The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    138/170 (page 124)
    seeds of decay are taking root. The long peace which the world enjoyed, with few interruptions, for ninety-nine years, has borne its fruits, and in our country is still ripening them. The evils of peace are not acute like those of war, nor so fleet- ing: they are insidious, slow-working, and long-lasting. Peace brings ease, and ease saps energy. Appeased, the people suffer mischief to be imposed; and dreaming, they fall into vain ways themselves. Already we have fastened upon our necks the single gold standard; and so long as the idea is held up as a fetich that all values must be measured by the value of a single commodity, it will be in the power of financiers to produce fluctuations while waiting for the insetting appreciation that is sure to come. Public debts are everywhere being established as national blessings, that business men may have a convenient fund for investing their idle capital. The wasted interest paid thereon, added to the ever-enlarging demands made upon gov- ernment, is perpetually increasing taxation, and leading to the invention of new taxes and the revival of old. Already the legacy tax has been resuscitated before its time —in Europe in imitation of the Roman, in America in imitation of the Eu- ropean — with its squandering of capital; also the income tax, imitated here as there, with its inequitable incidence upon the married and unmarried alike, alike upon those who have chil- dren and those who are childless. Already the old Roman ap- propriation of the public lands by the rich has been duplicated in England in the enclosure of the commons; and in our coun- ‘try little has been attempted till the mischief was done to pre- vent the purchasing of the public domain in unlimited tracts. In several countries peasants and would-be tillers of the soil have been driven off, and the land given over to pasturage or to hunting ranges; while in our country again labourers returning to their jobs have found them occupied, not by slaves, but by imported cheap labour from abroad. Hatred of the rich is al- ready beginning, with an unreasoning demand for their despoil- ment. In many countries the people are disarmed, and even in ours, where the Constitution forbids, in New York they are prohibited from possessing arms by the monstrous “ Sulli- van law,” proposed by a certain “‘ Big Tim,” as his multitud- inous admirers dubbed him,— an advocate of female suffrage, by the way, and not without connection, as he would make