When we say that things should be divided equally we mean that every man should have a chance. Men like Schwab and Carnegie have risen from poor young men to wealth; but they are the extraordinary young men. The ordinary young man is not able to rise above his birth, and the extraordinary young man is one in a million.

I don't mean that all the money in the country should be cut up into equal parts. What I mean is that the people should own in common all the means of production, the sources of wealth, and divide the results. The talk of economical equality is no more ridiculous now than was the talk of social equality years ago.

Suppose Alfred G. Vanderbilt has five million dollars invested in his railroads. Say there are twenty-five thousand employees. Out of his investment he receives, say, five per cent, which is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. He doesn't turn a wheel, he doesn't move a locomotive, he doesn't do a thing for the railroad. He simply owns it. He doesn't contribute toward making the road safe. Those men earn so much money for him. Suppose he should give them what they earn, instead of taking it himself?

My idea is to have things equally divided so that when a man dies his children shall not inherit wealth.

Heretofore the poor man has had the world's sympathy as the under dog. Now he is becoming supercanine and the rich man subcanine. Does the rich man not give? He is stingy. Does he give? He is a briber—passes from negative to positive crime.

If he would get rid of superfluous wealth his only chance is to buy edifices and burn them down uninsured. Even then he might be arrested for arson and accused of maliciously overworking the poor firemen; or hygienists would say he was dirtying the air with smoke, and thus murdering those compelled to breathe it.

Instead of settlements for the neglected poor—such institutions as grew up in East London after Sir Walter Besant wrote "All Sorts and Conditions of Men"—there should be settlements for the neglected rich.

As things are now they have no chance—their best is necessarily a worst. Victims of society, equally condemned whether they do or don't do, no option seems open but to journey to the extreme edge of space and jump off into nothingness.

A favorite doctrine of Calvinistic New England was that a man was not saved unless entirely and absolutely willing to be damned for the glory of God; with a similar inexorable logic our new moralists have established the doctrine of unescapable taint—that if a man have and keep he is stewed in iniquity; that if he does not keep, adding would-be bribery to his other sins, he scatters his own corruption among the innocent.

Ground between upper and nether stones, fenced in all directions, the life of the rich is necessarily an ethical tragedy. Whatever he does or doesn't do, the rich man is a traitor to the kingdom, a puller down of the temple.

It is obvious that the only thing feasible is to abolish wealth and go back to the tree-climbing days, to that period of primitive apehood when each plucked his own cocoanut and had no thought of ownership, tainted or untainted.

Fortunes which sometimes look excessive may be the result of rendering great services to the community. If a man by intense mental application or natural aptitude can introduce important economies into railroad management, he is worthy of a large salary. The salary would not in any case absorb the entire saving made to the stockholders of the railroad and to the public by the reforms introduced.

In some cases this claim of the inventor is compensated by the royalties paid under the patent law; and there are many services rendered in the matter of organization which are not patentable, but afford as striking benefits as patents. Among these, for instance, may be suggested the reduction in the cost of the manufacture of steel by Mr. Carnegie and those associated with him in the upbuilding of the industries now combined in the Steel Corporation.

From such services have come many of our great fortunes. If their possessors receive what amounts to a commission on the services they rendered, it is only a small part of the benefit they have conferred on the community.

Take away the opportunity for winning either money or distinction by rendering such services, and few men, as human nature is constituted, would render them.

It is right that competition between men should be brought within constantly narrower and narrower rules of justice. This is possible without taking away the initiative which makes men do things, and seems to me the direction in which, in spite of obstacles, humanity is tending.

We do not believe that there is so formidable a jealousy and hatred of wealth, in itself, as is frequently alleged to exist, and to be growing. The sting lies in wealth unjustly acquired. It is ill-gotten gain, flaunting itself, that is the great breeder of socialism.