Griffiths Gambles with Destiny

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-83-8162-332-2
Verlag: Ktoczyta.pl
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 118 Seiten

George Griffith became famous for his fantastic stories. The main character decided to fight with Destiny. The hero is the symbol of all nations, he combines the interests of all nations. The author conceived an interesting idea and in the end will surprise readers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Griffiths, George

Leseproben

IV. PRESIDENT RAEBURN By nightfall, Stanley Raeburn was the most famous man between the Atlantic and the Pacific. His voice had rung like a trumpet-blast throughout the length and breadth of the land. At his bidding the American people had awakened from the dream of subjection to the capitalists at home and empty defiance of the world abroad. With those two terrible words, “universal war,” ringing in its ears, it had opened its eyes and seen the red gulf of battle yawning at its feet. It had looked down into that awful chaos of blood and flame and misery and disaster, out of which it was impossible that it could take either honour or profit; and then it turned round and quietly but steadfastly refused to allow either its politicians to goad it or its Spread-Eagle paragraphists to cajole it into taking the fatal step which, once taken, could never be retraced save through unspeakable shame and dishonour. In a word, it had grasped Stanley Raeburn’s single, simple argument firmly, and had determined to abide by it. It saw very clearly that the reverse was not only impossible, but ridiculous, and it saw it all the more clearly when that night a second message went forth over the wires from the Tribune office calling upon the American people to ask the United States whether they seriously considered themselves strong enough to sweep the united fleets of Europe off the sea, and, having done that, to invade the Continent vid Spain, and annex the Old World? Incidentally, the message reminded them that there would be about five hundred ships of war and some ten millions of men to be dealt with, and these would not be mobs of amateur soldiers such as had confronted each other in the Civil War, but armies of highly trained professional soldiers with generations of warfare behind them, and commanded by the ripest military genius that the world could produce. It was in vain that the politicians raved themselves speechless about the “imperial destinies” of the American people, and it was equally in vain that the Spread-Eagle editors howled their battle-cries and danced their war-dances to the last limits of the scarehead’s capabilities. The American people had got its facts solid, and the next day, with something like a sixty million voice- power, it told the United States in unmistakable tones to come down. And the United States came down just as the French, German, and Eussian ministers were preparing to leave Washington. It so happened, not by any means unnaturally, that this national cataclysm, for it was really nothing else, occurred at the same time as the nominations for the presidency. It had, in fact, been arranged to come off then, just as Mr. Cleveland’s Venezuelan message had been engineered; but it also chanced that the day on which the decision was arrived at was Stanley Raeburn’s thirtieth birthday, and this fact made him eligible for nomination. In the then state of American feeling and opinion there was no one else possible, and so the Young Tribune of the People, as he had already come to be called, was nominated in such fashion as promised an overwhelming majority at the election. But by this time he had begun another crusade which already threatened to involve the country in something like revolution. It was not a wild-cat hunt of the sort in which a Bryan or a Henry George would have involved the country for the sake of personal notoriety and the profits of office. It was a sober, steady, earnest fight against that cuttlefish organization of capital which was sucking the life-blood out of the nation; that monster of monopoly which had made American politics a scoff and a byword among the nations of the earth, and American law and justice the names of things that could be bought and sold. In his nomination address, he had said “I am neither a socialist nor a silver crank. I believe in every man getting and having that which his hands or his brains can win for him. I believe in every man getting just as rich as he can by honest and legitimate methods. I believe in the survival of the fittest, but I want them to be the fittest, and I want the fittest to mean the best, not the worst. I want an open field, and no favour for any one. I want the race to be to the swift, and the battle to the strong; but I also want the race to be run fairly, and the battle to be fought within the four corners of the law. I have as great a horror of mob-rule as I have of purse-rule, and I want to make both of them impossible within the boundaries of what I hope will soon be truly called the United States.” The meeting at which this speech was delivered was signalized by an extraordinary incident which practically assured the election of the Young Tribune. At the end of the speech, his own father mounted the platform and opposed him. It was the first time they had met since the interview in the library. It was also notable as the first occasion on which a multi-millionaire Trust-king had come out into the open to defend his order and the principle on which it was founded. What prompted him to do it, he himself didn’t know. But he did it, and the result of the discussion on the public mind was simply terrific. “This is my father. I claim a hearing for him!” Raeburn shouted through the storm of hoots and howls that greeted the appearance of the too well-known monopolist, and almost instantly the tempest was stilled. Then the old man stated his case clearly, calmly, and decisively. When he had done, Stanley refused to make any reply whatever, but his chairman got up and read out a statement showing with pitiless accuracy the sources of his colossal fortune, and ended by saying, without any attempt at oratorical flourish “This is the fortune that Mr. Raeburn’s son and heir had in the hollow of his hand. The amount of it proves better than any words could do how sincerely he hated the methods by which it has been accumulated, and why he left his father’s home to become, for all he knew then, an outcast and a beggar.” When the tempest of applause which followed had died away, Stanley Raeburn senior went up to his son and held out his hand, and said “You may be a dreamer or a fool, or both, but now I see that you are trying to ruin me as well as yourself. I’ve got to admit that you’re an honest man. Let the battle be to the strong, then! Those are the lines I have fought on all my life. Euin me if you like, and if you can. On the day that you’re President of the United States, I’ll forgive you. Will you shake on that, Stanley?” “I will,” he said, springing to his feet and taking his father’s hand. “I’m not going to ruin you, dad. I’m only going to try and get you to make money that will be cleaner, even if you don’t have quite so much of it than what you have now.” Then they shook hands. After this, the election was a foregone conclusion. The Young Tribune was, in fact, the only man possible. The Democratic and Eepublican candidates dropped out of the hopeless contest when Tammany and kindred institutions had bribed themselves almost into bankruptcy. The Silverite and Populist candidates shouted themselves speechless and disappeared after them, leaving as the Young Tribune’s only opponent the nominee of the Irish-American party, and as he, appropriately enough, was an ex-convict and dynamitard who had been all too leniently released from Her Majesty’s prison at Portland, he didn’t matter very much. As every one expected, the day of Stanley Raeburn’s inauguration as President of the United States was the beginning of troubles for the dollar- despots of America. Within the next few weeks, senator after senator and member after member of the House of Representatives was impeached on the ground of bribery and corruption, and either unseated or forced to resign; and then gradually, and for the first time since the Civil War, politics in America became possible for respectable people. Men who a year before would have considered a nomination as an affront to their personal honour came forward and were elected to the vacancies thus created in the midst of a popular quiet and decorum which boded very ill for the old order of things. The first act of the Raeburn Administration was the enactment of a new and far more stringent Anti-Trust Law, and this was immediately enforced with such ruthless and undiscriminating severity that the Trust-kings speedily found themselves confronted by a choice between fair trading and open markets and outlawry seasoned with confiscation. The President’s own father was, of course, among them, but he stuck to his bargain like a man, and the result of an interview on the night after the election was that Miss Lucy Carlyle was easily persuaded to make such change in her name and estate as enabled her to take her place as mistress of the White House. Most of the other millionaires, however, arrogant in their conviction that the dollar was still almighty, if you only had enough of it, determined not to yield their more than royal supremacy without a struggle, even if in that struggle they had to strike at the very foundations of the state itself. A committee was formed, which was in reality a Trust Defence League, with uncounted millions of capital behind it, and a campaign of wholesale bribery and secret violence was immediately inaugurated. “No instrument was too vile for use, and it was not very long before all the worst elements of the population became aware that good times for the tramp and the criminal, the loafer and the enemy of society, were at hand. The Irish scented revolution and a return to the old system of...