CONCLUSION. 419 



needs ; but the only means to be rich is to so 

 train your mind and capacities as to be able to 

 compel other men slaves, serfs or wage-earners 

 to make these riches for you. You have no 

 choice. Either you must stand in the ranks of 

 the peasants and the artisans who, whatsoever 

 economists and moralists may promise them in 

 the future, are now periodically doomed to 

 starve after each bad crop or during their strikes, 

 and to be shot down by their own sons the 

 moment they lose patience. Or you must train 

 your faculties so as to be a military commander 

 of the masses, or to be accepted as one of the 

 wheels of the governing machinery of the State, 

 or to become a manager of men in commerce or 

 industry." For many centuries there was no 

 other choice, and men followed that advice, 

 without finding in it happiness, either for them- 

 selves and their own children, or for those whom 

 they pretended to preserve from worse mis- 

 fortunes. 



But modern knowledge has another issue to 

 offer to thinking men. It tells them that in 

 order to be rich they need not take the bread 

 from the mouths of others ; but that the more 

 rational outcome would be a society in which 

 men, with the work of their own hands and in- 

 telligence, and by the aid of the machinery 

 already invented and to be invented, should 



