i8z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



possibly remove without opening a door to immeasurable evil 

 and wrong. Wealth itself is an inequality which renders pos- 

 sible the most lurid contrast in conditions of human happiness. 

 To see the brown-stone front with a gilded carriage at the door, 

 while a hovel with starving inmates is not many blocks away, 

 suggests a train of thought as pathetic as anything the world 

 has to show. But you can not abolish wealth without punishing 

 economy and thrift, and taking away the incentive to rise in the 

 world. You can only abolish it by abolishing civilization, to 

 which wealth and poverty are incidents ; and poverty you can 

 not abolish, either while civilization lasts or after it is destroyed. 

 Nothing was ever truer — as a declaration for the present, a de- 

 scription for the past, and a prophecy for the future — than the 

 statement, " The poor you have always with you." 



But schemes have been suggested for limiting wealth in one 

 way and another, either by extinguishing the owner's power to 

 bequeath it at all, or by reducing to a small allowance what may 

 go to his children, or what he may bequeath ; or by taxing each 

 additional ten thousand dollars acquired above the first ten thou- 

 sand at such a frightfully increasing ratio as to make the in- 

 centive to obtain money no longer attractive. This is a back- 

 hand way of trying to abolish poverty, or make it more tolerable 

 by making everybody poor compulsorily. You can not do a 

 more effective thing toward paralyzing energy and industry, 

 and offering a bounty to laziness and unthrift, than to make the 

 thrifty men of the world draw all the sloth and incompetence 

 along. This is taxing them not only to support poverty, but to 

 multiply it and make it prevail. 



I have been comparing here the evils that seem to have rela- 

 tion to wealth with those which seem to some to grow out of the 

 " unearned increment," But if it is a fact that a hovel of starv- 

 ing inmates can be seen not far from the palace of a man of 

 wealth, is it not even a more closely related fact that the rise of 

 the palace, and the man who lives in it, has directly helped thou- 

 sands of honest toilers, and continues to help such, whether the 

 man who is wealthy wishes to help them or not ? But we do not 

 notice, on account of this hovel, the thousands of well-to-do 

 workers all over the land who have drawn tribute for years 

 from this wealthy man's multiplied wants and luxuries, and who 

 live plainly and comfortably from the fact that he and others 

 like him live luxuriously. A society where wealth exists has 

 evils, because evil is inevitable ; but to cripple or destroy wealth 

 would bring a deluge of disasters which no man, if he could 

 foresee them fully, would be able to avert. I have been suj)pos- 

 ing what I do not believe, that the " unearned increment " in- 

 volves some element of wrong. In continuing the supposition, I 



