"So We Are Only a Dollar-making People, are We?"
It has for many years been a favorite gibe of thousands of foreigners,
living for the most part upon inherited wealth, and taking the
customary snobbish attitude of the consumer toward the producer,
that Americans are "only a dollar-making people," as Mr. Raemaekers
has it in his forceful cartoon. Barring the word "only" perhaps the indictment
is true—I hope it is. One of the fondest of my many fond
wishes for my fellow-Americans is that they may all become successful
dollar-makers, since he who makes his own dollars is able always to maintain
his independence, to look his creditors large and small squarely in
the eye, and live by grace of his own powers, and not by favor of potentate
or patron.
There is nothing disgraceful about a dollar, and it may be said on its behalf that it differs from the Sovereign Incarnate of the Germans in that it is redeemable always at par, being worth the full one-hundred cents that it calls for; in that it rings true; in that whether it be of gold, of silver, or of paper, that which it promises it fulfills, and has never yet been known to dishonor itself. It may occasionally be seen in bad company, but it never falls below the level of its evil associations, and is genuine to the core. Loose thinkers sometimes speak of the "tainted dollar," but there is no such thing. If any taint lingers near it is not in the dollar itself, but in the holder. So excellent, indeed, and so immune to the effects of evil association is the character of the dollar, intrinsically, that any one of Uncle Sam's many billions could pass from the pocket of a Burglar into that of a Bishop, and be worthy of its latter estate.
I have yet to meet an American who confounds this true and honest servant of his well-being with his God, but, alas, I have met countless Germans who call it our American King, and themselves bow ignobly down to a Lord and Master whose assumption of a divine relationship has made of his life a prolonged blasphemy; a King whose deeds of savagery are a complete negation of his hypocritical pretensions to the possession of lofty ideals; whose ring is the ring of a brazen counterfeit, and whose word has been so dishonored by himself that it has become the synonym for worthlessness throughout the world.
If Kings or Masters of any sort must be endured who would not rather abase himself before the American Dollar, true and honest to the core, than debase himself by bending the knee to a Kaiser who by his infamies has made an Attila appear to be an Angel of Peace, a Bill Sykes a Gentleman, and the word of an Ananias a Bond of Faith?
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.
