It has created a world of new and extreme
inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual
and of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, the
houses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very large
group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this
moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an
income of $3,000 or more; only 11/4 per cent have an income of $5,000
or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten
law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and
Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might;
force; cunning? Yes.
Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently
worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad
inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and
game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the
ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements,
sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What justifies a
pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?
Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no natural
inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare
assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely
parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability
among mankind.
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