than the man out of whose investments come the railroads, steamships, factories
and coal mines, where the so-called poor man finds his employment. They lie in
ruins thick along the track of the past four years. The fact is the rich are
seldom as rich as they seem. The world's business is done largely on borrowed
capital.
POOR NOT GROWING POORER.
But the poor are not growing poorer. The
savings banks give testimony. There never were so many savings hoarded as now.
If the workmen gets less pay per day he pays less for rent and for flour and
for the clothes he wears. And if he will shape economy to needs and not luxuries
and skip the growler when at work and the saloon on his way home his lot is
inside a wide margin of comfort. As a rule he is enjoying a better scale of prosperity
than the man who employs him, is less troubled in his home at night and wakes
up with a lighter heart in the morning.
That demagogue is most popular with the
unthinking who screams about gold bugs and corporations, as though the men of
means (if it were true that the rich are growing richer) were the enemies of
their country. If the rich grow richer, does that make the poor poorer? The richer
the rich are the more money they spend in employing the poor.
But the rich form corporations. That is
their crime.
How do you go to Europe by steamship in five
days instead of by sail in thirty days? Gold bugs furnished the $3,000,000 to
build the steamship which the artisans put together with day toil for which
they were paid more than they could get at anything else and the gold bugs
furnished supplies and money for sailors to navigate them. If you have come up
here from New York in five hours and a half at 2 cents a mile, instead of
taking a week and paying 10 cents a mile, it is because gold hugs have formed a
corporation and done what the individual could not do—put in millions of money
to enable workingmen to bring you here faster than the storm travels, at wages
which furnish them frugal homes. Have the gold bugs harmed us in these things?
Yes, they drove out the stage driver and his horses. But when they drove out
one stage driver they rescued 10,000 of his passengers from delay and misery.
The corporation is an aggregation of men to
do business on a grander scale and furnish the commodity cheaper. If five men
in company can furnish me my barrel of flour $2 cheaper than the man who trades
alone, I will trade with the five men and reckon them a blessing to my
neighbors and myself. And I deny any man's right to disrupt the company because
he wants to sell me flour at $2 a barrel more. I deny any man's right to tear
up the tracks of the Central railroad because he wants the job of towing me to
New York in his canal boat over a waterway owned by the state or drag me there
with wheezy horses through mud or snow in a stagecoach.
If the man who works wants to smash
machinery because it does away with human hands, I say he is the enemy of those
who wear shoes, and not the man who buys the machines and makes the shoes. The
workman must find something to do where hands and labor which he brings to
market are wanted.
Evils there are in corporations. There are evils
in churches, too. These things regulate themselves and are regulated by the
Christian evolution of society. It is by a steady and safe law of progress and not
by riot.
CORPORATIONS AS BLESSINGS.
Corporations have been and are inestimable
blessings to this country. It is impossible to measure them in dollars. They
have befriended the poor man by furnishing labor. They have built his cottage,
educated his children, brought his farm in touch with market, made his clothes,
milled his food and dignified his manual toil. Drive out the gold bugs, destroy
the corporations, tear down the factories and destroy commerce and you will see
quickly how much the poor depend upon the rich, against whom loathsome
demagogues now seek to array him in enmity.
There is nothing more dastardly, more despicable,
more monstrous, more to be execrated by all decent and law loving people than
the efforts of certain political characters to climb into power over the ruins
of labor and capital. To attempt to create two classes with opposing interests out
of the men who risk their money in manufactories and the employee who puts into
the business his toil is the vilest and most cowardly treason against the
republic. It was the seed of such anarchy and demagogy that bore the Upas fruit
in Chicago a few years ago which sent men to the gallows.
We have no aristocracy of money. We have no
serfs of labor. Your rich man of to-day may be the clerk of his bookkeeper
to-morrow. Your poor man of to-day may own the factory to-morrow. And this is
the only helpful condition of things. It is impossible to create classes while
this condition of things obtains. The rich on the one side and the poor man on
the other is only possible where states are upheld by dynasties or entailed in
aristocracy and where the poor are without hope of improvement. It can never be
so in this country. Some one has remarked: "It is only a couple of
generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in this land." The wheel is
ever turning and fortunes are always changing. Opportunity is the legacy of the
poorest boy born on American soil.
This issue is the prime one before the American
people to-day. It supercedes the tariff and the dollar. The people should put
the mark of Cain upon this murderous doctrine of the anarchist. No man who
represents such inflammatory teachings in his platform or addresses should
receive the suffrages of the American people.
HONEST DOLLARS WANTED.
It is not for me in these brief moments to
discuss with you our dollar. I will say we want an honest one. We must not try
to legislate clipped coins into standard dollars. We cannot legislate silver
into gold any easier than we can legislate potatoes into silver. A gold dollar
is worth a gold dollar before it goes through the mint, and a silver dollar must
be worth the best dollar in the world before it goes through the mint. That is
the only way we can make it worth a dollar when it comes out of the mint.
This is a pretty poor dollar which is not
worth a dollar anywhere in the civilized world that is a dollar only at home.
The Mexican dollar is a poor dollar because it is a dollar in Mexico only.
We are in commerce with the world and not
simply with the states of the Union. We buy and sell with England, France, Germany
and all nations. Do you imagine that because we say a piece of metal is a dollar
it will be received as such by these nations? But you trade with these nations.
What dollar are you going to use with the commercial world? Take your 53-cent dollar
and start to travel abroad. How far do you imagine you will get with it? You
would soon come back with your 53-cent dollar and say to the silverities: "Gentlemen,
this dollar is a failure." In two years every dollar will be driven from
the country and you must carry on commerce with the other nations with a 53-cent
dollar. And quickly the dollar which is not a dollar abroad ceases to be a
dollar at home. It is insanity to imagine that we can make a dollar which shall
be a standard of value independent of the commercial centers of the world. It
is what the civilized nations of the earth agree upon that must be used as
estimate money in these days. Our greenbacks are money to-day because behind
every such note is a dollar worth its weight in gold.
As a politician I care nothing about the
present issue, for I am not one, but I speak upon the broad principles of the hour.
The settlement of this issue involves the work and future of this university. I
judge of its effect because for months not a business man has given me a ray of
hope that he could help us to buildings or endowments until he knew what the
dollar is to be. If it to be a clipped coin no man can tell what will come to
business. I therefore feel some solicitude, not because I am a Republican or
Democrat, or because as between men merely I have much choice, but because I am
an American citizen deeply concerned for the peace of the land among all
citizens, the integrity of our standards and the success of business, to which
all our educational and philanthropic causes are so vitally related.
DRAWING TO
A CLOSE.
The Fair
and Bazaar at the Club House on Tompkins-st., Cortland.
The Fair at the C. A. A. club house
[historic Randall House] last night was better patronized than on any previous
evening and the crowds were better pleased with the entertainment than ever.
The museum of living freaks formed a center of attraction during the entire
evening. The decorations and the arrangements of the electric lights which so
brilliantly illuminate the whole building, and which have received so many complimentary
remarks, were the work of Mr. Jas. F. Costello.
A large number of people saw their own bones
by means of the X-ray machines. The gypsy
camp received its share of attention. A very pleasant incident last evening was
the presentation to Mr. E. S. Burrows, the president of the association, of a
large elk's tooth handsomely set in gold. The gift was from some of Mr.
Burrows' friends in the association, and in the order of Elks, which he has
just joined.
To-night is the last night of the fair, when
the bicycles will be disposed of.
BREVITIES.
—The Central school football team left this
morning for Whitney Point to play the academy team this afternoon.
—The Normal and Cazenovia seminary teams are
playing a game of football at the fair grounds this afternoon.
—New advertisements to-day are—A. Mahan,
pianos and organs, page 6; Chas. F. Brown, did you ever, etc., page 4.
—It is reported that four sportmen from the
East Side were out hunting squirrels yesterday all day and returned late with
one small owl as booty.
—The McKinley marching club will meet at the
Republican headquarters Monday night at 7:30 o'clock. There will be a business
meeting followed by drill.
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