Sugar Trust and Tariff Profits
Trust, and 50 cents to sugar growers and wholesale groceries. "As our sugar account amounts to about $200,000,000 a year, the trust will this year pocket about $30,000,000 of our sugar tax. Nearly $10,000,000 more will go to sugar growers, wholesale grocers, and Sandwich Islands speculators, who are the chief beneficiaries of reciprocity." "The sugar leech has cost us $550,000,000 during the last seventeen years," declared the speaker, "and all but $35,000,000 has been filched from us by means of the sugar tariff, manipulated by its friends." "What have we to show for it? A score or more of millionaires, whom De Witt Warner has said are the most dangerous Anarchists this country has ever seen. They both make and break our laws and corrupt our politics, legislators, executives, and judiciary." "Mr. Holt maintained that enough senators are owned by the trust to carry out its will in regard to the tariff, and this end is gained, he asserted, by electing legislators in the various States who will choose Sugar Trust senators. In substantiation of this he quoted Mr. Havemeyer's testimony before the Senate in regard to the trust's local political contributions always given to the party in power." "Mr. Gamaliel charged that we are where Europe was three or four hundred years ago,—ruled by feudal barons, alias United States senators. He declared that the present conditions continued mean revolution, and that unless we meet the situation, this government will go to pieces. Hon. John E. Russell followed in the same line." "Professor Cummings, who is a very young-looking man, expressed his opinion that it was beneath the dignity of the Reform Club to echo the sentiments heard on the street corners from Socialists and Anarchists and would-be debasers of the currency." "He averred that the difficulty is not so much in the trusts and millionaires and the government as it is in a lack of sound moral sense among the people. To cultivate that should be the first thing in the way of reform." "At the head of the table, in addition to the speakers referred to, were Vice-president Moorfield Storey, who presided; Archibald M. Howe, H. H. Fletcher, Winslow Warren, Samuel Y. Nash, Charles Warren, J. J. Myers, Dana Estes, Henry W. Lamb, and Robert Treat Paine." "In closing the meeting Moorfield Storey answered some of the criticisms of Professor Cummings, and said the radical views uttered during the evening were to be the more seriously considered in view of the high character of the men who advanced them." Truly such a condition of things tends to revolution. "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
When wealth accumulates and men decay." Spake the prophet of old: "Wo unto them that join house to house, and lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." Isa. 5:8. Said another: "He is a proud man, neither keepeth at home, who enlargeth his desire as hell, and is as death, and can not be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations, and heapeth unto him all peoples. . . . Shall they not rise up suddenly that shall bite thee, and awake that shall vex thee, and thou shalt be for booties unto them? Because thou hast spoiled many nations, all the remnant of the people shall spoil thee." Hab. 2:5-8. "And the songs of the palace shall be howlings in that day, saith the Lord God; the dead bodies shall be many; in every place shall they cast them forth with silence." Amos 8:3, R. V., margin. And Isaiah completes the picture: "Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant." Isa. 5:9. The overreaching and grasping of the rich and the class feeling engendered by it in the poor are rapidly bringing us to a fulfilment of the above divine predictions. We are nearing the end. See James 5:1-7.