Our Industrial and Financial Situation [pp. 517-529]

524 OUR INDUSTRIAL AND [July,
a contract for building a lot of them at reduced rates for some
foreign railroad, when the demand ceased here; and that, at
some loss to himself, he offered to take it if his workmen
would suffer some reduction in their own wages. This they
peremptorily refused, and marched through the streets flaunting on their banners "Bread or Blood." Four thousand in the
town where this is said to have occurred were fed that winter
by public charity. Ought this so to be?
There is no department in which the system we now deprecate has been more largely carried into effect than the iron
manufacture. With what effect? To raise iron to pri&es
which, with high prices of construction in other respects, first
bankrupted most of the new and unfinished western railways,
then rendered it necessary for the residue to charge rates of
transportation insupportable to the farmers-for whose benefit
they were built-in the present state of the grain market, leaving,
even then too often, no remuneration`to the holders of the
stock, and not much less often a default of interest on their
bonds. Hence, largely came the panic which has ruined the
iron manufacture itself, for the time at least, and thrown a
paralysis into all forms of industry nearly or remotely implicated
with it. So surely will nature's laws assert themselves and
avenge the outrages upon them. The endeavors of some
trades to pluck all other occupations for their own aggrandizement, is only a repetition of a very old scheme of killing the
bird that lays the golden egg.
This, indeed, is the result of the whole system of inflation and
extravagances engendered by the war, and fostered to some extent by the very aspirations which our universal political equal.
ity raises in the hearts of multitudes, tempting them to overspend their earnings and income on overstrained attempts to
ape or overshadow the ostentation and luxury which they deem
symbolical of elevated rank or fortune. It is unquestionable,
that much of our present financial distress is due to the extravagance of dress, equipage, living, which has eaten out the substance of all classes of society.
Another mode of attempting to evade this great law of justice which has been rife among us, has been in the thousand
processes of contriving to make a sudden fortune without the
labor of earning it by any service rendered to men in exchange