Page:North American Review 1889-12 Vol 149 Iss 397.pdf/43

 your readers will pardon me for recalling an incident connected with our last interview. Sitting in my library, Mr. Rice expressed a wish to hear the author read his manuscript. I read and he listened from beginning to end, making but one interruption. When the passage was read which stated that, of every thousand dollars spent to-day in so-called charity, probably nine hundred was unwisely spent, he exclaimed, “Yes, nine hundred and fifty! Make it nine hundred and fifty!” and it was so made. I cannot pass without paying a tribute to Allen Thorndike Rice. That I knew him is one of the sources from which sweet remembrances spring at times, when free from the roar and bustle of life.

While “Wealth” has thus met a cordial reception upon this side of the Atlantic, it is natural that in the mother-land it should have attracted most attention, because the older civilization is at present brought more clearly face to face with socialistic questions. The contrast between the classes and the masses, between rich and poor, is not yet quite so sharp in this vast, fertile, and developing continent, with less than twenty persons per square mile, as in crowded little Britain, with fifteen times that number and no territory unoccupied. Perhaps the Pall Mall Gazette in its issue of September 5 puts most pithily the objections that have been raised to what the English have been pleased to call the “Gospel of Wealth.” It says:

“Great fortunes, says Mr. Carnegie, are great blessings to a community, because such and such things may be done with them. Well, but they are also a great curse, for such and such things are done with them. Mr. Carnegie’s preaching, in other words, is altogether vitiated by Mr. Benzon’s practice. The ‘Gospel of Wealth’ is killed by the acts.”

To this the reply seems obvious: the gospel of Christianity is also killed by the acts. The same objection that is urged against the gospel of wealth lies against the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” It is no argument against a gospel that it is not lived up to; indeed, it is an argument in its favor, for a gospel must be higher than the prevailing standard. It is no argument against a law that it is broken: in that disobedience lies the reason for making and maintaining the law; the law which is never to be broken is never required.

Undoubtedly the most notable incident in regard to the “Gospel of Wealth” is that it was fortunate enough to attract the