Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 9

climatic influences injurious to the liver, or by some still-existing taint
of convict blood, it is impossible to decide; we can only hope that the
genus will become extinct as the world becomes more generally agreed
that, as we all consist of the same amalgam of animal and spiritual
matter, we have all equal rights to the consideration and courtesy of our
fellows.

The Root Of All Evil
The Dawn Volume 2, Number 8. Sydney, December 5, 1889

IN spite of the popular belief that "there is a woman at the bottom of
everything", there are a few who still believe that the "love of money is
the root of all evil", and we need hardly say that in our opinion the
latter is by far the more fertile cause of misery. During the last few
years in Sydney, we have seen a long succession of prosecutions for
fraud and embezzlement committed by clerks and others in positions of
trust. These men did not steal to procure food for starving wives, or
medicine for sickly children; they were all in receipt of salaries
sufficient to procure them the necessaries and the comforts of life. They
stole that they might spend more, or to enable them to gamble and grow
rich with a bound, and their histories show clearly enough that crime is
a natural outcome of this insensate love of riches and extravagant
display. Even with the mass who happily keep honest; the same passion
keeps men anxious and chafing, because forsooth they are not richer;
they may have enough, yet they pant for more with as much vehemence
as if tickets to Paradise were to be sold to the highest bidder. The
amount of physical injury which results from the perpetual haste and
friction caused by this starving for superfluities is incalculable; there is
not any disease more insidious and exhausting than worry, yet how
many men can be found who live placidly, content that they are
decently clad, housed, and fed, and satisfied to be free from the horrors
of poverty without craving for the extravagant and dangerous pleasures
of wealth? The majority of people rarely look downwards towards the
miseries of poverty, never reflect on the ills which they, themselves,
escape, ills under which millions of their fellow-creatures writhe, but
occupy themselves in envying those who are better off, sighing for
some fresh luxury, grumbling because they cannot save more, chafing
under the limits of their income which happily keeps their tastes and
comforts within the bounds of untempted simplicity. The effect of this
money craze on men and women alike, is always disastrous; temper
and constitution are worn down by it. Character goes overboard when
money is to be won, and no sooner does the pocket grow full than
commensurate requirements develop to exhaust it. The actual
selfishness of being rich, the indifference to human agony which is
implied in the personal possession and use of a large fortune, is what no
one seems to recognise, yet it perhaps explains why "it is easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter

the kingdom of heaven". It is easy for one who is not wealthy to profess
gratitude that he has not committed the crime of devoting to his
personal use that which other men, not less worthy, die for lack of; but
it is probably the best of a poor man's unconscious and negative virtues
that he is poor, and therefore not misusing for his own benefit that
wealth which might bring hope into the lives of a hundred necessitous
creatures. Of the terrible effect upon the world at large of the craving
for wealth, the records of crime and of pauperism furnish sufficient
examples. In these days of speculation many men are willing to grow
rich upon the losses of others; in these times of fierce competition and
rapid, cheap production many a man climbs to wealth up a stairway
made of the living bodies of the poor. The desperate attempts made of
late years to lessen the gulf between the very rich and the very poor
have only been partially successful. The rich grow richer and stronger,
the poor weaker and more numerous. Hundreds of thousands of pounds
pour annually through the channels of charity upon the smouldering
fires of poverty, and the generosity of the few is spread like a veil over
the miseries of the many, who, being honest workers, should never
need to take aught that they do not earn. The recent gift of a quarter of a
million made by one Englishman for the purpose of building homes for
the poor is a splendid example of individual generosity, yet it is but a
bucketful of water thrown on a desert,