- "For the sake of my money,
employ or buy of me, and me only!"
Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You
know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their
arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women
dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I
had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what
he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The
other makes me ill.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress,
and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every
intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in
language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together
of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of
money is progress.
I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through
scores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few
hundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat
through their noses.
The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who
was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion
required or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned
out so many hundred thousand dollars' worth of such and such an
article; there so many million other things; this house was worth
so many million dollars; that one so many million, more or less.
It was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells.
It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was
expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I
should admire; and the utmost that I could say was: - "Are these
things so? Then I am very sorry for you."
That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me
unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand.
About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the
Garden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that
her head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a
cocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him
breathe heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord
should miss his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world
to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then,
I should have been sorry for him. To-day I find eleven hundred
thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the
art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in that
they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies.
