Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Our Magnates With the rise of the magnates to power comes a growing self-consciousness of their authority and responsibility. I am a citizen of no mean state, is the reflection of each of them as he looks upon the emergent order of which he is so large a part; and thereupon it becomes his mission to live up to his rank and function. Frequently his benefactions increase, and always he takes on a more Jovian air, and views with a more providential outlook the phenomena passing before and about him. He is a part not only, as Tennyson makes Ulysses say, of all that he has met, but of the primary causes of things. He is at once the loaf-giver to the needy, the regulator of temporal affairs, the lord protector of church and society; and he holds his title directly from the Creator. The rights and interests of the laboring man, wrote the chief of the anthracite coal magnates last August, will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country. Gradually there comes the renascent development of the seigniorial mind. Business is the main thought, and the apotheosis of business the main cult of the new magnates. Of gods, friends, learnings, of the uncomprehended civilization which they overrun, indignantly writes Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, they ask but one question: How much ? What is a good time to sell ? What is a good time to buy ? . . . Their heathen eyes see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing but an intelligence office, and hired men to help them burglarize the treasures accumulated for a thousand years at the altars of liberty and justice, that they may burn their marble for the lime of commerce. Though a forcib...
Synopsis
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