Our Poorer Brother 237 



and vacuous lives, that all right-minded men must 

 look upon them with angry contempt; but, on the 

 whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens than 

 the thriftless ; and the worst capitalist can not harm 

 laboring men as they are harmed by demagogues. 

 As the people of a State grow more and more intelli- 

 gent the State itself may be able to play a larger and 

 larger part in the life of the community, while at 

 the same time individual effort may be given freer 

 and less restricted movement along certain lines; 

 but it is utterly unsafe to give the State more than 

 the minimum of power just so long as it contains 

 masses of men who can be moved by the pleas and 

 denunciations of the average Socialist leader of to- 

 day. There may be better schemes of taxation than 

 those at present employed ; it may be wise to devise 

 inheritance taxes, and to impose regulations on the 

 kinds of business which can be carried on only under 

 the especial protection of the State ; and where there 

 is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, and in this 

 country generally has been, promptly done away 

 with; but the first lesson to teach the poor man is 

 that, as a whole, the wealth in the community is dis- 

 tinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in the 

 long run because other men are well off; and that 

 the surest way to destroy what measure of prosper- 

 ity he may have is to paralyze industry and the well- 

 being of those men who have achieved success. 



I am not an empiricist; I would no more deny 

 that sometimes human affairs can be much bettered 

 by legislation than I would affirm that they can al- 



