The coming climax in the destinies of America

Dedication

Publishers Preface

Prelude— "Dawn" ....

I. The Lesson of the Great Rebellion

VII

VIII. The Inertia of the Middle Class

IX. Nation- Builders and Nation-Savers

X. The American Producer Stands at Bay

XI. The Air is Heavy with a Great Fear

XII. Guides that Mislead the People Symptoms of Organic Disease The Gangrene of Dissolution .

The Dread Dynamics of Hate The Impending Crash In Order of Battle

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII. The Gage of War .

XIX. The Dread Climax

XX. The Task that Implores Us Postlude— "When the Towers Fall"

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137 149 164

TO THE ALL-POWERFUL MlDDLE CLASS OF AMERI- CA, WHO BY WISE AND RIGHTEOUS ACTION CAN SAVE THE REPUBLIC FROM EVERY DANGER THAT NOW THREATENS, THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

Realizing the gravity of the subjects with which the present treatise deals, I think a word is due to the reader, not as to the author's logic, for of this every critic must judge for himself, but as to his knowledge of the facts with which he deals.

Lester C. Hubbard was born on the Western Reserve in Ohio, of a family that settled in New England in the seventeenth century. He was a private soldier and afterwards a captain in the civil war. After the war he studied law, but soon took up newspaper work and has had long practical experience on newspapers in leading cities, East and West.

His attention was first called definitely to the labor problem at Boston, during the telegraphers' strike of 1883. Since that time, he has been earnestly devoted to the labor movement of the country at large, and has had an exceptional opportunity to keep informed of its growth and its spirit, by reason of an extensive correspondence, amounting to thousands of letters per year, with

8 PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

its leaders and writers in all sections, and with workers in all departments of toil. If there be in the United States any specialist and expert who can speak with authority regarding the extent, the purposes and the temper of the various associations of workers in city and country, Lester C. Hubbard is the man.

As the last pages of "The Coming Climax" go to press, a noteworthy incident occurs. A prominent ex-member of Congress and high official of the World's Fair, says at an aristocratic banquet in Chicago, as reported by the "Times," that he returned from a recent European tour with "the opinion that after all a monarchy was a pretty good sort of government, and that, with the exception of the United States, republican forms of government were hollow shams." This speech is mainly noteworthy from the fact that it has not attracted newspaper comment. The disloyalty of our governing class to democracy is becoming a commonplace. Is not the time ripe for a word that shall open the people's eyes?

Charles H. Kerr.

Chicago, November, 1891.

"DAWN"

It comes, it looms up in the darkness;

Something, I hardly know Of a word or a name to name it;

Yet I feel it must be so; That a time of choice is coming

For weal or for woe.

The pulses of a nation

Beating in fever and pain; The fever of woe and want,

The fever of greed and gain, And the stars are wailing in heaven,

And the great sea moans for its slain.

In the stillness of my life

I can hear the tramp afar Of the armies marching

Under the morning star, To the Armageddon battle,

Where the eagles are.

The days lie dark before me;

I know not what shall be; But at midnight or at day-dawn

10 DAWN

When the call comes unto me, I am ready to rise and follow To the death-agony.

O my people, my brothers!

God grant me to be true, Ever true to his highest truth.

No great thing can I do, But firm as a faithful heart may love,

Ever I stand by you.

Yours, and I see God's angel

Coming along the sky, With the garments rolled in blood,

And the steadfast eye, And some say her name is Love,

And some, Liberty.

She comes — who will know her coming, And be ready her step to greet,

When she comes with the blood on her brow And the dust about her feet?

Who will boldly drink of the bitter Without a hope of the sweet?

Let us be true, heart-loyal,

Ready what time she calls.

Justice and Truth have met

To cast down the age-built walls. Happy shall be the victor that day,

And blessed he that falls.

Alice Werner.

Chapter I The Lesson Of The Great Rebellion

"Our present civilization is characterized and tainted by a devouring greediness for wealth — the passion for gain is everywhere sapping pure and generous feeling and raising up bitter foes against any reform which may threaten to turn aside the stream of wealth; I sometimes feel as if a great reform were necessary to break up our present mercenary civilization in order that Christianity — now repelled by the universal worldliness — may come into near contact with the soul, and reconstruct society after its own pure and disinterested principles." — William Ellery Changing.

The presage of storm and portents of evil which prophetically announced the great war of the rebellion were faint and few when compared with the omens of approaching convulsion which now challenge the attention of all thinking people whose logical faculties are not hopelessly drugged by selfish personal interests.

God has struck the hour for a New Dispensation for man. It will come in and nothing can stop it. Shall it come in peaceably by reason of our willing co-operation, or must it come in forcibly by the omnipotent will of the Almighty crushing down at one and the same time our 11 upstart wills, our vain opposition and our rebellious bodies?

When Channing spoke the words quoted at the head of this chapter, there were only two millionaires in America, Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor. There are now over three thousand; and we have single individuals who count their wealth by the hundred million. Then the rule of great corporations was unknown, while they now occupy and devastate our whole land. The evil and peril then existent have increased an hundred fold.

Our great, patient toiling masses, so long denied a living voice in their own government, so long oppressed by cultured and crafty power, so long robbed of the fruits of their toil through bastard legal forms, have at last arisen, and now say to one another:

"What shall we do to save ourselves and our children? How again enjoy the reign of justice? How get back Washington's republic that has been ravished from us? How secure for coming generations the blessing of a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the people? How can we best obey God's intimation that after ages of bloodshed, persecution and tyranny the time has at last come when one country shall stand among the nations of earth preaching, believing and living the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man?"

We know what of sympathy the Triumphant Plutocrats will give to these divinely born aspirations that are now thrilling in the hearts of millions of our great plain people. They will scoff them, deny them, give ferocious battle against them. They will do as did Pharaoh of old — as did our own slaveholders, when God said, "Let my people go free!"

What answer will our great, contented, well-to-do and all-potential middle class of America make to this high plea for better things for man? Will they sit silent and unresponsive while taking their ease ? If so, woe be unto them and the land in which they live. For a dark night shall come, and a mighty storm shall beat them down into the earth, and the punishment that of old was visited upon disobedient men shall be visited upon them, and they shall cry out in their agony, "Truly, God is above all, and doth rule in this — His universe."

Only the other day and a great war occupied all our broad American land. During four tragic years thirty million citizens of a great republic, with a common language, a common lineage and a common destiny, made fighting each other their principal business. All the productive energies of the people, all their accumulated resources, and all the strength and courage of all the able-bodied men in the nation, were concentrated in opposing lines, and then hurled against each other for purposes of mutual destruction.

Terrible was the slaughter of men, but far more awful the moral devastation that followed the shock of battle. Tender fathers, affectionate husbands, aspiring youths torn to pieces by shot and shell, burned by fevers, worn down by hardships, wasted away by wounds, withered up by disease. These good citizens, these nation builders, these wealth creators, the most priceless treasure of a well ordered state, were slain by reason of ostrich-head-hiding foolishness on the part of the republic; murdered because an unthinking and utterly selfish animalism was regnant in the land; perishing for the sinful ignorance of the people who could know the right and do it, but would not. All these went down to death by the hundred thousand and were piled into dank trenches like cord-wood. Oh, it was hideous beyond belief.

And yet the present dominant crowd of patriotic orators, philosophic essayists and authoritative pulpiteers declare to a man, that the "war between the states" was a historic necessity, an unavoidable event in the life of the nation, and its supreme pain merely the necessary friction incidental to a great turn in the evolutionary wheel. Nay more, the clerical contingent with sacrilegious audacity saddle the final responsibility for it on the Almighty, and affirm that it was a fore-ordained part of God's plan for the government of men. As well might they lay it on Providence when a family pushing love and charity out of doors fall to murdering one another under the devilish inspiration of hate and greed. For the nation is only a larger family.

The optimistic complacency of our accredited exponents of public opinion, when brought front to front with the monumental crime and shame of that bloody war, is but an expression of the aggregated egotism of our whole people. Where a national sin is concerned we are in the position of the autocrat of all the Russias. There is no visible authority that has the power to punish, and no earthly court to give an impartial trial of the issue. Our pride, vanity and self-sufficiency furnish the only advocates in the case, and these plead solely in exculpation and justification. While the national conscience has slept, we have suffered an inversion of our moral perceptions, and see glory and congratulation in a fratricidal war, where of right there should be only infamy and regret. We build battle monuments to commemorate the victories of brothers over brothers on blood-stained ground where only temples of sorrow would be meet and fitting. North and South alike erect statues and exult in the prowess of military chiefs who demonstrated high expertness in killing men of their own kin.

The North declares that its triumph established the fact of the indissoluble union of the states. The South, vanquished, but content with present prosperity and full political rights in the nation, pleasantly denies that the proposition affirmed by the late Confederate States of America can be so determined. Rivers of human blood poured forth. Billions of property expended, stolen and destroyed. The spiritual sensibilities of our whole people put in eclipse. The moral progress of the Nation halted. A monstrous debt saddled on to the back of patient industry. A dragon 's-teeth crop of hitherto unknown evils springing out of the blood-soaked ground full grown and armed to the heel for ravaging spoliation. Oppressive trusts, autocratic monopolies, combinations of capitalistic knaves who make the people their prey, an era of political corruption that amazes the virtuous; legislative bribery rampant, and a a prostituted judiciary, that makes all righteous laws obsolete when the defendant has plenty of gold and is willing to spend it. Illegal franchises and brigand charters sold for a price. The practical passing away of democratic government in Washington's republic, co-incident with the rise of a Triumphant Plutocracy that imperialistically dominates the government of the Nation. The glamour of ill-gotten wealth dazzling the eyes of the people, causing them to doubt their old-time reverence for simple honesty. The spread of an atheistic gangrene through all the body politic, which makes the getting of dollars, no matter how, the chief end of man.

All this varied crop direct from the Kingdom of Hades as the logical product of that unnatural war, and yet no undying principle of right settled by it. It could not be so accomplished, because physical force cannot invade the domain of the spiritual, which is the birthplace and home of moral principle.

Sophistical mouthers may challenge us with the "freedom of the slave." The enfranchisement of the negro was an accident of war, an unpremeditated result, and northern claim to it, as the primary philanthropic motive of the war, is destitute of all validity. The war of the rebellion merely decided that when a nation with slaves fights one without any, the human chattels are liable to be lost as spoil of battle.

More than fifty years ago God gave clear intimation to the people of this professedly Christian country, that it was time they set about abolishing the eternal crime of holding their brother men in bondage. His command was unheeded. So he did the task in his own way and meted out just punishment for our national disobedience along with it. The guilt of the North and South was precisely one and the same, yet the South was smitten with a heavier hand. But are the books balanced and has the North told down all its penal debt in agony and shame? No man dare say so; the end may not yet be, for though God does not settle his accounts every month or every year, he inexorably squares them at the long last.

Slavery had become a national offense in God's eyes, and was His cause of the war of the rebellion. The cause of that war, as recognized by the average American citizen of the time, was the firing on Fort Sumter, which was a Southern hint that the United States government had split in two. And forthwith slaveholding Douglas democrats took down their guns and marched forth to maintain the integrity of the Federal Union. This iron-clad fact effectually disposes of the sentimental northern after-thought that the war was prosecuted by the northern states to purge this alleged land of the free of the crying shame of human slavery. If further evidence of a confirmatory character is needed to prove our proposition, it can be found in the record of fugitive slaves returned to their masters in the first year of the war, by the liberating army of United States soldiers to whom the black men had confidingly flown for freedom and protection.

In this year of grace 1891, we are wiser on some matters than we were in 1861, and are now pretty well convinced that the war came on because God struck the hour for the extirpation of slavery in our American republic.

Could the institution of slavery have been put away in peace? To deny that proposition is to negative the declaration of God in Holy writ, for He saith, "My ways are ways of pleasantness and all my paths are paths of peace." All human experience proves that the only true happiness comes by obedience to the moral law. The upward road to virtue is hard and steep both to individual men and nations, but fair flowers of compensation bloom all along the way. The sacrifices exacted belong not to the physical world, but to the spiritual, and are of selfdenial, patience, charity, and loving service for others. By the exercise of those heavenly benevolences, the people of the United States could have cast off the national sin of slavery without the shedding of one drop of human blood.

Were these supernal agencies invoked when God's clear intimation of high duty to be done came to our republic?

They were not.

The Almighty said through his chosen prophets: "It is full time that this American nation which gives me worship, and reverences Jesus Christ the Divine Illuminator, should put away from it the ages-old crime of human slavery. That sin belongs to days when men's minds were darkened, and their consciences ignorant. You live in the new light and can see the wrong; harbor it among you no longer."

Then obedient children of the Almighty Father would have replied: "This duty which thou givest unto us will we do, and at once." From all the land good and wise men would have come together, and said to one another:

"This hath been the sin of all of us, North and South alike; become we now brotherly toilers in the common task of putting it away. Let us tax ourselves equitably from year to year until the just price has been paid for every slave. We will affectionately instruct these our swarthy brothers, because they are to be one with us in God's eternal kingdom; we will think providently and wisely for them, until they shall have become useful, enlightened and equal citizens of our great republic, and then the task given us by the Father will be well and truly done."

But our people did not heed the Divine command, for they reviled God and murdered His prophets. The Abolitionists, who spoke the warning of the Almighty to the people of this nation, were scorned, spit upon, mobbed, shot and hung. The planters of the South found slavery profitable, and clung to it. The influential and wealthy commercial and manufacturing classes of the North upheld it because there was money for them in the southern markets. The pro-slavery southern vote held the balance of power in the nation, and United States officials hunted fugitive slaves until they vanished across the Canadian border. A mob of Yankee aristocrats dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck. The Attorney General of Massachusetts presided at a meeting in Faneuil Hall that approved the murder of Elijah Lovejoy because he attacked human slavery. United

States Marshall Isaiah Rhynders, at the head of a band of ruffians, broke up an Anti-Slavery convention in New York City. Thirty-five years ago any orator, man or woman, who assailed the institution of slavery in any northern city did so at the hazard of life.

And where were the clergy at that time ? Just where they are to-day, on the side of power and gold. That great woman, Miss Martineau, writing more than fifty years ago, said of our country:

"Not even the slave-holding and commercial classes, are so guilty of the crime of slavery as the clerical class; their opposition to its abolition is well nigh universal, and they use all their authority as religious teachers in favor of slavery, and yet when its abolition is finally accomplished, they will claim the glory of a reform which they did their uttermost to retard."

After a half a century we know full well both the truth of her general statement and its prediction.

The Republican party was born through sectional selfishness, and the abstract right or wrong of the slavery system from a moral point of view, was a minor consideration. The North found out by practical experiment that slavery was a politico-economic fallacy, in the case of energetic and progressive communities in a temperate climate. Seward announced the irrepressible conflict between industrial systems that were built respectively on free and slave labor. There was money in it for the northern states to have all territories come into the Union as free states, for it meant a larger population, more general wealth, and a greater number of buyers.

Here was something tangible to build a political party on. It appealed to the interests of millions of people who were greedy after cash.

The inevitable shock of battle between the opposing northern and southern states came. The republican party went into power through a plurality vote. The South seceded. The National instinct recognized that enduring prosperity was impossible, unless all the states formed one government. President Lincoln declared his indifference whether he saved the Union with or without slavery, but it must be saved. After nearly two years of unsuccessful conflict, the slaves were freed as a war measure. The Union was preserved; that was man's part of it. Slavery was abolished; that was God's part of it.

Did the terrible punishment we received for National disobedience teach us National wisdom?

Do we know with more of certainty that God rules and reigns in His universe?

Have we learned through much suffering that Nations as well as men are under the dominion of an omnipotent moral law, which inexorably punishes all transgressions?

Has a clearer light come to us by which we see that it is a man's mission here below to build and progress from better unto best, and take into his soul and life more of that justice and charity which is to be a part of his divine estate, hereafter?

And lastly, have we found out that selfish omissions to do plain duties are punished, the same as active sins, under God's government?

The time is nigh at hand when the people of this Nation shall receive Divine intimation of new tasks to be done for the well-being of all men; and as by our acts we must make answer, thus will be shown the degree of moral progress we made under the schoolmastership of God, during the war of the rebellion. "Be swift our souls to answer him, be jubilant our feet," lest we again pass under his terrible rod.

Chapter II The Peril Of A Slothful Optimism

They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us. — Micah III: 10, n.

A whimsical fable, that is charged up to antediluvian times, shrewdly illustrates the persistent unbelief of our average humanity as to disagreeable events to come, no matter how distinctly they may be foretold by the inexorable logic of existing facts. The Old Testament gives circumstantial narration of the scorning, scoffing and gibing which Noah's neighbors heaped upon him, while that devout man, in obedience to the divine command, kept at it, patiently weatherboarding his ark. The legend in question carries the story on a bit farther, and tells us that after the rain had been pouring down unceasingly for ten days and nights, and Noah's deriders were floundering around with the water clear 27 up to their necks, they still stubbornly maintained that "it wouldn't be much of a shower after all."

We have not passed beyond the shadow of the monumental catastrophe of our civil war, and are still struggling with its nearby effects. The burdens which it put upon us yet bear wearily down, and new consequences of that terrible conflict continually crop up in our national life.

Centuries must pass before the philosophic historian can make an authoritative summary of the results of that tremendous clash of arms which shall be full and final. Nevertheless the remote and proximate causes of that great war stand sharply defined to our eyes, whereas with posterity they must ever become more dim and unsubstantial as the years circle away.

The slow but sure approach of that time of titanic battling was heralded by paroxysmal outbreaks of sectional antagonism which found expression both in congressional halls and among the people at large. They came at irregular intervals during the two-score years preceding 1861, and, always increasing in breadth and intensity, unerringly indicated the ever-nearer oncoming of the inevitable shock of war. These precursory broils, which logically led up to the ultimate tragedy, are live and familiar in our minds, for we still have gray-haired men amongst us who actively participated in most of them. Hence, let us con them over well, and then make comparison with certain sinister events that have taken place during the last twenty years. Let us mark if there be signs of kinship between them: note if they are the same in essence, and particularly observe if their general tendency lies parallel with the line of march that ended in a Niagara plunge into night and chaos some three decades ago.

Our country, though torn, bleeding and wounded nigh unto death, finally managed to scramble out of the black gulf. Surely with that time of horror still so near, we will not walk as the fool walketh, and heedless of past suffering take again the way of danger. Nations, like individuals, can learn wisdom through miserable experiences; and this generation of living men may turn the ignorance, blunders and crimes of dead ancestral generations into sublime stepping stones up which they shall lift their country into a loftier plane of being, where all the sweet prosperities in safety do abide, under the nurturing care of liberty, peace and justice.

Turn then, oh my countrymen, to the past; read its stern lesson with your immortal souls; heed its minutest teaching, and when, in your journey of exploration along a highway which shows the trackings of tumultuous multitudes in the olden time, you come to where the road drops off into an abyss ragged and torn as by internal convulsion — beware, and turn back on your course, seeking better paths. The rent garments and whitened bones you see far down below, hold warning for you, and tell that other men have tried that way and found their death.

The average American works in the present, for the purpose of living in the future. His father is a cherished memory, but his grandfather soon lapses into a shadowy personage, while his great-grandfather becomes a vague myth; he knows not what this ancestor wrought at, where he lived, where he died, and is ignorant of his full name.

The American gives his country's past much the same consideration — that is, he indifferently turns his back on it, and goes about the business of to-day. Ask him who were cabinet officers twenty years ago — who our foreign ministers — who members of the Supreme Court — who speakers of the House — what the important laws passed in two sessions of Congress. Ask him to name the foremost national events between i 871 and '75, and you will find that this alert, intelligent man, who is informed right up to the front of the present hour, has a memory like a school-boy's slate where yesterday's sums are rubbed off to give place to those of to-day.

This national peculiarity is a national weakness and fraught with peril, and a national instinct of self-preservation will compel its prompt reformation, if we are to save ourselves from a national disaster so overwhelming and allprostrating that the war of the Rebellion will be dwarfed to a minor inconvenience of temporary character when placed beside it. We must go back to the past of our country and strive to gain therefrom whatsoever of instruction and guidance it may hold for a near future that is beset with many dangers. The departing mariner oft directs his course into the great sea by a well-known headland he leaves behind him.

In 1817 the territory of Missouri applied for admission as a State, and there came about the first friction between the sectional interests of the North and South. The morality of the institution of slavery did not enter into the issue, for both sides agreed that its righteousness was established by the Bible, and its legality by the constitution of the United States. Both sides also recognized that free and slave labor could not harmoniously co-exist in the same community on a footing of equal prosperity, for long experiment had irrefragably proved that as one system flourished the other inevitably decayed.

The North and South were like rival farmers who both coveted the same piece of ground, and as their powers in the government were evenly balanced, they settled the argument by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which provided that the South should have for slavery all the western territory below 36 degrees and 30 minutes of latitude, and the North retain for free labor all above that line. The irreconcilable antagonism of the two systems of labor in the same country had not yet dawned upon the wisest statesman, so with much ponderous selfcongratulation, our egotistic law-makers of that far-away time fancied that by their paper compromise they had secured eternal peace between the North and South, and blocked God's evolutionary plan for the moral progress of man.

South Carolina's Nullification ebullition of 1832 arose out of the tariff question, but indicated very clearly the attitude that would be taken by the hot and audacious South, when its supreme interest of human slavery was deemed to be threatened.

The years rolled on, and along in the forties humble anti-slavery societies were organized through the North. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, "the Fox of Kinderhook," allied himself with the democratic abolitionists, ran on the "barnburner" ticket, and defeated Lewis Cass, the regular democratic nominee, by incidentally helping the whigs elect Taylor and Fillmore.

Again the fires of sectional animosity blazed out, and the men of the North and South looked distrust at one another across Mason's and Dixon's line. The statesmen of the South were swift to note this new menace against their "peculiar institution," and forthwith began an aggressive campaign for defense. In 1850 they haughtily demanded a fugitive-slave law, whose arbitrary provisions were taken as a personal outrage by millions of northern men. By this law all citizens were commanded to aid the slave-hunters in securing their prey, even to the extent of fighting in their defense. The taking of the negro back into slavery was a minor matter; the major grievance of the free-born Northerners was the insult involved in their being compelled by law to do the task. Higher and still higher blazed the fire of wrath, when that infamous bill became a law.