Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

BETTER DAYS:
OR,
A Millionaire of To-morrow.

BY

THOMAS FITCH AND ANNA M. FITCH.

“Philosophy consists not

In airy schemes, or idle speculations;

The rule and conduct of all social life

Is her great province. Not in lonely cells

Obscure she lurks, but holds her heavenly light

To Senates and to Kings, to guide their counsels,

And teach them to reform and bless mankind.”

San Francisco, Cal.:

BETTER DAYS PUBLISHING CO.

1891.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891,

By THOMAS FITCH,

In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Pacific Press Publishing Company,

Oakland, Cal.

Printers, Electrotypers, Binders.

TO THE

Eight Thousand Millionaires of America

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.

IF, THROUGH A PERUSAL OF ITS CONTENTS, ONE AMONG THEM ALL SHALL BE LED TO SO DISPOSE OF A PORTION OF HIS FORTUNE AS TO HELP THE WAGE-WORKERS OF OUR LAND TO HELP THEMSELVES, THEN THESE PAGES WILL NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN VAIN.

CHAPTER I.
“The earth trembled underneath their feet.”

“Chicago,” said Professor John Thornton, “Chicago, my dear doctor, is the typical American city. New York and San Francisco may be classed as metropolitan. Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New Orleans are local to their surroundings; Boston is—Boston, but Chicago is sui generis. Notwithstanding its large permanent foreign population, and the presence of the throngs of strangers attracted by the Columbian Exposition, Chicago remains intensely and distinctively an American city.”

“I quite believe you, professor,” said Dr. Eustace. “Certainly in all the world elsewhere there is no race track for locomotives, no place where iron horses are speeded, and purses of gold and diamond badges awarded to the winners.”

“It is an innovation certainly, doctor, but just such a one as might have been expected in Chicago. The people of this city have not yet passed the noblesse oblige period. You know that in all large cities there is liable to come a time when the citizens divide into separate communities, usually with separate interests, and without any general public spirit. In New York, for instance, Madison Square takes no pride in the East River bridge, Avenue A does not care whether the Grant monument shall ever be completed, and the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island is as strange to many a resident of Harlem as if she were planted on the banks of the Neva. But the people of Chicago, though locally divided into Northsiders, and Southsiders, and Westsiders, are joined in interest for Chicago against the world. Any project that promises glory or profit for the Lake City will cause her citizens to open their pocket books. These Illinois Don Quixotes never tire of sounding the praises of their Dulcinea, and are ever ready to break a lance in her honor.”

“Is not this race,” said Dr. Eustace, “under the auspices of the National Exposition?”

“Not at all,” replied the professor. “As I am informed, a party of speculators leased a thousand acres of land here, ten miles from the city limits. They have, as you see, inclosed it and provided it with the usual buildings, including seats for one hundred thousand spectators. The race course is circular in form, four miles in length, and seven railroad tracks are laid around it. The officers of the leading railroad corporations of the country readily consented to send locomotives and engineers here to compete for the prizes offered, and—you witness the result. This is the third day of the races, and still the interest seems undiminished.”

It was late in the month of July, 1892, and although the World’s Exposition was not yet formally opened, tens of thousands of strangers thronged the hotels of Chicago and added to the gayety of her streets. The great attraction of the day was the locomotive railroad race, and about twenty acres of people, representing all nations, filled the benches and spread over the outer circle of the great four-mile track.

Seven of the largest locomotives in America, selected or constructed for this race, were steaming up and down the tracks, waiting for the signal to range themselves under a white cable, which was stretched diagonally across the race course at such an angle as to equalize the difference of length of inner and outer tracks. Each locomotive was draped with its distinguishing colors, worn also by its attendant engineer and fireman. The favorite engine in the pool rooms was the Chauncey M. Depew, entered by the New York Central Railroad Company.

The furnishings of this engine were of polished silver, with draperies of blue silk, and the engineer and fireman wore shirts and caps of the same color.

The engine which most attracted the admiration of the throng was the Collis P. Huntington, entered by the Southern Pacific Company. All the furnishings as well as the wheels of this locomotive were gilded and burnished for the occasion. The attendants wore shirts and caps of crimson, and the drapery consisted of ropes of crimson roses, the freshness of which, while coiled around smoke stack and boiler, was accounted for by the fact that they were cut from asbestos cloth made and tinted for the purpose.

The directors of the railroad corporations centering in Chicago had readily extended aid and co-operation to the company organized in that city for the construction and conduct of a locomotive race track, for it was conceded that no more instructive school for engineers and firemen could have been devised, and that there was no better field in which to make experiments in machinery, tests of fuel consumption, and economical creation and application of dynamic force. Almost every railroad company in the United States and Canada entered one or more locomotives for the races, which were advertised for the last week of July, 1892, and, notwithstanding the large sums offered for premiums, and the great expense of building and maintaining the race course, the enterprise proved exceedingly profitable to its projectors.

Among the one hundred and fifty thousand spectators of the contest was Professor John Thornton, of Boston, who, ten years before, had been the hardworking principal of the Denver public schools, but who, through the death of an uncle, inherited a fortune of five millions of dollars, and was now one of the solid men and social magnates of the Hub.

During the years of poverty and struggle which antedated Professor Thornton’s introduction to the ranks of wealth, he had grown to regard very rich men with aversion and contempt. He was fond of quoting the aphorism that the Lord expressed his opinion of money by the kind of men he bestowed it upon, and he was stout in the belief that any man who, in this world of human misery, could make and keep five millions of dollars, was too selfish, if not too dishonest, for an associate. He did not carry his opinions so far as to refuse the estate which fell to him, but he was exceedingly generous with his income, and he never ceased to criticise the millionaires.

Professor Thornton was generally regarded by his friends as a Crœsus with the instincts of a Bohemian, a sort of gilded sans-culotte, with very radical opinions and a very conservative bank account.

The professor was accompanied to the race course by his family physician and old friend, Dr. Eustace. This gentleman, unlike the professor, was optimistic in his views of life. Pessimism, according to his belief, might be sometimes necessary for ballast, but as a rule he preferred to throw the sand and rocks overboard, and load up with the silks and spices of Cathay.

“What a country!” ejaculated the doctor, as, amid the cheers of the multitude, one of the locomotives dashed up the track to try her speed.

“It is a great country,” said Professor Thornton, “but will its peace and prosperity endure?”

“Why not?” sententiously interposed Doctor Eustace.

“Are we,” replied the professor, “so much wiser than the people of the republics which once encircled the Mediterranean, that we can afford to disregard the lesson imparted by their history?”

“Do you pretend to compare the ancient civilizations with ours?” queried the doctor.

“It may not be gainsaid,” rejoined Thornton, “that our civilization is superior to that of the ancients in control and utilization of the forces of nature, and it is also true that in the relations of the individual to his government the former has gained in freedom and in security of personal rights. But otherwise we seem to be traveling the same round of national life from infancy to decay, which marked the course of Assyria, of Egypt, of Greece, and of Rome.”

“But conditions were different with them,” remonstrated the doctor. “Rome, even when a republic, was such only in name. There was never any basis of universal suffrage. The government of Rome was always a military despotism, and her prætorian guard sold the imperial purple, and rich men bought it, and she fell because of her corruption.”

“And we have legislators and bosses who sell offices, and ambitious incapables who buy them,” answered the professor. “And we are having now the same vast accumulations of fortune in individual hands that have ever proven the forerunners of national destruction elsewhere. Wealth, corruption, weakness, decay, the mob, and the despot have been the six stages of national life with other republics, and I doubt whether by harnessing steam and electricity to our chariot we shall do more than expedite the journey.”

“Professor, you should go out as a missionary to millionaires,” interposed the doctor, “and preach to them the doctrines of nationalism.”

“Doctor, you are satirical,” replied the professor, “but I am not so sure that events are not fast making missionaries of some such doctrine. Certainly the pressing problem of the hour is that of dealing wisely and justly with the new and unparalleled conditions which vast wealth has created throughout the world, and especially in these United States.”

“We shall prove equal to the problem,” said the doctor cheerfully. “A people who, North and South, were adequate to the achievements and sacrifices of our Civil War, will never allow their government to be overturned by a mob, or their politics to be always ruled by a few thousand wealth owners. And then the personnels of the pauper and the capitalist are ever changing. We have no law of entail by which the founder of a fortune can perpetuate it in his descendants. The vices and the brainlessness of the sons of rich men will come to our aid, and in the third or fourth generation the boatman’s oar and the peddler’s pack will be resumed. Let the millionaires add to their millions without molestation, say I. They cannot take their gold away with them. It must remain here, where it will again be distributed.”

“Doctor,” said the professor solemnly.

“Now, John,” interrupted the doctor, laying his hand familiarly on his friend’s shoulder, “possibly the country may be going to ruin, but we shall have time to see the race out. They are bringing the locomotives in line ready to start. If they should come out close together at the end, how are they going to tell which wins?”

“The judge of this race, doctor,” explained the professor, “is electrical and automatic and cannot make a mistake. As soon as the engines are arranged in line for starting, a wire will be stretched across the track behind them. This wire will connect with a registering apparatus, dial, and clock in front of the grand stand, and each track is numbered. At the signal bell for starting, the clockwork will be put in motion. The first locomotive that crosses this wire will, in the act of crossing, telegraph the number of its track, close the circuit, and stop the clock, thus registering the number of minutes, seconds, and quarter seconds consumed in the run.”

“How clever!” said the doctor. “Well, there sounds the signal bell—they are off!”

With a shrill shriek of challenge from their throats of steel, like unleashed hounds the giants bounded away, gaining speed as they ran. In thirty-eight seconds they rounded the curve by the half-mile post without much change in their relative positions. The next mile was made in fifty-five seconds, with the Chauncey M. Depew, which had the inside track, fifty yards ahead of the Collis P. Huntington, and the others all the way from fifty to one hundred yards behind. At the third mile post the Huntington and the Depew rounded the curve almost side by side, with trails of fire streaming from their smoke stacks, and mingling in a luminous cloud, which hovered above their distanced competitors.

Then, with thunderous leaps and bounds, they came down the home stretch, the one a streak of blue and silver, the other a streak of gold and crimson, and the roar of the multitude fairly drowned the shrieking of the whistles as engineer James Flanagan, of the Southern Pacific Company—his crimson cap gone, his black hair streaming in the wind, and his red flannel shirt open at the breast and almost blown from his massive white shoulders—rode across the signal wire five feet ahead of his competitor, winning the first prize of $10,000 for his company and the diamond badge for himself, making the run of four miles in three minutes nine and one-quarter seconds, or at a rate of over eighty miles an hour.

“It was nothing, sor,” said Flanagan to the vice president of the Southern Pacific Company, who climbed upon the cab of the locomotive to shake hands with his engineer. “If it wasn’t for the time lost in getting under way I’d engage to sind the Collis P. around the four-mile track in two minutes and a half. Sure, the machine was never built that could catch her on a straight run. She’s a dandy and a darlin’ and a glory to old California,” and he patted the throttle valve affectionately.

“Flanagan,” said Vice President Crocker, “the owners of this race track have made one mistake They give the diamond badge, worth $1,000, to the engineer, and the purse of $10,000 to the company. Suppose we trade and let the company take the badge and you take the purse.”

“Oh, more power to you, Misther Crocker,” said the delighted engineer. “It’s thrade I will, and may you live until I offer to thrade back, and whin you die may you go straight up, wid never a hot box to delay you on your run to glory. I’ll give twinty-five hundred dollars of the money to Dan Nilson, that shoveled the coals unther the boiler, like the good man he is, and wid the balance I’ll buy a chicken ranch in Alameda that will be the makin’ of Missis Flanagan and the kids.”

On the bench behind the professor and the doctor two men were seated engaged in earnest conversation.

“I am not asserting,” said one, “that the ore is so very rich. It will average fifteen per cent in copper carbonates, and that is good enough for anybody. But I do say that the lode is an immense one.”

“How long do you suppose it would last, Bob, with a dozen forty-ton furnaces at work on it?”

“Last? why, if you had Niagara for a water-power, and the State of Colorado for a dumping-ground, and hades for a smelting furnace, you couldn’t work that ledge out in a million years.”

“Well, Bob,” laughed the other man, “I will go and look at your mine. Can you start to-night?”

“Your time is mine,” was the response.

“Very good; shall we go by the Iron Mountain route, or by Kansas City?”

“I will have to go by some other route than either,” was the reply. “I cannot cross the State of Missouri; I am honorably dead there.”

“Honorably dead?”

“Yes, sir. It was this way: I lived at Atchison for a while when I was a young fellow, and Abe Simmons and me were always at outs about something, and at last we quarreled in dead earnest about a girl, and he sent me a challenge to fight a duel. I always held that dueling was a fool way to settle things, but I wasn’t going to take water for no Missourian, and so I placed myself in the hands of my second, as they call it among the chivs.

“Well, Abe’s second and my second were good friends of both of us, and they were in for a sort of a lark, and they fixed it up to paint two life-sized pictures, one of Abe and one of me, on the door of an old stable, and we was each to fire at the picture of the other at the word. They had three doctors to examine the wounds on the paintings, and if they decided that the wound was mortal, then the fellow whose picture was killed had to consider himself honorably dead, and was to leave Missouri and never return. If the wound was not mortal, he had to lay up and keep his bed for such time as the doctors agreed would be necessary.

“Well, sir, they made a circus of us, that’s a fact. We both signed a paper agreeing on honor to carry out the arrangement, and we went out one broiling afternoon in August in pursuit of each other’s gore. The boys had passed the word, and we played to a bigger audience than was ever at a Democratic barbecue. I was the best shot, but I was getting ashamed of the whole business, and I fired in a hurry, and only plugged Abe’s picture through its gambrel joint. He took a dead sight and shot my picture plumb through the heart. I wanted three days to settle my business, but the doctors decided that the weather was so hot I wouldn’t keep more than twelve hours, and accordingly I lit out for Pike’s Peak—as it was then called—the next morning, and I have never touched the soil of Missouri since.”

“How about Abe?”

“The doctors agreed that he had to go on crutches for three months, and the boys laughed at him—so I heard—so much that at the end of the second week he limped out to his father’s ranch, and stayed there until his time was up, when he went to St. Louis.”

“And the girl?”

“Well, of course I was a corpse, and she had no use for me, and Abe had, before the duel, invited her to a dance, and, naturally, being a cripple, he couldn’t go, and she allowed that she would neither go to a dance or tie herself for life to a man with a lame leg, and she married another fellow altogether. But you see I cannot honorably go into Missouri unless I can travel on a corpse ticket.”

“Well, Bob, your remains shall not violate your pledge. We will keep out of Missouri this trip.”

“All right, Mr. Morning.”

The professor turned at the sound of the name, and, looking his neighbor in the face, exclaimed:—

“David Morning, have you altogether forgotten an old friend? True, it is nearly ten years since I saw you last, in Denver, but surely I have not changed so very much since then?”

“Forgotten you, Professor Thornton?” replied the party addressed, as he shook hands warmly, “forgotten you? no, indeed. I do not need to ask if you are well—and your wife and daughter? Are they both with you?”

“Both are in Boston, and well, thank you. Do you remain long in Chicago?”

“I leave to-night for the West. Pray convey to your family my remembrances and regards.”

“I will not fail to do so.”

“The crowd seems to be going, professor; I suppose we must say good-by.”

“Good-by, then, and a pleasant journey to you.”

CHAPTER II.
“The light that shone when hope was born.”

In the early dawn of an August day in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-two, David Morning stepped through the French window of his bedroom out upon the broad and sheltered piazza of the railroad station hotel at Tucson, Arizona.

A mass of straight brown hair crowned rather than shaded a broad, high brow, over the surface of which thought and time had indented a few lines which gave strength and meaning to the face. Eyes of sea gray hue, as candid and as translucent as the deeps which they resembled, were divided by a nose somewhat too thick at the base for perfect features but running to an aquiline point, with the thin and flexible nostrils of the racer. A short upper lip was covered with a luxuriant chestnut brown mustache, shading a chin which, though long and resolute and firmly upheld against the upper lip, was yet divided by a deep dimple which quivered with sensitiveness. A thick-set but graceful and erect figure, clothed in a suit of dark blue flannel, completed the tout ensemble of the subject of our sketch, who, with thirty-two years of human experience behind him, had stepped five hours before from the West-bound Pullman sleeper.

David Morning—the only child of a Connecticut father and a Knickerbocker mother—was born and passed the days of his boyhood in the city of New York, where he was a pupil of the public schools, and where he was making preparation for entering upon a course at Yale, when, at sixteen years of age, the sudden death of his father, followed within a fortnight by that of his mother, compelled him to surrender his studies and seek a means of livelihood.

A distant relative offered him a place as clerk in a general merchandise store in Southern Colorado, whither the lad journeyed. For two years he faithfully served his employer. Always of an exploring and adventurous disposition, he had, while “geologizing”—as he called it—in the neighboring hills, in company with a prospector who had taken a fancy to “the kid,” discovered a quartz lode, which his companion located on joint account, David being under age. This location was soon afterwards sold to an Eastern company for the sum of $20,000, of which the lad received one-half. Declining several friendly offers to invest the money in promising mines, he wisely determined to return East and resume the studies which had been interrupted by the death of his parents; but, guided by his Colorado experience, and having a strong inclination for the vocation of a mining engineer, he determined to study in special lines which were outside of the usual collegiate course. He had not deemed it necessary to leave his own country to obtain the necessary instruction, and, four years later, he found himself with $5,000 left of his capital, with no knowledge of the Greek alphabet and but small acquaintance with Latin, yet able to speak and write fluently French, Spanish, and German, and possessed of a good knowledge of geology, metallurgy, chemistry, and both civil and mechanical engineering, and with a cultivated as well as a natural taste for politico-economic science.

At twenty-two years of age, having completed his studies, David Morning located in Denver, adopted the profession of a civil and mining engineer, and promptly proceeded to fall in love with the only daughter of Professor John Thornton, the principal of the Denver public schools.

Ellen Thornton at seventeen gave abundant promise of the splendid womanhood that was to follow. Above the middle height, slender in form, and graceful in carriage, with a broad, low brow crowned with silky, lustrous, dark hair, and eyes of chestnut brown, that, in moments of inspiration, grew radiant as stars, she captivated the young engineer and was readily captivated by him in turn. An engagement of marriage followed, to be fulfilled as soon as the clientage of Morning should be sufficient to warrant the union.

But business comes slowly to young men of two and twenty, and Ellen’s mother grew impatient of the fetters which she deemed kept her charming daughter from more advantageous arrangements. Ellen was proud-spirited and ambitious, and, although she was earnest and conscientious, she was not so stable of purpose as to be unaffected by the arguments and appeals of her mother. At times she was sure that she loved David Morning, and at other times she was not so sure that her love was of that enduring and devoted character which a wife should feel for her husband. Her reading had created in her mind a conception of an ideal passion which she could not feel had as yet come into her life. She believed that her affianced had undeveloped powers that would some day bring him fame and fortune, and again she was not so sure that he possessed the tact and persistence to utilize his powers to the best advantage. This doubt would not have deterred her from fulfilling her engagement of marriage if she had been entirely certain of her love for him. But she was divided by doubts as to whether the affection she felt was really the ideal and exalted passion of her dreams, or only a strong desire for a companionship which she found to be exceedingly pleasant.

She was not quite certain in all things of her affianced, not quite certain of herself, not quite certain of anything, and one day, yielding to an irresistible impulse of doubt and hesitancy, she asked to be released from her engagement.

Morning was amazed, indignant, and almost heartbroken at her request. Had he been of riper age and experience he would have known how to allow for the doubts and self-questionings of a young girl in her first love affair, but he was as unsophisticated as she, and more secure in his own possession of himself. Frank and proud, he took her at the word, which she regretted almost as soon as it was uttered. He neither sued nor remonstrated, but with only a “God bless you” and a “good-by,” and without even a request for a parting kiss, which, if given, might have opened the way to a better understanding, he hurriedly left the house.

The next day he was on his way to Leadville, in fulfillment of a professional engagement, and when he returned two weeks later he found that his former affianced had accompanied her parents to Boston, where Professor Thornton had been suddenly called by the death of a relative, to whose large fortune he succeeded.

Our hero did not despair, and, having no natural inclination for dissipation, did not make his rejection an excuse and an opportunity for self-indulgence. He was of an intense and earnest nature, and he was really in love with the girl who had discarded him, but life was not dead of duty or achievement to him because of her loss, which he looked upon as final, for her newly-acquired position as a wealthy heiress made it impossible to his self-respect to seek a reconciliation. He applied himself with assiduity and industry to his profession, and soon became an exceedingly skillful and reliable mining expert.

Ability to comprehend the story written upon the rocks cannot always be gained by study or experience. At last it is a “faculty,” rather than the result of reading or training. Fire and flood, oxygen and electricity, the tempests of the air and the volcanic throbbings of the earth, have been busy for ages with the quartz lode, and have left their marks upon it. It is possible sometimes to decipher these hieroglyphics so as to answer with a degree of accuracy the ever-recurring question, “Will it pay to work?” Yet such possibility cannot be reduced to a science. Professors of geology and metallurgy are often wrong in their conclusions, and even old prospectors are frequently at fault.

Go across a piece of marsh land on a spring morning accompanied by a bull-dog and a Gordon setter. The former will flush no snipe save those he may fairly run over as he trots along. But the fine nose of the dog with the silky auburn coat will catch the scent of the wary bird, and follow it here and there around tufts of marsh grass and across strips of meadow, until the sagacious canine shall be seen outlined against earth and sky. It is difficult to be certain of anything in this world of human deceptions, but one may be absolutely sure under such circumstances that the dog will not lie, and that he cannot be mistaken. There is a snipe within a few yards of that dog in the direction in which his nose is pointed. If the sportsman fails to secure the bird, the fault will be with his aim or his fowling-piece—the dog has done his part.

Some men—even among experienced miners—have the bull-dog’s obtuseness, and some have an eye for quartz equal to the nose of a pointer for snipe. David Morning was of this latter class, and to the thorough training which he had received during his four years’ studies he speedily added that practical knowledge of the rocks which, guided by natural aptitudes and intuitions, will enable the wooer of the hills to gain their golden favors. His honesty, good judgment, and fidelity caused his services to be eagerly sought by the mining companies, which—after the Leadville discoveries—abounded in Colorado, and at the date at which our narrative opens he had acquired a fortune of about $300,000, which was invested mainly in mortgages upon business property in Denver. But he made no attempt at further attendance on Cupid’s court, and, indeed, gave but little attention to society.

Yet, while the physical Ellen Thornton thus passed out of the young man’s life, there came into his soul instead an ideal, whose influence was ever an inspiration to higher thinking, purer life, gentler judgments, and loftier deeds. Well has the poet said, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” No man can be possessed by love for a good woman without being thereby moved upward on all the lines of existence. Damps cannot dim the diamond; its facets and angles of fire will never permit the fog to abide with them. From the hour that his heart is touched with the electric passion, the lover is in harmony with all delights.

The waters tinkle and the lark sings for him with sweeter notes, while the sunlight is more radiant, and the hills are robed with a softer purple. The woman who has evoked the one passion of a man’s life may become as dead to him as the occupant of an Etruscan tomb, but the love itself will abide with him to enrich his life, and journey with him into the other country.

David Morning found in books the most pleasant and absorbing companionship, and those who gained admittance to his library were surprised to learn that there was a dreamy, speculative, poetical side to the busy, practical mining engineer. All the great authors on mental, moral, and political economy were well-thumbed comrades, and the covers of the leading English and German poets and essayists were free from dust. Especially was he a close and interested student of social science, and he had his theories concerning changes of various natures in society and governments which might ameliorate the condition and elevate the lives and purposes of mankind.

In religion Morning was neither an accepter nor an agnostic. His reading taught him that all religions inculcate the righteousness of truth, honesty, and unselfishness, and that any form of faith in the hereafter is better for the world than no faith at all. The Persian who bowed devoutly to the highest material sign of Deity, the sun, was thereby filled with a spirit which made him readier to relieve the misery of his brother. The Egyptian who brought tribute to the priests of Isis and Osiris, was the better for his self-denial. The Greek who believed in Minerva was a closer student. Odin’s followers scorned a lie. Confucius taught love of home and kindred. Mahomet prescribed temperance, and the pure and gentle faith of Buddha in its benefactions to the human race has been exceeded only by the benign power of the religion of Jesus.

Skeptics strengthen their scoffings by recounting the wars and cruelties—in bygone centuries—of zealots insane with fervor. But these are only spots upon the sun. The rusty thumbscrews of the Inquisition, and the ashes of the fires amid which Servetus perished—fires unkindled and dead for three hundred years—may be forgotten when one considers the hospitals, and schools, and houses of shelter which now link their shadows across continents.

A few days before, while attending the locomotive races in Chicago, Morning had met an old mining friend, at whose earnest insistence he had been induced to visit and examine, with a view of purchasing, a large and promising ledge of copper in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It was the pursuit of this purpose that had brought him to Tucson.

From his seat on the hotel piazza David Morning gazed into the little triangular garden beneath, with its splashing fountain guarded by fragrant honey locust trees, its close-knit, dark green lawn of Australian grass, and its collection of weird and ugly cacti, transplanted from their native sand for the edification of passing tourists.

Then, raising his eyes, he beheld the ancient adobe pueblo, with a few belated saloon lights blinking through the murk, which was now slowly changing into ashen dawn. In the east a pencil line of light was beginning to glow, and to the northward the blackish purple of the Santa Catalina Range upreared itself against the night sky.

In yonder mountains, as tenantless, as forbidding, as inaccessible, and almost as unexplored as when they were first upheaved from the tortured breast of chaos, there reposed the golden power which, in the hands of David Morning, was to change the economic and social relations of mankind, and, possibly, the governments, the boundaries, and the history of nations.

Nothing of these ripening purposes of Omniscience were then revealed to the soul of our hero; none of them even rested in his dreams. Yet the nations, weary of centuries of error, centuries of wrong, centuries of toil and tears and martyrdom, were waiting, even as he was waiting before commencing his work, for the light which every moment grew brighter in its scarlet beauty against the eastern horizon—the light which was to guide humanity to its destiny of better days.

CHAPTER III.
“The storm is abroad in the mountains.”

The Santa Catalina Mountains, although commonly designated as a part of the Sierra Madres, are, in truth, a small, isolated range, towering to a height of seven or eight thousand feet above the surrounding plains. They are steep, rugged, and practically inaccessible, except at the eastern end, where they may be entered through a long, narrow, crooked canyon, which runs from the plain or mesa to within a short distance of the summit. This canyon widens at intervals into small valleys, few of which exceed a dozen acres in extent, and through it the Rillito, a mountain stream, carrying, ordinarily, about five hundred miner’s inches of water, tumbles and splashes. Along and above the bed of this stream, at a height of fifty feet or more, in order to avoid the freshets created by the summer rains, runs a very primitive wagon road, which was constructed for the purpose of allowing supplies to be transported to the miners, who, during the era of high prices for copper, were engaged in taking ore from the carbonate lodes which exist in abundance in a range of hills half way to the summit and ten miles from the mouth of the canyon.

The lower hills of the Santa Catalinas are covered with a scant growth of mesquite and palo verde, along the Rillito there is a fringe of willows and cottonwoods, and near the summit is a large body of pine timber, but its practical inaccessibility and distance from any available market have protected it from the woodman’s ax. The absence of any extent of agricultural or grazing land in the Santa Catalinas has proven a bar to their occupation by settlers, and their isolation, rugged nature, and unpromising geological formation, have deterred prospectors from thoroughly exploring them. Such searchers for treasure as visited them always returned with a verdict of “no good,” until a quasi understanding was reached by the miners and prospectors of Arizona that it was useless to waste time looking for gold or silver in their fastnesses.

Above the copper belt no prospector was ever able to find trace or color of any metal, and the low price of copper and the high charges for railroad freight which prevailed in 1883 and succeeding years, caused abandonment of the rude workings for that metal, and at the date of the opening of our narrative it might have been truly said that the entire Santa Catalina Range was without an occupant.

At the western and southern end of the range its summit and rim consist of a huge basaltic formation, towering perpendicularly one thousand feet, upon the apex of which probably no human footstep was ever placed, for its character excluded all probability of quartz being found there, even by the Arizona prospector, who will climb to any place that can be reached by a goat or an eagle, if so be silver and not scenery entice him.

In the spring of 1892 Robert Steel, who, in years gone, had acted as superintendent of a copper company operating in the Santa Catalinas, and was familiar with the ground, had been inspired by a considerable advance in the price of copper to visit the scene of his former labors and relocate the abandoned claims. It was at his solicitation and representations that David Morning, who had known him well in Colorado, was induced to take a trip to Arizona to examine the properties.

Robert Steel was designated by those who knew him best as “a true fissure vein.” With hair that was unmistakably red, and eyes that were blue as the sky, with the upper part of his face covered with tan and freckles, and the lower part disguised by a heavy brick-red beard, his personal appearance was not entirely prepossessing to the casual observer. But under the husk of roughness was a heart both tender and true, a loyalty that would never tire, a thorough knowledge of his business as a miner, and a tried and dauntless courage that, in the performance of duty, would, to quote the vernacular of the Arizonian, “have fought a rattlesnake, and given the snake the first bite.”

He carried his forty years with the vigor of a boy, and his occasional impecuniosity, which he accounted for incorrectly by saying that he “had been agin faro,” was in fact the result of continued investments in giving an education to his two young brothers, and furnishing a comfortable home and support for his parents and sisters in Wisconsin.

There are many Robert Steels to be found among the prospectors of the far West. They are the brightest, bravest, most generous, enterprising, and energetic men on earth. They are the Knights Paladin, who challenge the brute forces of nature to combat, the soldiers who, inspired by the aura sacra fames, face the storm and the savage, the desert and disease. They crawl like huge flies upon the bald skulls of lofty mountains; they plod across alkaline deserts, which pulse with deluding mirages under the throbbing light; they smite with pick and hammer the adamantine portals of the earth’s treasure chambers, and at their “open sesame” the doors roll back and reveal their stores of wealth.

They are readier with rifle or revolver than with scriptural quotation, and readier yet with “coin sack” at the call of distress, and they are not always unaccustomed to the usages of polite society, though they scorn other than their occasional exercise. Under the gray shirts may be found sometimes graduates from Yale, and sometimes fugitives from Texas, but always hearts that pulse to the appeals of friendship or the cries of distress, even “as deeps answer to the moon.”

Among these pioneers no one man assumes to be better than another, and no man concedes his inferiority to anybody. In the last forty years they have carried the civilization, the progress, and the power of the nineteenth century to countries which were beforetime unexplored. In their efforts some have found fortune and some have found unmarked graves upon the hillside. Some with whitened locks but spirits yet aflame continue the search for wealth, and some, wearied of the search, patiently await the summons to cross the ridge. Wherever they roam, and whether they spin the woof of rainbows upon this or upon the other side, they will be happy, for they will be busy and hopeful, and labor and hope carry their heaven with them evermore.

Two days after the arrival of David Morning at Tucson he left for the Santa Catalinas. The party consisted of Morning and Steel and two miners who were employed for the expedition. A wagon drawn by four serviceable mules was loaded with tools, tents, camp equipages, saddles and bridles, provisions, and grain for the animals sufficient for a week’s use. Late in the afternoon of the second day the site of the copper locations was reached, and a camp made upon the mesa a few hundred feet from and above the bed of the stream.

A cursory examination of the copper locations made before nightfall satisfied Morning that before he could form any judgment upon which he would be willing to act in making a purchase, it would be necessary to clean out one of the old shafts, which had, since the mines were abandoned, been partially filled with loose rock and earth. This work it was estimated could be performed by Robert Steel and his two miners in about three days, and while it was being done Morning proposed to explore, or at least visit, the source of the stream, near the summit of the range ten miles away. Assuring Steel that he was an old mountaineer, and that no apprehensions need be felt for his safety if he did not return until the end of two or three days, Morning saddled one animal, and, loading another with blankets, camp equipage, a pick, a fowling-piece, and three days’ provisions, he departed next morning, after an early breakfast, for the trip up the cañon.

Above the old copper camp the wagon road came to an end, and only a rough trail running along and often in the creek took its place. Following the trail, Morning proceeded, driving his pack mule ahead, until, at a point about six miles from where he had left his companions, further progress with animals was found to be impossible.

One hundred feet above the bed of the stream, which here emerged with a rush from a narrow gorge, was a plateau of probably ten acres in extent, on which were a number of large oak trees, and the ground of which was at this season covered with a heavy growth of alfilaria, or native clover. Here Morning unloaded and tethered his mules, and made for himself a temporary camp under a huge live oak tree.

After eating his luncheon, he buckled a pistol about his waist, that he might not be altogether unprepared for a possible deer, and, using a pole-pick for a walking staff, he climbed out of the cañon and commenced the ascent of the mountain to the southward. It appeared to be about a thousand feet in height, and upon its summit towered, one thousand feet higher, the basaltic wall which Morning recognized as that which was visible from Tucson, and which formed the southern and western rim of the Santa Catalina Mountains. His purpose was to reach at least the base of this wall, and ascertain if there were any means of ascending it to its summit, from which it might be possible to obtain an extended view of the country.

After half an hour’s hard climbing, our adventurer gained this wall and found along its base a natural road, with an ascent of probably three hundred feet to the mile. Slowly plodding his way among the loose rock and débris, which had, during many ages, scaled and fallen from the basalt, he soon reached an opening about sixty feet in width.

Supposing that this might be a cañon or gorge that would furnish a means of ascending the wall, he turned into it. In a little more than a quarter of a mile it came to an abrupt termination. It was a cul de sac, a rift in the wall made in some convulsion of nature. It ascended very slightly, being almost level, and at both sides and at the end the basalt towered for a thousand feet sheer to the summit, without leaving a break upon which even a bird could set its foot. It was now midday, but the rays of the sun did not penetrate to the bottom of this rift, and the atmosphere and light were those of an autumn twilight.

After ascertaining the nature and extent of the gorge, Morning turned, and, plodding through the sand and loose rock to its entrance, resumed his journey along the base of the great wall. The ascent of the little ridge or natural road grew steeper and steeper, until at length the top was reached, and our explorer stood upon the summit of the great basaltic formation, a mile in width and ten miles in length, which forms the southwestern rim or table of the Santa Catalinas. From near the outer edge spread as grand a prospect as was ever vouschafed to the eye of mortal. Tucson, seven thousand feet below and fifteen miles away, seemed almost at the foot of the mountain. To the southeast stretched a narrow, winding ribbon of green, the homes of the Mexicans, who, with their ancestors, have for more than two centuries occupied the valley of the Santa Cruz. Farther yet to the southward the lofty Huachucas towered. Northward a higher peak of the Catalinas cut off the view, but to the southwest broad mesas and billowy hills stretched for more than a hundred and fifty miles, until at the horizon the eye rested upon the blue of the Gulf of California, penciled against an ashen strip of sky.

As Morning gazed in awe and delight, there appeared in the sky, scudding from the south, flecks of cloud, chasing each other like gulls upon an ocean, and remembering that this was the rainy season, and feeling rather than knowing that a storm was about to gather, Morning retraced his steps. He had proceeded on his return to a point about five hundred yards above the mouth of the rift which he had visited on his upward journey, when the rapidly-darkening clouds and big plashes of rain drops warned him that one of the showers customary in that section in August was about to fall.

Such storms are usually of brief duration, but are liable to be exceedingly violent, the water often descending literally in sheets. It would have been impossible for Morning to reach the camp where he had left the animals in time to avoid the storm, and a hollow in the basalt wall—a hollow which almost amounted to a cave—offering just here a complete shelter from the rain, which was approaching from the south, over the top of the wall, he sought the opening, and was soon seated upon a convenient rock, while his vision swept the slope to the cañon a mile below, and thence followed the meanderings of the Rillito until it vanished from sight.

And the clouds grew and darkened. Like black battalions of Afrites summoned by the “thunder drum of heaven,” they trooped from distant mountains and nearer plains to gather upon the summit of the Catalinas. The south wind—now risen to a gale—swooped up the fogs from the distant gulf, and hurried them upon its mighty pinions, shrieking with delight at the burden it bore up to the summit of the basalt, above which it massed them.

Then the demons of the upper ether reached their electric-tipped fingers into the dense black watery masses, and whirled them into a denser circle, whirled them into an hour glass, whose tip was in the heavens and whose base was carried by the giant force thus generated slowly along and just above the top of the great wall.

Whirled in a demon waltz to the music of the shaking crags, yet touching not those peaks, for to touch them would have been destruction, the circling ocean in the air sailed, roaring and shrieking, to the eastward, growing denser and more powerful, and black with the blackness of the nethermost pit, as it journeyed on. At last it reached the blind cañon so lately visited by our explorer. The air—imprisoned between the earth and the clouds—rushed with a tortured yell down the rift in the mountain. The wall of water sank as its support tumbled from beneath it; its base touched the ragged rocky edges of the cleft; the compactness of the fluid mass was broken, and the forces fled and left to its fate the watery monster they had engendered.

Then, with a roar louder than a thousand peals of thunder, with throbs and gaspings like the death rattle of a giant, the waterspout burst, and its vast volume descended into the gorge, down which it seethed with the power of a cataclysm.

Out of the mouth of the cul de sac a torrent issued, or rather a wall of water hundreds of feet in height. Down the mountain side it sped, tearing a channel deep and wide, and crumbling into a thousand cataracts of foam, which spread and submerged the slope. A deep depression or basin on the side of the mountain just southward of the bed of the Rillito deflected the torrent for a few hundred yards, and it rushed into this basin and filled it, and, leaving a small lake as a souvenir of its visit, went roaring down the cañon, which it entered again about a quarter of a mile below the spot where Morning had tethered his mules.

Not more than fifteen minutes had elapsed since the bursting of the waterspout when the storm was over, the sun was shining, the water had departed down the cañon, and our awe-stricken witness to this mighty sport of elemental forces started to retrace his steps. He had witnessed the deflection of the water wall, and knew that his animals were safe, and he also knew that no harm would come to his companions down the cañon, for their camp was hundreds of feet above the bed of the ravine.

A few minutes’ walk brought Morning to the mouth of the gorge which he had visited an hour or more before. From it a small stream of water—the remains of the waterspout—was yet running, and, being curious to observe the effects produced upon the spot which first received the fury of the waters, he descended into the channel which had been torn by the torrent, and again entered the rift.

The tremendous force of the vast body of water precipitated into the gorge had excavated and swept through its opening the fallen and decomposed rock and sand and bowlders which had been accumulating for centuries. The channel rent by the waters as they emerged was quite twenty feet in depth and sixty feet in width, and Morning found that the floor of the box cañon had been torn away to a similar depth.

The waterspout had accomplished in one minute a work that would have required the industrious labor of one thousand men for a month. The gorge was swept clean to the bed rock, which showed blue limestone, and in the center of this limestone bed there now stood erect, to a height of twelve feet, a ledge of white and rose-colored quartz of regular and unbroken formation, forty feet in width, running from near the entrance of the rift to the end of it, where it disappeared under the basalt wall.

The experienced eye of Morning taught him at a glance that this was a true fissure vein of quartz, and a brief examination of some pieces which he knocked off with his pole-pick convinced him that it was rich in gold. But for the waterspout which had swept away the sand, gravel, and loose rocks which ages of disintegration of the face of the wall had deposited over this lode, its existence must ever have remained undiscovered for there were no exterior evidences of the existence of quartz, to tempt a prospector to sink a shaft.

The primal instinct of the miner is to locate his “find,” and Morning proceeded forthwith to acquire title to “the unoccupied mineral lands of the United States” so marvelously brought to light. His notebook furnished paper for location notices, and an hour’s work enabled him to build location monuments of loose stone, in which his notices were deposited.

It was now more than two hours since the waterspout had expended its force. Morning conjectured that Steel and his miners, after the flood had passed them, would probably set out in search of him, and he did not wish his location to be discovered until he should have perfected it by recording at Tucson, and possibly not then. But he knew that it would require at least three hours for the men at the copper-camp to reach him, and, though the light in the cañon was beginning to grow dim, he determined not to leave there without further examination of the ledge.

Accordingly, he walked around it and climbed over it. From its summit and its sides at twenty different places he broke off specimens, which he deposited in his pockets until they were full to bursting. It was beginning to grow dark when he emerged from the rift and started along the base of the basalt. He had not proceeded a hundred yards from the mouth of the rift, when he beheld three figures a quarter of a mile distant, rapidly picking their way along the channel which had been worn by the torrent in its descent of the mountain.

Five minutes more in the gorge and his secret would have been discovered.

He shouted to his friends, who responded to his hail, and in a few minutes they met and descended the mountain together to the plateau under the trees, where the tethered animals, surfeited with alfilirea, were whinnying loudly for human companionship.

It was too late to attempt to return to the copper-camp that night, and, indeed, daylight was needed for the journey, for the trail had been in many places washed away by the flood.

After a supper, which made havoc with the three days’ rations, a large fire was built, more for cheerfulness than for warmth, blankets were divided, and all retired.

Morning slept less soundly than his fellows, for his quick and accurate brain was filled with an idea of the colossal fortune and the mighty trust that the events of that day had placed in his hands.

CHAPTER IV.
“Gold is the strength of the world.”

Morning concluded it would be unwise to make another trip to his location, lest suspicion might be excited and discovery follow, so, breaking camp early the next day, he returned with his comrades to the copper-lodes, which they reached before noon.

Work was resumed by Steel and his two miners in clearing the old shaft, and Morning, taking a fowling-piece, avowed his purpose to look for quail down the ravine. Having reached a point where he felt secluded from observation, he began a critical examination of the quartz specimens, which until now he had not dared to withdraw from his pockets.

As with his microscope he scrutinized piece after piece, he grew pale with excitement and astonishment. With the habit of a mining expert, he had sampled the ledge as for an average, and the average value of the twenty different specimens of quartz, taken from twenty different localities, enabled him to determine the true value of the property with great accuracy. He discovered that the amount of gold in each one of the twenty specimens would not vary materially from the amount of gold in proportion to the quartz in each and all of the others. In other words, the entire body of quartz was uniformly impregnated with gold, and, therefore, of uniform richness and value.

There was no better judge of quartz in all Colorado than David Morning. He had been accustomed, after careful inspection, to estimate within ten or twenty percent of the value per ton of free milling gold quartz, and his accuracy had often been the subject of amicable wagers among his friends. He was able in this instance to say that each one of the ore specimens carried not less than five hundred ounces of gold to the ton of quartz, or that the entire lode would yield, under the stamps, an average of $10,000 per ton.

This was marvelous! unprecedented! phenomenal! No such deposit for richness and extent had ever been found in the history of the world.

Ten thousand dollars in gold, distributed through two thousand pounds of quartz, may not make much of a showing in the quartz, for in bulk there is fifty times as much quartz as gold; but one hundred tons of such quartz would yield a million dollars, and the ledge uncovered by the waterspout was forty feet in width and thirteen hundred and sixty feet in length to where it ran under the basalt wall. It cropped twelve feet above the ground, and extended to unknown depths below the surface. Thirteen feet of rock in place will weigh a ton. In that rift in the mountain there was now in sight above the surface, all ready to be broken down and sent to the stamps, six hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet, or fifty thousand tons, of quartz, containing gold of the value of $500,000,000.

What was to be done with the vast amount of gold which might be extracted from the Morning mine? How was it to be placed in circulation without unsettling values, reducing the worth of all bonds, inaugurating wild speculation, and revolutionizing the commerce and the finances of the world?

Would not the nations, so soon as they should be made aware of the existence of this deposit, hasten to demonetize gold, make of it a commodity, change the world’s standard money to silver exclusively, and so lessen the value of the Morning mine to a comparatively small amount?

Under the plea that increased production of silver necessitated a change in relative values, that metal was demonetized in 1873 in Europe and in the United States, and its value reduced one-third. Might not gold now be similarly dealt with, and, with such a vast deposit known to be in existence, be diminished by demonetization to the value of silver or less?

The entire production of gold in the world for the last forty years, or since the California and Australia mines began to yield, had been but $5,000,000,000, and as much might be extracted from the first one hundred and twenty feet in depth of the Morning mine. All the gold money of the world was but $7,600,000,000, or less than might be excavated from the first two hundred feet in depth of this marvelous deposit. The total money of the world—gold, silver, and paper—was but $11,500,000,000, and a similar sum might be extracted from the first three hundred feet in depth of the mine.

If the ledge extended downward a thousand feet, it contained as much gold as three times the sum total of all the gold, silver, and paper currency of the world, and its value was equal to the value, in the year eighteen hundred and ninety, of one-half of all the real and personal property in the United States.

How much of this gold could be added to the circulation of the world with safety? and how could the existence of the vast quantity held in reserve be kept secret?

His studies in political economy had taught David Morning that gold, like water, if fed to the land in proper proportions, would stimulate its fertility and add to its power of beneficent production, but if precipitated in an unregulated and mighty torrent, would, like the waterspout, prove a destructive power.

Knowledge of the existence of the gold, if generally diffused, would be nearly as injurious to the world as to extract it and place it in the channels of finance. Yet how could the secret be kept? The ledge as it stood could not be worked without half a hundred men knowing its extent and value. No guards or bonds of secrecy would be adequate. The birds of the air would carry the tale. Even now a vagrant prospector or wandering mountain tourist might reveal the secret to the world.

Not in any spirit of self-seeking did David Morning ask himself these questions. All his personal wants, and tastes, and aspirations might be gratified with a few millions, which could easily be mined and invested before knowledge of his discovery could destroy or lessen the value of gold. But the purpose now beginning to take possession of him was to use, not merely millions, but tens and hundreds and thousands of millions, to bring peace, and progress, and prosperity to the nations, to ameliorate the conditions under which humanity suffers, to raise the fallen, to aid the struggling, to curb the power of oppressors, to remedy public and private wrongs, to solve social problems, to uplift humanity, and comfort the bodies and souls of men. To accomplish this work it was necessary that he should have vast sums at his command, and it was also necessary that his possession of vaster reserves should not be known.

The discoveries in California and Australia by which in ten years fourteen hundred millions of gold dollars were added to the world’s stock of the precious metals was a beneficent discovery. It lifted half the weight from the shoulders of every debtor; it made possible the payment of every farm mortgage; it delivered manhood from the evil embrace of Apathy, and wedded him to fair young Hope; it invigorated commerce, it inspired enterprise, it led the armies of peace to the conquest of forest and prairie; it caused furnaces to flame and spindles to hum; it brought plenty and progress to a people.

But this addition to the gold money of civilization was gradually made, and the product of forty years of all the gold mines in the world was not equal to the sum which in less than four years might be taken from the Morning mine.

If, as a consequence of Morning’s find, gold should not be demonetized, if it should be permitted to remain as a measurer of all values, and the extent of the deposit should be made known to the world, the inevitable result would be to quadruple the prices of land, labor, and goods, and to reduce to one-fourth of their present proportions the value to the creditor of all existing indebtedness. The farmer whose land was worth $10,000 would find it worth $40,000, and the man who had loaned $5,000 upon it would find his loan worth but $1,250 practically, because the purchasing power of his $5,000 would be reduced to one-fourth of its present capacity.

All government bonds of the nations, all county, city, and railroad bonds, and all the mortgages and promissory notes and book accounts in the world, would, if all of Morning’s gold should be poured at once into circulation, without preparation or warning, be reduced at one blow to one-fourth of their present value, and all the owners of land, and implements, and horses, and cattle, and merchandise would find their value at once increased fourfold. The laborer who had only his hands or his brains would remain unaffected. His wages would be quadrupled, and so would the cost of his living.

Knowledge of the extent of the Morning mine would immediately enrich the debtors and ruin the creditors of the world, unless the governments of earth should demonetize gold, deny it access to the mints, refuse to coin it, and so degrade it to a commodity.

An illustration in a small way of the operations of this immutable law of finance may be found in the history of San Francisco. The foundations of some of the great fortunes of that city may be traced to the days of the Civil War, when San Francisco wholesale merchants paid their Eastern creditors in legal tender currency, the while they diligently fostered a public sentiment which made it discreditable to the honesty and ruinous to the credit of any California retailer who should attempt to pay his debt to them in the despised greenbacks. The interior storekeeper glowed with pride when Ephraim Smooth & Company gathered in his golden twenties, and commended his honesty for “paying his debts like a man, in gold, and not availing himself of the dishonest legal tender law.” But Smooth & Company paid their New York creditors in greenbacks, and pocketed the difference.

Inflation of the currency, or an increase of the money of a nation, if it can be gradually made, need not prove disastrous to the creditors, and must prove a benefaction to the debtors of the world. The relation of wages to the cost of living, whether the volume of money in a country be contracted or inflated, practically remains the same. It may be claimed that the workman who receives an increase of wages, and whose cost of living is correspondingly increased, is no better off at the end of the year, yet economy brings to him larger apparent accumulations, and he is thereby encouraged to practice frugality.

The American mechanic who wandered to the Canary Islands, where he received $400 a day in the local currency for his wages, was enabled to save $100 a day by denying himself brandy and tobacco, and but for this dazzling inducement he might have surrendered to temptations that would have made him a proper subject for the ministrations of the W. C. T. U.

But though an inflation of values which should be beneficent might follow the discovery and working of the Morning mine, clearly the first thing for the discoverer to do was to take effectual measures to conceal from human knowledge the extent of his discovery.

David Morning remained for some time in deep thought, and then, rising from his seat upon a bowlder behind the manzanita bushes, he tore into fragments the paper upon which he had been making calculations, and, excavating with his foot a hole in the sand, he dropped into it and covered the specimens of gold quartz which he had taken from the ledge, and, retracing his steps, was soon at the copper-camp, where, in answer to the queries of his companions, he replied truthfully that during his absence he had not seen a single quail.

Two days elapsed, and, the shaft having been cleaned out and the copper lode thoroughly exposed, Morning took samples of it, and also of croppings of the other lodes included in the ground located by Steel, and the party broke camp and started for Tucson, where they arrived early in the afternoon of the second day.

Making an appointment with Steel for that evening, Morning deposited his copper samples with an assayer, and, walking to the Court House, he filed the notice of location of the Morning mine with the county recorder. Two hours later he had the report of the assayer upon the copper samples, showing an average of twelve per cent of carbonate copper in the ore. This was not so rich as had been predicted by Steel, but was of sufficient value to warrant the purchase of the copper prospects at the low price which had been fixed upon them, provided that arrangements could be made for economically working them, and Morning had already formulated in his own mind a plan of action by which the working of the copper lodes could be made to advance his project of working the gold lode so as to conceal the extent of its yield.

Morning calculated that the amount of money needed for labor, supplies, machinery, and buildings, to work the mines in accordance with his plans, would be about $300,000, and his first thought was to obtain this money by breaking down, and shipping to reduction works in California or Colorado, about thirty tons of the quartz before he should commence the work which he projected for the concealment of the ledge.

With his own hands he could mine and sack such an amount of ore in a fortnight, and with the aid of half a dozen pack animals, managed by himself, transport it a mile or two from the rift, where it might be thrown into the channel cut by the waterspout, and, with a blast or two, be covered with rocks and dirt until teams should be brought from Tucson for it.

With this idea uppermost, he sought the freight agent of the railroad company of Tucson.

Then he came in contact with the system in vogue on the Pacific Coast—and possibly elsewhere—that of a one-sided railroad partnership with the producer, on the basis that the producer furnish all the capital and suffer all the losses, the railroad company providing neither capital, experience, nor services, but taking the lion’s share of the profits.

“What,” said Morning, “will your freight charges be for three car loads of ore to Pueblo or San Francisco?”

“What kind of ore?”

“Gold-bearing quartz in sacks.”

“What does your ore assay?” inquired the agent.

“What has that got to do with it?” questioned Morning sharply.

“Everything,” answered the official. “We charge in car-load lots $12 per ton to San Francisco, or $24 per ton to Pueblo, and $2.00 per ton in addition for each $100 per ton of the assay value of the ore.”

“Very well,” said Morning, “I believe I will ship thirty tons to San Francisco.”

“Have you it here?” said the agent.

“It will not be ready for some weeks yet,” replied Morning.

“You did not mention its value,” said the agent.

“I will state its value at $100 per ton,” said Morning.

“All right,” said the agent, “we will take it at that, subject, of course, to assay according to our rules by the assayer of the company at your expense.”

“Well, I don’t know that I care to trouble the assayer of your company,” replied Morning. “In fact, the ore is a good deal richer than $100 per ton. But I will ship it at that valuation, and release the company from all liability for loss or damage beyond that. In brief, I will take all the chances, and if the ore shall be lost, or stolen, or tumbled off a bridge, or overturned into a river, the company will only account to me for it at $100 per ton. I suppose that will be satisfactory?”

The agent shook his head.

“It looks as if it ought to be satisfactory,” said he, “but my orders are imperative. The ore must be assayed, and you will have to pay two per cent of its value.”

“But this,” replied Morning, with some heat, “is unreasonable and outrageous. If the tax of two per cent is to be regarded in the light of a charge for insurance, I am sure there is not a marine or fire insurance company in the world that would charge one-fourth of one per cent for such a risk.”

“Company’s orders,” said the agent.

“Suppose you wire headquarters at my cost, and say that David Morning wishes to ship thirty tons of gold-bearing quartz from Tucson to San Francisco, at a valuation of $100 per ton. Say that he will prepay the freight, and load and unload the cars himself if permitted. Say that he does not wish the railroad company to take any of the risks of mining, transporting, or reducing the ore, nor to share any of the profits of the business. Say that he will release the company from all liability even for gross negligence or theft, beyond $100 per ton. Say that he does not wish to acquaint the company’s assayer or the company’s freight agent with the value of the ore, or permit either of them to form any accurate judgment for speculative or other purposes as to the value of the mine from which the ore was taken. Say that he wishes the privilege of conducting his own business in his own way. Say that if the railroad company will kindly fix a rate at which it will consent to carry the freight he offers, without sticking its meddlesome, corporate nose into his business, he will then consider whether he will pay that rate or refrain from shipping the ore at all.”

“Mr. Morning,” said the agent, “if I were to send such a telegram as that, it would cost me my place, and, indeed, my orders are not to communicate remonstrances made by shippers at the company’s rules, except by mail. Of course you can send any message you like over your own name to the head office, but I can inform you now that they will only refer you to me for an answer, and I can only refer to my general instructions, and there the matter will end.”

“Well,” replied Morning, “I will ship the ore by ox teams or not ship it at all before I will submit to the injustice of your general instructions. I suppose I am without remedy in the premises?”

“You might build another road, Mr. Morning,” said the agent, with a slight tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

Morning answered slowly, as he turned away:—

“I may conclude to do so, or to buy up this road, and if I do I will run it on business principles that shall give the shipper some little chance.”

“When will that halcyon hour for the public arrive, Mr. Morning?”

“By and by,” rejoined our hero, “and then you may look for better days.”

CHAPTER V.
“The rich man’s joys increase the poor’s decay.”

“Forty-five years ago, doctor,” said Professor John Thornton to his friend, Dr. Eustace, “do you remember that, as barefooted boys, we fished for pickerel together in this very pond, and from this very spot?”

“And caught more fish with our bamboo poles and angleworm bait than we appear likely to capture to-day with this fancy tackle,” remarked the doctor.

“Everything about this lovely little lake seems unchanged,” resumed the professor, “but elsewhere the great world has indeed rolled on. Then there were less than one hundred millionaires in this republic—now, doctor, there are more than eight thousand.”

“And then,” said the doctor, “we came here in a rickety old stage wagon, and we were ten hours in making the same journey which to-day we achieved in an hour while seated in a parlor car. Then the telegraph was in its infancy, the electric light was unknown, the great manufacturing cities were unconstructed, the petroleum of Pennsylvania and the gold of California and Australia were undiscovered, the great Western railroad lines were unbuilt, and the web of complex industries with which the land is now laced was unspun. The victim of a raging tooth or a crushed limb was compelled to suffer without relief from chloroform or ether, and it was a crime punishable with social ostracism to question the righteousness of human slavery, the curative virtues of calomel, or the beneficence of infant damnation. I never could think, John, that the good old times, whose loss you are always bemoaning, were nearly so comfortable times to live in as those amid which we now dwell.”

“Dr. Eustace,” said the professor, “you attach undue importance to a few physical comforts and conveniences. If our fathers lacked the advantages of our later civilization, they were also without its vices. In the good old times which you deride, wrecking railroads, stealing railroads, and watering stocks were unknown. Senatorships and subsidies were not procured by bribery; the legislator who sold his vote made arrangements to leave the country, and bank burglars and bank defaulters kept, in the public estimation, the lock step of fellow-criminals.”

“And what, in your opinion was the cause of our descent from this high estate of public virtue and whale-oil lamps?”

“The main cause, Dr., of the corruption of the human race everywhere,—gold. It was the gold of California that revolutionized the finances, the business methods, and the morals of the nation. After the year 1849 the advance of values, the aggregation of wealth, the increase of population, and the magical growth of the West, made additional facilities for inland travel and transportation a necessity. This necessity caused the rapid construction of new lines of railroad. The differences and difficulties of local management suggested the advantages of consolidation—and then the reign of the centripetal forces commenced.”

“But all the millionaires of the country are not railroad men, John.”

“Concentration of capital began with them, doctor, and their example was soon followed by others. The Civil War broke down local prejudices, made East and West homogeneous, introduced communities to each other on the battle-field, obliterated State lines, and made individual effort in business, in finance, in manufactures, and even in politics, less advantageous to the individual than participation in aggregated effort, where his gains were increased, though his personality was submerged.”

“I have always thought that our civil war was a moral education to this people and to the world,” remarked the doctor.

“War was an educator,” conceded the professor, “yet the tree of knowledge with its crimson leaves yielded evil fruit as well as good. The moral nature of the American people has, I fear, reacted from the tension of generous and patriotic sacrifice which war evolved. Some of the very men who helped to strike shackles from black slaves have been busy ever since forging other shackles for white slaves, and in twenty-five years from the days when we freely paid lives and treasure to preserve the existence of the nation, and free it from the wrong of slavery and the rule of a slave-holding oligarchy, we have passed under the sway of other despots, more selfish, more sordid, more relentless, and more rapacious of dominion. The dusk-browed tyrant of Egypt has been overthrown, but in his place Plutus reigns.”

“I grant you,” interposed Dr. Eustace, “that the wealth owners are the rulers of our later civilization, but, so far as I have observed, instead of endeavoring to curb or overthrow them, we are all doing our best to join their ranks and participate in their power. You appear to be the only living millionaire who declaims against his class. I know of no other man who is brave enough to defy the power of money, great enough to ignore it, or strong enough to resist its influence, and I dare say you would change your views if you were to lose your millions. We all defer to the plutocrats. The Spanish nobleman who, for his ancestor’s services, was permitted to remain with his head covered in the presence of his sovereign, would have been sure to take off his hat if he had entered the office of the president of a country bank, with a view of negotiating a small loan on doubtful security. There was a great truth inadvertently given to the world in the programme of a Fourth of July procession, wherein it was announced that the line would end with bankers in carriages, followed by citizens on foot.”

“This subservience to King Gold, and pursuit of his favors, must cease, Dr. Eustace, or this republic will be lost. The people must be taught to assume a more independent and manly attitude toward the owners of money.”

“Ah, John, money is so necessary, and it is so hard to turn one’s back upon it! This way lies comfort, ease, luxury—that way deprivation and sacrifice. This way ‘the primrose path of dalliance trends’—that way ‘the steep and thorny road.’ This way the wife and children beckon and sue for safety and peace—that way only rocks, and bruises, and hunger, and loneliness summon. What wonder that the Christ, voicing the cry of the human to the infinite Father, placed as the central thought of the Lord’s prayer the words, ‘Lead us not into temptation’! But, John, honestly now, do you think the eight thousand millionaires you rave about are such an utterly bad lot as you make them out to be?”

“Individually I dare say they are good husbands, fathers, and neighbors,” replied the professor, “but they conceal their selfishness and rapacity, and exercise their despotism from behind the shields of corporations which they create and govern, and tyranny is none the less tyranny because it is decreed not by kings, but by entities which fear neither the assassination of man nor the judgment of God.”

“Professor, pardon me, but you generalize a good deal, and I fear somewhat loosely. It would make a difference to me, in my feelings, at least, whether I was knocked down by a ruffian, or by an electrical machine.”

“Doctor, your simile was not considered as carefully as are your prescriptions. If the machine be guided by the ruffian, what matters it whether you be struck by his hand, or with an electric current directed by his hand? If our great newspapers, which are influential, which claim to be independent, and which ought to be free, are restrained from publishing articles advocating postal telegraphy, or criticising the management of a news corporation, what matters it that the freedom of the press is choked by a board of directors rather than a government censor? If the citizen dare not give voice to his views on public affairs, what matters it whether his utterances be choked by the knuckles of a king, or the polite menaces of an employer? If the voter cast his ballot against his own convictions, and in accordance with the will of another, what matters it whether he be coerced by a soldier with a musket or a station agent with a freight bill? If the settler lose his land, what matter whether the despoiler be a personal bandit armed with a rifle, or a corporate robber equipped with a land-office decision? If capital exempt itself from taxation, and place the burden of sustaining government upon the broad back of labor, will it alleviate the pain of the load to know that it is not the law of feudal vassalage but of modern politics which accomplishes the exaction?

“Hallo! I have a bite! Ah! ha! my boy, your eagerness to swallow that minnow has brought you to grief!”

And the speaker lifted a twenty-ounce pickerel from the placid waters of Nine Mile Pond, and deposited it, struggling and shining, upon the green turf at his feet.

“Well, John,” inquired the doctor, “what are you going to do about it all?”

“We will have him split down the back and broiled for luncheon,” replied the professor absently.

“Broil who?” queried the doctor, “Jay Gould?”

“Eh? No; the pickerel I mean, though I am not sure that similar treatment might not be accorded to Gould, with advantage to the country.”

“You ask,” continued the professor, “what shall be done about it all? The wealth owners themselves should be able to see that existing conditions must sooner or later find cessation either in relief or in revolution. Monopolies in transportation, intelligence, land, light, fuel, water, and food—all concealed in the impersonality of private corporations—now sit like vampires upon the body of American labor, and suck its life blood, and they have grown so bold and so rapacious that they even neglect to fan their victims to continued slumber.”

“Why, John, you seem to have an attack of anticorporation rabies. You talk like a sand-lot politician who is trying to sell out to a railroad company. What is the matter with you? What have these much berated entities done?” said the doctor.

“Done?” replied Professor Thornton. “What have they not done? They have torn the bandages from the eyes of American justice and fastened false weights upon her scales. They have turned our legislative halls into shambles where men are bought and honor is butchered. They have written the word ‘lie’ across the Declaration of our fathers. They have struck the genius of American liberty in her fair mouth, until, with face suffused with the blushes and bedewed with the hot tears of shame, she turns piteously to her children to hide if they cannot defend her.”

“John Thornton,” ejaculated the doctor, “your remarks would be admirable in substance and style for an address before some gathering of work shirkers, organized to procure lessened hours of labor and larger schooners of beer, but to me you are talking what our transatlantic cousins call ‘beastly rot.’ I deny that a majority, or even any considerable number, of the capitalists of this country are dishonest, or unpatriotic, or indifferent to the rights and needs of their fellow-men.”

“I have not said that they were, doctor,” replied the professor. “Indeed, if such were the case, we might cry in despair, ‘God save the commonwealth!’ for only Omniscience could work its salvation. What I claim is that it is full time for the conscientious millionaires who love their country and their kind, to seriously consider a situation the perils of which they are every day augmenting by their indifference.”

“What perils do you mean, professor? How, for instance, would anybody be hurt or periled if I were to become a millionaire?”

“A great fortune is a great power, doctor, and not every man is fit to be intrusted with great power. To-day no second-class power in Europe can negotiate a treaty or make even a defensive war without the consent of the Rothschilds, while in America the owner of fifty millions is more powerful than the president of the United States, and the owner of ten millions more influential than the governor of a State.

“And so he ought to be,” interposed the doctor. “The man who can by fair means make $10,000,000 is more useful to the community in which he lives than a dozen governors of States.”

“But look at the danger to the people, doctor, of these great fortunes. There are ten men in the United States whose aggregate wealth amounts to $500,000,000, and who represent, and control, and wield the influence of property amounting to $3,000,000,000. If these men should choose to settle their rivalries and combine their interests and efforts, they could about fix the prices of every acre of land, every barrel of flour, every ton of coal, and every day’s wages of labor between Bangor and San Francisco. They could name every senator, governor, judge, congressman, and legislator in twenty States. They could rule a greater empire than any possessed by crowned kings. They could promulgate ukases more absolute, more despotic, and more certain of being enforced, than any which ever went forth from St. Petersburg to carry desolation to a race. They could say to the laborer in the grain-fields, ‘Henceforth you shall be reduced to the condition of your brother in England or Scotland, and eat meat but once a week.’ They could say to the toiler in the humming factory or over the red forge, ‘Henceforth you must toil twelve hours in each twenty-four.’ They could say to every wageworker in the land, ‘Henceforth we will take all the results of your labor, and give you only the slave’s share—existence and subsistence.’”

“All you need, Professor John Thornton,” said Dr. Eustace, “is a long beard, a woman with green goggles and a tamborine, a fat boy with a snare drum, and a pair of bellows in your chest, to be a Salvation Army seeking recruits for the church of Anarch. You know just as well as I do that you are talking nonsense, and that the capitalists of our country would be neither so inhuman nor so unwise as to push their power as you indicate.”

“Maybe not, doctor, maybe not, but their ability to so use their power if they choose is a menace to a free people, and a standing inducement to disorder, and unless the plutocrats cease their aggressions the people may invoke the motto, ‘Salva republica suprema lex,’ and tax all great fortunes out of existence.”

“What aggressions do you refer to, professor? For the life of me I cannot see that this country or this people have any just cause of complaint. The census returns of 1890 show that in the preceding ten years there was added to our national wealth, values amounting to nearly $20,000,000,000.”

“The census returns tell only a part of the story, doctor. The cottages of the land will tell you that while as a nation we may have grown of late years very rich and prosperous, yet among the individuals composing the nation its wealth is possessed and its prosperity enjoyed within a very narrow circle. The value of all the property in the United States in the year 1890 was $66,000,000,000. Do you know that $40,000,000,000, or sixty per cent of the wealth of America, is owned by less than forty thousand people? Do you know that in the last twenty years the laborers of the United States have added to the general wealth of the nation, values amounting to $30,000,000,000?”

“Well, what is there to complain of in that fact?” questioned the doctor.

“The complaint is that the money has not been divided among the ten million workers who earned it. The complaint is that it has not furnished each of ten million households with a $3,000-shield against the assaults of poverty. The complaint is that as fast as created it has been seized by the centripetal tendency which now dominates our civilization and hurried into the strong boxes of ten thousand Past-Masters of the art of accumulating the earnings of other people.”

“The complete answer, professor, to your diatribe is that the accumulations of which you speak are not the earnings of other people. The greater portion of this wealth has been developed from the bounty of nature in ways which could not have been pursued without large combinations of capital.”

“That is a mere assumption, doctor.”

“Not at all, professor. The money taken from gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, and coal mines, has come from the treasure vaults of nature, and has not been filched from the earnings of anybody.”

“Mining is the one exception to the rule, doctor.”

“I beg your pardon, professor, but it is not. Another avenue to wealth has been the organization and reorganization of great industries on unwasteful and remunerative principles. For instance, the beef and pork packing establishments of the West supply the retail butchers of the land with meat at a less price than is paid for the live cattle.”

“Where, then, doctor, do these philanthropists of whom you speak make their money?”

“They make it, professor, by scientific utilization of the hoofs and horns, bones and blood, which in small butcher shops are necessarily wasted.”

“You believe, then, in the rightfulness of monopolies and trusts, do you, doctor?”

“John, there are no monopolies. No restrictions are placed by law on any man who chooses to embark in any reputable business. As for the much-abused ‘trusts,’ they have all resulted in higher wages and more constant employment to the workman, and lower prices and better goods to the consumer. I suppose you will not claim that the capitalists alone are responsible for all the crime and pauperism of the land?”

“No,” replied the professor, “for the ignorant and vicious poor play into the hands of the selfish and vicious rich, and between the two the honest and industrious body of the people is being ground as between the upper and nether millstone. Indeed, I do not know which is the greater curse to the country, the stock thieves, whose dens are under the shadow of Trinity Church spire, and who combine to corrupt courts, juries, and legislators, or the dynamiters and anarchists who would involve the innocent and the guilty in one common wreck of social order. I hope I am no senseless alarmist, Dr. Eustace, but I am sure we must have relief, or there will be national ruin.”

“From what source, professor, do you expect relief to come?” inquired the doctor.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” was the reply.

“Maybe your next National Convention will relieve the situation,” insinuated the doctor, slyly.

“I am sure that relief will not come,” said the professor, “from existing political parties, whose orators grow earnest and belligerent over the ghosts of dead issues, and travel around and around over the same path, like an old horse on an arrastra, forever going somewhere and never getting anywhere, neither knowing or caring whether he is grinding pay rock or waste rock, conscious only of the whip of his driver, and hopeful only of his allowance of barley.”

“Why, John, I thought you were a devoted partisan,” said the doctor.

“Did you?” was the retort. “Well, you were mistaken. What can be hoped from political parties when legislators who are not free from suspicion of venality are voted for and elected year after year, because Grant captured Vicksburg, or Lincoln issued a proclamation of emancipation, or Stonewall Jackson was killed more than twenty-five years ago? Must the people forever submit to the rule of brawlers, and vote sellers, and trust betrayers, because such men hurrah for some flag which other men once carried into battle? Must the masses lie down in the path of Juggernaut and invite him to crush them, because the evil-visaged god parades his devotion to party issues which were long ago remitted to the limbo of things lost on earth?”

“The people will right all the evils of which you complain, professor, so soon as they see that it is to their interest to do so.”

“How can they doubt that it is their interest to right them? It is they who suffer both in purse and pride for every unjust exaction and every dishonest evasion. The poorest do not escape the consequences; it all comes out of their toil in the end. It depletes their pockets in a hundred unobserved ways. They pay for it in enhanced taxation of their homes, in the fuel which cooks their food, in a greater cost of the necessaries of life, in a higher rent, in the nails which hold their houses together, and in the increased cost of the blows of the hammer which drives them. I do not need to tell you, doctor, that labor must bear the burdens of the State. Labor at last pays all and capital pays nothing—all burdens of government, all expenses of courts and juries, and prisons and police, all cost of armies and navies. The diamonds which glitter upon the shirt front of the purchased legislator, the wine which hisses down the throat of the lobbyist, the steel doors and locks which guard watered stock and stolen bonds, the very powder and bullets which shoot out the life of maddened and insurgent labor, are all paid for out of the toil of the laborer.”

“While there is much truth in what you say, professor,” observed the doctor, “yet where is the immediate necessity for you to work yourself into such a state of mind about it?”

“Your remark, doctor, is a representative one,” replied Professor Thornton, “and the general indifference which it expresses is the most discouraging feature of the existing situation. Like the villagers who cultivate their vineyards at the base of Vesuvius, we heed not the rumblings of the volcano. Like the citizens long resident in Cologne, we scent the tainted air without discomfort. We cry with the French king, ‘After us the deluge,’ and we seem to care very little what may happen so long as it shall not happen to us.”

“There is the mate to your pickerel,” said the doctor, as he landed a fish upon the grass at his feet. “Two of the millionaires of Nine Mile Pond have succumbed to their own greed and the patience and cunning of intelligent labor.”

“Many of our millionaires,” resumed the professor, not to be driven from his theme, “and some of the most active and powerful of them all, are as selfish, as rapacious, as arrogant, as ignorant, as corrupt, and as despotic as Russian Boyars or Turkish Bashans. At the same time they are unaware of their danger, are utterly obtuse to their social and moral responsibilities, and conceited with the invulnerable conceit of self-made men. They do not seem to recognize that they are unprotected by an army, or a strong government, or spies, or the machinery of despotism, or any traditions or practices of rule, and they appear to take no thought of the infinite possibilities of disaster which line the path of every to-morrow.”

“You really fear, then, the fulfillment of Macauley’s prophecy, professor?”

“What thoughtful man does not? There is in every large city of our land a multitude unindustrious, unfrugal of life, uncurbed of spirit, undisciplined, uneducated, fretful of small gains, accustomed to freedom of speech and action, jealous of anything which looks like oppression or class rule, unaccustomed to restrictions of any kind, irrreligious, materialistic, discontented, idle, envious, and often drunken.”

“In brief, a powder magazine,” said the doctor. “Great cities have always presented the same problem to rulers, yet civilization lives, nevertheless.”

“Because,” rejoined the professor, “in monarchial Europe the magazine is guarded by trained armies and watchful sentinels, while in our country it is left open and unguarded, and anarchists with lighted torches pass to and fro. In Europe the train of government is built of carefully-selected materials, it is officered by experienced engineers, and at every station the testing hammer rings against the wheels. Here we put in any piece of crystallized iron for wheel or axle, and give the control of the engine to any loud-voiced braggart who can climb into the cab, or any ambitious dotard who chooses to hire the tricksters of the caucus to hoist him there. Then we throw the brakes off, the throttle-valves open, and go screaming down the grade.”

“And how do you propose, John, to avoid a smash-up?” queried the doctor.

“We shall have passed the danger point,” replied the professor, “and entered upon an era of safer and better life for the republic, only when the great millionaires of America shall elect to consider themselves not merely as conquerers on the field of finance, entitled to the spoils of victory, but as trustees for humanity, as suns whose mission it is to draw the waters of affluence from overflowing lake and stream, not to hold those waters above the earth forever, but to distribute them in bounteous and fertilizing showers.”

“And do you suppose, John Thornton, that the people would either appreciate or respond to such seraphic unselfishness on the part of your regenerated and beatified millionaires?

“Dr. Eustace, let me tell you that when the great, industrious, intelligent, patriotic body of workers shall be made to feel that there is no necessary conflict between labor and capital, —when they shall be made to know that any considerable number of our millionaires are seeking further wealth not merely to add to their personal luxury and power, but in order that labor may be helped in turn to higher planes of life, when it can be said truthfully—

“‘Then none was for a party,

Then all were for the State;

Then the great man helped the poor

And the poor man loved the great’—

In that day professional labor agitators will lose their vocations, the workingman who never works will be without influence among his fellows, and the brotherhoods of beer and brawling which infest the purlieus of our larger cities, and clamor for bread or blood—meaning always somebody else’s bread or somebody else’s blood—will find occasion to disband. I do not despair of relief, I know that it must come. Whether it shall come through ‘a preserving or a destroying revolution,’ whether it shall come in wrath or in peace, is a question which the capitalists of this country must answer and answer speedily.”

“John, you dear old dreamer,” said the doctor, “I know of one millionaire whose gold has not corroded his humanity. I hope there are many such, but I fear that if the world looks to its wealth owners to lead it in a crusade of unselfishness, it will wait a long, long time. But I do not diagnose the disease as you do. You resemble a boy who has stubbed his toe. To him there is no world and hardly any boy outside of that sore toe. Yet if the cure be left to nature, in time the pain will abate and the toe recover. I do not believe that any law framed by man can make a pound of flour out of half a pound of wheat, or that any scheme of government can equalize the inevitable inequalities of human life.”

“Then you do not believe in the wisdom and beneficence of compelling the rapacious rich to aid the deserving poor?”

“No; I believe in the wisdom and beneficence of exact justice. I believe that the skillful and rapid bricklayer is entitled to higher wages and greater opportunities of employment than his stupid and slothful associate, and that to deny the former his rightful advantage is an outrage upon justice, whether such outrage be perpetrated by an employer or a trades union. I believe that every man is fairly entitled to all the fruits of his labor, his skill, his good judgment, and his good luck. The pickerel at your feet came by chance to your hook and not mine, and therefore it is your fish and not my fish.”

“But by the law of nature, doctor, there is no difference between a beggar and a king.”

“There is where you are wrong, professor. The law of nature is a universal statute of equality of opportunity and inequality of result, and man distorts her purposes and violates her statutes when he places an unearned crown on the head of a king, or an unearned crust in the mouth of a beggar.”

“Do you think, then, that man has no excuse for his shortcomings, doctor?”

“He has many. He is controlled by the occult power of race transmissions, by laws which he did not help to make, by customs which he did not help to form, by organizations and environments beyond his power to change or combat. But because of these he should have no license to plunder his wealthier neighbor, for, in this republic, it is within the power of the people to change laws, and alter customs, and secure to every man the result of his own toil and skill—and that is all any man is entitled to.”

“But the wealth owners, doctor, have monopolized nearly all the resources of nature.”

“Nonsense. There is not a hungry idler in the purlieus of New York City but might catch fish enough at the nearest wharf to keep him from starvation, or find within a day’s walk a piece of land he could cultivate on ‘shares.’ The resources of nature are inexhaustible. If every adult male in the land were to build for himself a marble palace, there would be no perceptible diminution in nature’s supply of marble. If every farmer were to devote his energies and his acres to the production of wheat, until enough wheat should have been harvested to feed the world for five years, yet the capacity of soil and sun, water and air to produce more wheat would be neither exhausted nor impaired. For thousands of years the men of every civilization have been hewing forests, and smelting iron, yet the forests which are untouched and the mines which are unopened are practically limitless.”

“Doctor, a man cannot stir the earth without a spade, or cut down a tree without an ax, or mine iron ore without a pick, and the owners of the spades, and picks, and axes, exact from the laborer an undue share of his labor for their use.”

“Who is to determine whether the share exacted be an undue one? My own opinion is that the laborer’s share of results has grown larger, and the capitalist’s share smaller, during the last twenty years. At least, the rate of interest on money is not much more than half what it was before the war. But whether this be so or not it is not nature’s fault. Nature is not only implacably just, she is impartially generous. No suitor is denied the chance to gain her favors, and none is refused any favor he may have earned. There are floods and tornadoes, frosts and fevers, burning suns and chilling winds. Yet these, as well as the fruitage and the harvests, are the offspring of inexorable law, and science now interprets the law. It warns us of cyclones ten thousand miles away; it predicts the date of arrival, speed, and duration of hurricanes; it brings the ladybug from Australia to combat and destroy the scale-bug in California; it promises to conquer drought by exploding dynamite bombs in the air or by chemical production of rain; it restrains floods by diverting rivers; it destroys malarial germs by planting groves of eucalyptus; it analyzes soils; it selects seeds; it fertilizes with electric wires, and it ploughs and plants and harvests fields with iron-limbed and steam-lunged servants. A hundred years ago one man with spade and sickle slowly wrested from the earth the sustenance for his little household, with only sufficient surplus to scantily compensate the weaver, who, with hand loom, constructed a few yards of cloth between daylight and dark. Now a girl guides the spindles and shuttles and makes thousands of yards of cloth in a day, and the labor of one man industriously applied to so much land as he can advantageously cultivate with the aid of improved machinery, will in one year produce one thousand bushels of wheat, or their equivalent in agricultural products—enough to feed fifty men for a year.”

“I grant you, doctor, that the production of wealth has greatly increased. The problem of the hour is how to provide for a more equal and just distribution of it.”

“John, the solution of the problem is not difficult. Allow every man to have that which he earns, and compel every man to earn that which he has. Accord every man the opportunity to work or starve, with the assurance that for his work he will receive full value, and for his idleness a hunger that no public or private charity will alleviate. Hard labor and hard fare for the criminal, generous diet and tender care for the sick, an ax or a pump handle for the tramp, and allow no healthy man to eat his supper until he has earned it. Consider sporadic and indiscriminate charity as great an evil as injustice. Accord every man his dollar and demand from every man your dollar, and give and exact shilling for shilling. Emulate and copy the inexorable justice of nature.”

“Doctor,” said the professor, “I am silenced but not convinced. The sun is getting too high for further fishing. Come, let us go to luncheon.”

CHAPTER VI.
“No man can tell what he does not know.”

“Bob,” said Morning, as they lighted their cigars, and seated themselves after supper upon the piazza of the railroad hotel at Tucson, “the copper assays are not up to your expectations, still I am inclined to buy the property if I can arrange to employ men at rates that will enable me to work it. What are miners’ wages hereabouts?”