American Revisited: The Millionaires
It is not my intention here to deal with the psychology of murder. Every thinker knows that in certain types of men the homicidal instinct is powerful. It is powerful in all men of force. Indeed, this terrible instinct lives in all human beings, more or less. No—I am not here to deal with the genesis of this instinct. My point is simply this:
You cannot have a society if you allow any class of men in it whatsoever to slay others without warning.
If you allow this, you are allowing the axe to be laid to the root of the tree. Your State will fall, for the keystone—security—is being wrenched out of the arch.
I am not arguing as to the moral or immoral aspect of willful murder. I am only saying that a State that allows it—for whatever cause—is breaking up.
The United States allows a man to commit willful murder if that man possesses enough money. He is of come submitted to a great deal of inconvenience, but he is not dealt with as society must deal with him if society is to exist.
I well know that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor all over the world. To deny this would be to go against the fact. Even England is not an exception to this rule—though I hope I shall not be accused of favouring England if I assert that in England, where grave and vital issues are involved, the administering of the law is free from the money.
THE POWER OF MONEY.
Again, If I may, I would like to digress here to say that I do not believe all wealthy men to be scoundrels. I certainly hold that the possession of great wealth by an individual is not a good thing for the state but it is a far cry from the holding of that opinion to thinking that a wealthy man is necessarily a criminal. Indeed, a Millionaire who realises that he is a robber, who gives away part of his plunder, and who possesses a sense of humour, may be a most charming man. But joking apart, it is quite possible far a wealthy man to be in every way a good sort, just as it is possible for a poor man to be in every way a bad sort. Besides, there are different methods of acquiring wealth. A man who invents a commodity, and who superintends the producing of that commodity and who becomes a millionaire by so doing, is certainly not the same sort of person as the enemy of the human race who becomes a millionaire through the cornering of the food of the people. The first millionaire is in effect a working man who gets a very fancy price indeed for his labour. Such a man helps others in the helping of himself. He is overpaid—but he is none the less a worker, and is no more to be compared with the scoundrel who corners food—or who juggles with values not of his own creating—than light is to be compared with darkness.
And before I leave this part of the subject into which I have branched, I must add that it is the millionaire scoundrel who is largely responsible for the coming challenging of the power of money. This concentration of the tokens of value which is called " wealth " is, when rightly used, an instrument of great use to human society as it exists now. But some millionaires--and it cannot be denied that they are in the main Americans—have so abused the use of this power that already there are signs of deep and intense irritation against it. And as sure as I write these words the day is near at hand when the power of wealth will be challenged. There will be a shedding of blood and the shedding will not be all on one side.
The real enemies of society are not dagger and bomb using revolutionists. They are men such as these American millionaires. These men are worse than the worst clique of Grand Dukes that ever crushed Russia. They are largely responsible for the turning of the United States into a place where a man may commit deliberate murder with impunity if he possesses enough money.
From The Times of India. Oct 4, 1906. Page 1.