kinds of wealth to be owned and transferred by these expedients to successors. It is not likely that men of the present day will be prepared to admit that the perpetuity of James Watts' claim to the steam-engine, or Elias Howe's right to the sewing machine, appearing in the person of their descendants or legatees, would be exactly an equitable method of adjusting human rights, so it may be that eventually they will recognize the truth that no form of human privilege should have more than a temporary existence, and that all rights should terminate at death. Patents and copyrights are now issued for the period of an average lifetime, or less, and are not only equitable, but desirable in their economic effects, while if they were established as perpetuities, they would become unbearable tyranny.

The curse of perpetuity hangs over all governmental institutions, and in this way the dead past is forever binding the present. To illustrate this idea, we have the Constitution of the United States. It was an agreement made between the people of thirteen little colonies existing more than one hundred years ago on the eastern coast of this country, then about one-tenth of its present size in the area inhabited and containing a population of about three millions. Those people wrangled with one another over the exact nature of their political agreement, and were actuated far more by selfish desires in formulating the famous document than by the patriotism usually ascribed to them. When they had completed that patchwork of concessions and compromises, they pronounced their work holy and sent it down to posterity with a provision embodied within it that its binding force could only be changed by a vote of two-thirds the representation in Congress and ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. To-day there are seventy millions or more of people living under that Constitution,

yet they cannot legally change it to conform to their desires except by practical unanimity. They are tied politically and socially (so far as tying can really be accomplished by such methods) by the absurd idea of their predecessors, that they could make among themselves a bargain for all time which would express not only their own desires, but the desires of their posterity. The result of this original fallacy is now displayed by the absurd condition of the country in attempting the imposition of an income tax. The people as represented in Congress declared that they wanted such a tax. The Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, declared that under their Constitution the people could not levy such a tax, and the decision of one man controls the course of seventy millions of people in regard to property involving many millions of dollars. Meanwhile the people are discontented, but they cannot change their Constitution nor levy income taxes, if they really desire that form of taxation, without the tedious process of altering the organic law bequeathed to them, a change which involves the control of three-quarters of the states. Meanwhile, suppose that discontent progresses till a majority of the people, or even a large minority, becomes dissatisfied to the extent of revolt. The result, traceable directly to the perpetuity embodied in a "paper constitution," which never did and never will bind men in any country if they find themselves wronged, may be found in the horrors of civil war. The people of the United States need to amend their constitution by providing that all future amendments may be adopted or rejected by a direct vote of the people and submitted by a majority vote of Congress. The author of this book is not an advocate of income taxes, but the people must govern themselves and not be governed by their ancestors. Right or wrong, the majority of the people in any country will rule, and it is better

If the people

that they rule peaceably than by violence. desire income taxes or any other form of legislation, it is suicidal folly to repress or obstruct the expression of the popular will by means of the ancient dicta of the Constitution, for that course means, in the end, armed revolution.

CHAPTER XVII.

LOOKING ON BOTH SIDES.

Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and show contrivance; the Ant lays up an accumulation of capital, and has, for ought I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is no soul in Man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack and spinning seasand; then, I say, Man is but an animal, a more cunning kind of brute; he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish, he ought to admit it, I think;—and also straightway universally to kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner, at least, end, and wave these brute-worlds his dignified farewell!-THOMAS Carlyle.

It is but fair, in treating of the social troubles and the principles of heredity as applied to wealth, to consider the objections that are likely to be urged against the changes that have been advocated in this volume. Society has nothing to gain from blind and bitter partisans, no matter what position they occupy in the discussions now going on in every great nation. We do not need to engender bitter animosities, but we do need to consider what seems right and what wrong in our new social relations, and after such consideration to firmly demand what appears to be the best for permanent good, for otherwise society will inevitably become wrecked and individual welfare endangered in the general ruin. The man who, in periods like the present, maintains a purely selfish view of his own individual existence, to the extent

of refusing to acknowledge any duty to his fellow-creatures, is wise only in his own conceit; for the penalty of greed and tyranny must, sooner or later, be completely paid. All of us need to look on both sides of the shield.

The most complete objection that is urged against interference with successions or any other attempt to lessen centralization in wealth comes from the man who contends that centralization is in itself a desirable thing and not the evil that popular sentiment imagines it to be. Men who hold this theory are intelligent and usually have an accurate knowledge of recent economic history, whereby they are able to show the progress of our vast industries from their small beginnings. They can show how the immense wealth aggregated in a single great industrial establishment has vastly cheapened production, out of which society receives in some form the resulting benefits of economy. They prove conclusively that a great railroad system is cheaper in operation than many small lines under separate ownership, and they show the gain to society in many dollars and cents. They prove to any candid man familiar with business methods that the great trusts and syndicates which now excite the wrath of the more superficial observers by their tremendous aggregation of business, are not bleeding the pockets of the people, but are really cheapening production and obtaining their power in that way by driving out weaker and consequently less desirable, because less productive, competition. Even the Standard Oil Company, from the economical view of these advocates of wealth centralization, is a corporation comprising industrial angels in the form of human beings. These gains in economy are admitted. Some notorious rascality has been connected with the formation of trusts, but the greed and tyranny therein displayed are not greater, except for the magnitude of the financial operations, than thousands of men

unheard of display in minor business transactions of everyday life. There is no difference between the principles that make the trust and the principles that govern the transactions of a peanut-stand at the street corner, the only distinction being in the extent of the business transacted. It is true that all this aggregation of capital has cheapened production, increased wages, shortened the hours of labor, and enabled laborers who call themselves paupers now, to live better than princes could five hundred years ago.

Why, then, do you oppose wealth concentration? the reader will inquire. Simply because mere wealth is not all of life, and because some of man's aspirations are higher and nobler than a perpetual pursuit of the almighty dollar. If the accumulation of social wealth be all that men desire, their existing social system is a success; for the vast productive effort of modern society is storing up every year an unconsumed surplus, from which results, in the industrial depression, that harvest of leisure which is the only reward that man can ever gain from increased productive ability, even if he succeeds in combining the chemical elements directly into food, or in converting the wave-power of the ocean into electrical energy, or in immediately converting beds of stone into blocks of bread and cheese. At the end of every existence the individual has used a certain amount of food and clothing, and enjoyed or not enjoyed a certain period of cessation from productive effort. That result sums his economical existence. In the period of industrial depression, the rich obtain this cessation from productive effort in the form of stagnated business among the active, and a frivolous leisure in "society" among the idle; while the poor obtain it in Coxey armies, and in searching the country for work that does not need to be done.

The otherwise clear reasoners who admire the existing