Page:The fallacy of danger from great wealth.djvu/23

Rh wages and comfortable living never before existing in the world.

In earlier times in Europe the leaders of the people (under the various names indicating leadership or ability, as duke, king, etc.) built their walled towns and castles, and provided armor and fighting materials, and they and their followers spent much time in petty wars. Industry was carried on in the crudest and most wasteful manner as compared with industry in our country to-day. Poverty and ignorance and lives more animal than human were the rule among ordinary people. Even palaces of kings of a few hundred years ago were far less comfortable than the homes of workingmen in our country to-day.

Our monuments are industrial. In the centuries past the people in Europe put vast labor and money into the erection of cathedrals and other buildings for religious purposes. We look on these with wonder. But far more wonderful and more useful are our railroads, steamships, telegraphs, telephones, wireless telegraph, our factories of a thousand kinds and their multitudes of machines and tools, the power loom and spinning machine, the cotton-gin and hosts of agricultural