Caesars Column | Page 2

herein described are absurdly impossible.
Who is it that is satisfied with the present unhappy condition of society? It is conceded
that life is a dark and wretched failure for the great mass of mankind. The many are
plundered to enrich the few. Vast combinations depress the price of labor and increase
the cost of the necessaries of existence. The rich, as a rule, despise the poor; and the poor
are coming to hate the rich. The face of labor grows sullen; the old tender Christian love
is gone; standing armies are formed on one side, and great communistic organizations on
the other; society divides itself into two hostile camps; no white flags pass from the one
to the other. They wait only for the drum-beat and the trumpet to summon them to armed
conflict.

These conditions have come about in less than a century; most of them in a quarter of a
century. Multiply them by the years of another century, and who shall say that the events
I depict are impossible? There is an acceleration of movement in human affairs even as
there is in the operations of gravity. The dead missile out of space at last blazes, and the
very air takes fire. The masses grow more intelligent as they grow more wretched; and
more capable of cooperation as they become more desperate. The labor organizations of
to-day would have been impossible fifty years ago. And what is to arrest the flow of
effect from cause? What is to prevent the coming of the night if the earth continues to
revolve on its axis? The fool may cry out: "There shall be no night!" But the feet of the
hours march unrelentingly toward the darkness.
Some may think that, even if all this be true, "Cæsar's Column" should not have been
published. Will it arrest the moving evil to ignore its presence? What would be thought of
the surgeon who, seeing upon his patient's lip the first nodule of the cancer, tells him
there is no danger, and laughs him into security while the roots of the monster eat their
way toward the great arteries? If my message be true it should be spoken; and the world
should hear it. The cancer should be cut out while there is yet time. Any other course
"Will but skin and film the ulcerous place, While rank corruption, mining all beneath,
infects unseen."
Believing, as I do, that I read the future aright, it would be criminal in me to remain silent.
I plead for higher and nobler thoughts in the souls of men; for wider love and ampler
charity in their hearts; for a renewal of the bond of brotherhood between the classes; for a
reign of justice on earth that shall obliterate the cruel hates and passions which now
divide the world.
If God notices anything so insignificant as this poor book, I pray that he may use it as an
instrumentality of good for mankind; for he knows I love his human creatures, and would
help them if I had the power.



CHAPTER I
THE GREAT CITY
[This book is a series of letters, from Gabriel Weltstein, in New York, to his brother,
Heinrich Weltstein, in the State of Uganda, Africa.]
NEW YORK, Sept. 10, 1988
My Dear Brother:
Here I am, at last, in the great city. My eyes are weary with gazing, and my mouth
speechless with admiration; but in my brain rings perpetually the thought:
Wonderful!--wonderful!--most wonderful!
What an infinite thing is man, as revealed in the tremendous civilization he has built up!
These swarming, laborious, all-capable ants seem great enough to attack heaven itself, if
they could but find a resting-place for their ladders. Who can fix a limit to the

intelligence or the achievements of our species?
But our admiration may be here, and our hearts elsewhere. And so from all this glory and
splendor I turn back to the old homestead, amid the high mountain valleys of Africa; to
the primitive, simple shepherd-life; to my beloved mother, to you and to all our dear ones.
This gorgeous, gilded room fades away, and I see the leaning hills, the trickling streams,
the deep gorges where our woolly thousands graze; and I hear once more the echoing
Swiss horns of our herdsmen reverberating from the snow-tipped mountains. But my
dream is gone. The roar of the mighty city rises around me like the bellow of many
cataracts.
New York contains now ten million inhabitants; it is the largest city that is, or ever has
been, in the world. It is difficult to say where it begins or ends: for the villas extend, in
almost unbroken succession, clear to Philadelphia; while east, west and north noble
habitations spread out mile after mile, far