Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/97

 THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS. 89

of the modern world, and moving steadily toward the first place. This is a time of great prosperity. Never before were so many goods sold, so much business done. Real estate is advancing with big jumps, and within the last few months many fortunes have been made in buying and selling vacant lots. Landlords nearly everywhere are demanding increased rents ; asking in some of the business quarters an increase of three hundred per cent. Money is so plenty that government four per cents, sell for 114, and a bill is passing Congress for refunding the maturing national debt at three per cent, per annum, a rate that awhile ago in California was not thought exorbitant per month. All sorts of shares and bonds have been going up and up. You can sell almost anything if you give it a high-sounding corporate name and issue well-printed shares of stock. Seats in the Board of Brokers are worth thirty thousand dollars, and are cheap at that. There are citizens here who rake in millions at a single operation with as much ease as a faro-dealer rakes in a handful of chips.

Nor is this the mere seeming prosperity of feverish speculation. The country is really prosperous. The crops have been enormous, the demand insatiable. We have at last a sound currency; gold has been pouring in. The railroads have been choked with produce, steel rails are being laid faster than ever before ; all sorts of factories are running full time or overtime. So prosperous is the country, so good are the times, that, at the Presidential election a few months since, the determining argument was that we could not afford to take the chance of dis- turbing so much material prosperity by a political change.

Nevertheless, prosperous as are these times, citizens of the United States beg you on the streets for ten cents and five cents, and although you know that there are in this city two hundred charitable societies, although you realize that on general principles to give money in this

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