176 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



conclusion, that the idea prevails that it is only the misuse of 

 wealth that produces evil results. But a little consideration 

 will show us that it is the inheritance of wealth that is wrong 

 in itself, and that it necessarily produces evil. For if it is right, 

 it implies that inequality of opportunity is right, and that 

 "the law of social justice " as laid down by Herbert Spencer 

 is not a just law. It implies that it is right for one set of 

 individuals, thousands or millions in number, to be able to 

 pass their whole lives without contributing anything to the 

 well-being of the community of which they form a part, but 

 on the contrary keeping hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of 

 their fellow men and women wholly engaged in ministering 

 to their wants, their luxuries, and their amusements. Taken 

 as a whole, the people who thus live are no better in their 

 nature — physical, moral, or intellectual — than other thousands 

 who, having received no such inheritance of accumulated 

 wealth, spend their whole lives in labour, often under ex- 

 hausting, unhealthy, and life-shortening conditions, to pro- 

 duce the luxuries and enjoyments of others, but of which 

 they themselves rarely or more often never partake. Even 

 leaving out of consideration the absolute vices due to wealth 

 on the one hand and to poverty on the other, and supposing 

 both classes to pass fairly moral lives, who can doubt that 

 both are injured morally, and that both are actually, though 

 often unconsciously, the causes of ever-widening spheres of 

 demoralization around them ? If there is one set of people 

 who are tempted by their necessities to prey upon the rich, 

 there is a perhaps more extensive class who are in the same 

 way driven to prey upon the poor. And it is the very 

 system that produces and encourages these terrible in- 

 equalities that has also led to the almost incredible result, 

 that the ever-increasing power of man over the forces of 

 nature, especially during the last hundred years, while 

 rendering easily possible the production of all the necessaries, 

 comforts, enjoyments, and wholesome luxuries of life for 

 every individual, have yet, as John Stuart Mill declared, 

 " not diminished the toil of any worker," but even, as there is 

 ample evidence to prove, has greatly increased the total mass 



