Aristopia/Chapter 18
The venerable Ralph Morton lived but a few months after the abdication of James. He was in his hundredth year. To very few of the human race is it given to live and retain their faculties for a round century. Well would it be if all these centenarians were such as Ralph Morton.
For many years he had left to a subordinate the arduous labors of the chief executive's office and had undertaken no task beyond his strength. He became rather an adviser than an executive. Feeling that his end was near, and wishing to see his successor installed, he resigned his office. The people elected his son Charles as governor for a term of five years.
Ralph Morton had married, when about thirty, a young and comely woman who had come over to Mortonia to teach school. By this union he had no son who survived him. At the age of about fifty he had married again, and Charles Morton was the oldest son by this marriage. This son was, what too few sons of great and good men are, entirely worthy of his father. Free from avarice, arrogance, love of ostentation and luxury; desiring power and wealth only that he might do good with them; a philanthropist with an abiding faith in the ultimate high destiny of the human race; an earnest friend of progress, but opposing change for the mere sake of novelty; without bigotry, believing that the truest and most acceptable worship of God is the doing good to His creatures; he was the man above all others whom Ralph Morton desired as his successor, although he had never urged his election, which was a spontaneous tribute of a grateful people to a benefactor whom they could little requite for all his benefactions.
Ralph Morton bequeathed to the commonwealth in fee simple all the lands of which the royal charter made him lord proprietor, except a few acres about the mine, with the condition that the cardinal principles of the Constitution in respect to private ownership and monopoly of soil, forests, mines, waters, etc., should never be violated. In case of such violation the lands in respect to which the violation should occur should immediately revert to the heirs of Ralph Morton.
He gave to each of his living children and the representatives of such as were dead ten thousand dollars, with the request that they should use the advantages the wealth gave them for the benefit of their country and humanity. The mine he gave to his son Charles, on receiving a solemn pledge that the gold should be used for the public good. The stone had been dug away from the mass for its whole length and depth down to where, in miner's phrase, the deposit "pinched out." Several millions of dollars' worth were still left, sufficient for many years of use in assisting immigration, maintaining institutions of learning, and aiding the advancement of science; to these uses the new Governor Morton resolved to devote the gold.
At the time of his retirement, Governor Ralph Morton issued a farewell address to the people of Aristopia, which, in the main, he had composed many years before, while his mental powers were in full vigor, only modifying it somewhat as the flight of years opened to him new views and furnished him new illustrations. He not only drew upon the historical studies of his youth, but on the experiences of his long life. He hud kept himself fully informed, by means of his wide correspondence, of all public events of both Europe and America.
He urged his people to guard their liberties with unremitting and unending vigilance. He pointed out the dangers to which these liberties would be exposed and whence would probably come the assaults upon them; that these assaults would not be hold, abrupt, and open, but stealthy, insidious, and gradual. With every succeeding generation the dangers to popular liberty from the despotism of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy would grow less. With increasing and advancing civilization another kind of despotism—the despotism of wealth—would become more and more dangerous. This despotism might be hereditary, the slow growth of generations, or it might be the sudden growth of a score or two of years. In a new country, where so much of nature's wealth was unappropriated and so wide a scope was offered for those excelling in greed, cunning, and strength to grasp this unappropriated wealth, the sudden acquisition of great riches might be looked for in many cases.
He warned the people that the greatest dangers to liberty might be covered by the most specious pleas for liberty itself. He warned them that the wealthy and strong would plead for liberty—the liberty to oppress the weak and helpless, to rob them, not boldly and openly, with the coarse methods of the highwayman, but stealthily and under the pretence of fair and open "business." But the result would be exactly that accomplished by the highwaymen: the acquisition of wealth without rendering an equivalent.
Absolute equality of wealth, however desirable, could not be attained except in a community in which the individual was controlled in all financial matters by the society; otherwise the improvident and incapable would surely become and remain poor. As society is obliged in the end to care for the improvident and incapable, it is a question when that care ought to begin and how far prevention ought to be substituted for alleviation, especially when it is considered that the incapable one is often the head of a family, dragging down to poverty those naturally dependent upon him. But without any question, prevention ought to be used against the great and dangerous accumulation of wealth by individuals and associations not public. Great wealth in the bands of a few must with the utmost certainty be balanced by the poverty of many. The dangers and injustice to society of this are so great that no specious plea for liberty must be allowed to cover the acquisition of undue wealth. The liberty of the strong and capable to get all they can and keep all they get, although obtained at the expense of the weak and incapable, is only the liberty of the highwayman glossed over and refined by subtle methods; the liberty of the bold and strong to do as they please with the weak and timid, the liberty of the shrewd and cunning to deal as they can and will with the simple and uncalculating, is a sort of anarchy.
He warned the people especially against the dangers from corporations, which were then beginning to grow strong in England. He had seen a good specimen of corporation rule in the early settlement of Virginia. A corporation is the very worst of rulers. It has all the vices of the avarice, greed, selfishness, and cruelty of all its members combined and increased in geometrical ratio by the combination, with none of the virtues of the benevolence and generosity of its separate members. It is deaf to the voice of mercy, insensible to the pangs of remorse and the scourge of shame, and untouched by the sentiment of gratitude. Vain against corporations are laws relating to heredity, for corporations may perpetuate themselves and live through generations. Above all, he warned the people against giving a corporation any monopoly. Dangerous and evil as is any monopoly in the hands of an individual, in the grasp of a corporation its evil is multiplied infinitely. Although a corporation has no soul, it may have a head, who, wielding its vast power with a single will, may make of himself a most dangerous despot.
This paper, of which only a brief, dry outline is here given, was written with a vividness of color, a depth and warmth of feeling, an aptness of expression, a strength of argument, a force, and fire, and fervor which were possible only to a man of high genius, with a soul aflame with love of right and hatred of wrong.
The address became a classic in Aristopia, and was read and declaimed by every youth in every school for generation after generation. Its influence was greater than that of future presidents and congresses. Its maxims had more than the force of laws.