Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 377, 27 January 1892 — Property Qualification. [ARTICLE]

Property Qualification.

Somewhere about eighteen and a half centuries ago a great reform er and philosopher arose in Syria and floored the human race with the statement that a man with proparty was not necessarily any better than a man without. In fact, he distinctly intimated that the

probabilities tended the other way, and throughout his whole career all his blessings and his promises were for the poor, and all his anawere directed against the rich. He has now some 350000000 professed followers and except possibly some two or three dozen, mostly in jail they are nearly all bogus. For the Christian world still sticks to the great worldly axiom that property is the one criterion of merit and never under any possible combination of circumstances does it act up to its alleged spiritual creed. There is no real democracy in any yet explored region of the earth - - what is called a democracy onyl deserves the name because it is a shade more democratic than an aristocracy. There is no Church which does not snuffle fifty-two times per annual about the blessings of being poor and yet almost every one of them will holler for the police if an unshod vagrant - the living symbol of the blessed state of poverty, appears within its doors. There is no modern social reformer who will not admit that all men were born equal and if there is one who will get up to the creed in its entirety his name is not known and his address is unavailable. The worship of property in some shape or other has grown with a thousand centuries of grovel until it has be- come an instict or a disease. Possibly it is an incurable complaint, and if so the Christian faith is a failure and an impossibility and had better he given up. The stock arguement of the conservative in favor of plural voting is that it should be the reward of thrift. He always whoops for this one particular virtue, but he never ventures to desert definitely that it is greater than any other virtue. Thrift, after all, is onlyl the habit of accumulating coin, and is nerely another branch of the great virtue by which a monkey accurmulates nutes. it is the science of weating a dirty shirt, and thus enconomising on the wash bill the noble trait of sleeping, fourtheen in a room and keeping down the rent - the shining virtue of working and walloping a weary bony horse to death and handing out the profits of the animals misery on good "security."

If the typical conservative were asked whether it was a better and a grander thing to be a common money grubber and go to sheol - the conservative is a bug on sheol. or to be a Christian of the apoatolic pattern and finally go to heaven. he would answer unanimously and at once that the latter was far preferable. but he would suggest that he would enjoy his celes tial wings and his halo with more complete joy if he could be sure that the land and bricks and mor tar which he had left behind him would still confer plural representation on his heir. This shows with sufficient distinctness that his christianity is a lie and that he might as well be a budhist of the most pronounced type. If he were asked whether it was better to have the free-hold of a mud hovel or to be a patriot of the order of Bruce or Hugo or Garibaldi or Lincoln. he would undoubtedly whoop for the patriot but he never sug gested that the man who has serv-

ed his country should have extra voting power. and that the gilded animal who never served anybody save himself should not. This demonstrates that his patriotism is also a lie of the choicest description. And he never by any chances moves that the man of genius or learning, underpaid school teachers or the brief scarce lawyers, should by renseu of their education have an extra share of political power; the only indiviual he takes an interest in is the one who has scrapped money together, no matter how he got it. and this proves that the Toey is a lie altogether. from his soul of his boots and that the only thing he values in all the earth is