astrous condition of the very rich and the very poor, with aristocracy and pauperism, and where men who cannot find an opportunity to work for mere bread view with the murderous instincts of the savage heart of destitution the luxury of another man who never in his life did an honest day's work in productive effort of any kind.

The succession of generations and the manner in which property rights are transferred are the principal causes which breed the evil. Nearly every man whose selfish interests do not distort his judgment will acknowledge the injustice of the result of transmitted fortunes, but few, it is believed, have noted the equal injustice of the cause, for the nature of inheritance has not frequently been analyzed. It can hardly be disputed that under any possible form of government based on the competitive. system which men can establish (excepting the limitation or prohibition of wealth accumulation, a course really destructive of free competition), if inheritance be permitted in the form that now exists, great fortunes involving a monopoly of earth will inevitably ensue; the very rich and the very poor will be brought into fierce opposition long before the density of population compels a merely animal struggle for existence; and the government will go down under internecine strife unless temporizing measures can allay the ill-feeling of the disinherited.

There is no escape from this result. This being the status of our wealth problem, what can we do? One thing ought to be evident: Any governmental principle that we adopt must be approximately just in order to secure a permanent prosperity or genuine progress. Public good cannot arise from public wrong at its foundation. Evil seeds will produce evil fruit. If the converse of this proposition be true, that evil fruits are developed from evil seeds, no additional argument should be necessary to convince an unprejudiced reader that he will discover

something wrong in the law of successions, for the evil fruits are to be found on every hand.

After deliberate thought, the writer is convinced that the system of bequest and inheritance that prevails in every civilized country is radically unjust and productive of tyranny, and that it develops the principal conditions of which the moral sense of society now complains.

No person in whom there exists any genuine love of fair play can compare the condition of a boy who inherits a fortune of one hundred millions of dollars with the condition of a thousand other children taken at random from the people surrounding him, remembering that as children they have not produced what their ancestors have accumulated, be it much or little, and remembering that if they compete with one another for success in life they should justly have an approach to equal opportunities at the start, and then say that such a condition and such strife are just; that all of those children really have fair opportunities, considering life as a contest; that every child is in possession of his natural rights; and that all exist as God or nature intended that they should exist. We all know there is unfairness in any contest of that kind. We would not permit our horses to run in a race where one possessed all the advantage of position at the start. Even boys playing a game of ball or marbles would rebel and become "anarchists under conditions so grossly unjust.

We will commence our investigations by inquiring in the first place, what natural right any man has to become an heir. Does the son or other descendant of a wealthy ancestor, or does any other survivor, possess any natural or just claim to the property of the decedent to the exclusion of his fellow-creatures? Society has at various times in different countries granted a legal right-sometimes absolute, sometimes secondary, to the legal right of

the ancestor to bestow his wealth upon certain persons recognized as heirs and preferred as successors; but, after discarding all considerations of labor and reward, it can be conclusively denied that any person has a natural or just claim upon society for this preference. The only just claim that any man can have upon property is from what we call production, which is only transformation by the application of labor; for there is never any absolute production in the sense of bringing something into existence that did not exist before. A man can make a plow, but he cannot make the chemical elements that enter into the material which composes it, so his production is only a transformation.

Hence it can be proved that unless any person has produced or assisted to produce the fortune which he expects to inherit, he has no better right to it, in a moral sense, than any other survivor, for in attempting to establish justice in society, we cannot permit the mere question of consanguinity to affect our verdict.

My father may have been a murderer, but society does not attach blame to me on account of his acts; therefore, if my father happens to have accumulated a million of dollars, why should society permit me to claim the credit and take the entire amount, regardless of my own efforts and success, on account of the same kind of relationship?

When man enters this world, by his mere presence upon the planet, if any attempt is to be made at equitable government, he justly acquires the natural right to freely use earth in all its multiplicity of forms, observing and admitting similar rights in every other man. He has an equal right with all others to the use of natural wealth surrounding him, and a better right than all others to that definite portion of the earth to which his labor has been applied. If we except the mere exchanges of property rights, I can conceive of no just method by which any man can estab

lish a special claim to what he has not produced by his own efforts. I do not understand wherein any person can establish a just claim to succeed to the property of another person by inheritance, when his own efforts have not produced the wealth.

No matter what position may be taken concerning the justice or expediency involved in the accumulation of huge fortunes by monopolies and speculation; no matter if we concede that gambling is fair among gamblers, and the successful gambler entitled to what he wins; no matter if we concede that every great fortune is accumulated justly, still it must be denied that the son of another man who has produced or accumulated wealth by the fairest methods, has any just claim upon that wealth, unless his own efforts have entered into the production of it; for any other theory is an acknowledgment that certain men should reap where they have not sown, should expect a substantial reward from idleness and social worthlessness, and should require society to set them up as something better than ordinary mortals, who must work before they eat.

By long-established custom the heir apparent imagines that he possesses some natural claim upon the property of his ancestor, and often feels aggrieved, as though he were treated unjustly, when the dying man disinherits him at the final moment, even if he has in no way aided in producing the fortune he desires. The disappointed descendant is right in feeling injustice, but the injustice that really exists is not the imaginary injustice that he thinks he feels.

As one of the great social group remaining after his ancestor's death, he is entitled to his equal share of the specialized property that was left behind; but otherwise the disinherited offspring expecting the reward of another man's exertions is not defrauded of anything whatever

that could be or ought to be his by the inexorable decrees of justice, for he is only one of the many who should inherit the earth as other men lose the power to use it by the decrees of death. No man has any natural right or equitable ground for claiming anything that he has not produced, beyond the equal right that is possessed `by every other man to occupy and use earth and its products. No man can justly establish an exclusive claim to an inheritance, and every edict of society providing for special inheritance is a wrong perpetrated upon the body of the people.

Where the will of the state is permitted to operate in the case of distant relatives, who have had no intimate personal association with the decedent, and who receive a large fortune without having known the owner, this lack of equity becomes very apparent.

The following account of a fortune inherited in this way recently appeared in the newspapers of California:

"More like a romance reads a narrative of real life, in which the parties interested are Contra Costa and Alameda County people. Many years ago one Dan O'Keefe of County Cork, Ireland, took passage on a man-of-war bound for the East Indies. The lad was about 16 or 18 years of age, and was seized with a love of adventure and a desire to amass a fortune. He evidently accomplished both, for, unknown to his family during life, it turned out that at his death he left a fortune of five million sovereigns, that for the last eight years has been seeking for heirs. As near as can be ascertained with regard to this young man's career, the fortune had been accumulated through trading in diamonds and opium.

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English lawyers in London, England, have been searching the world over for the relatives of this dead millionaire, and letters finally reached the O'Keefe family of Contra Costa County. Four of the brothers-John, Dennis, Dan, and Jerry-reside in Alameda County, while a sister, Mrs. P. Roche, lives near our town of Concord, in Contra Costa County. So far they have proved themselves the