MONEY FALLACIES. 
383 
and ventilated by men who make a business of finding 
wrongs and correcting them on paper. Let us inquire into 
this grave charge in quest of the real guilt of social customs 
and statute law. 
In what does the wealth of the rich men of the world 
consist? Is it money? No. Shall it be warehouses filled 
with merchandise ? Who eats it, drinks it, wears it ? Who 
builds or adorns his house with it ? Shall it be mills and 
factories ? For whose uses are the wheels turned, the iron 
heated and shaped, the spindles whirled, the fabric woven ? 
Shall it be blocks of city real estate built up with houses ? 
Who dwell in them and find in them the comforts of home 
and the family fireside ? Shall it be stocks and bonds ? 
These are but the evidences of ownership, and the real 
things owned are undivided portions of railways. For 
whose benefit are the trains run, whose goods are trans¬ 
ported, who are the passengers carried swiftly on their jour¬ 
neys ? It appears, then, that while the rich man owns the 
wealth, the community is using it. The ownership is his, 
but the usufruct is ours. But if the final use of all this 
wealth is by the community what matters it who owns it, 
whether one man or a million? Whoever owns it is under 
bonds for all he owns to apply it to the most urgent de¬ 
mands of society. Failing to do this, he first loses his profits 
and then his principal. The economic law is merciless and 
accepts no excuse. He who owns capital, I say, must apply 
it to such uses as society demands or it will be taken from 
him. Good intentions or evil intentions are nothing to the 
purpose. Only the result is weighed in the balance. The 
economic law encompasses equally the evil and the good, 
the just and the unjust, and its mesh is fine enough to catch 
all the financial minnows and strong enough to hold all the 
financial whales. So long as a man comes honestly by his 
wealth, there is no more injustice or injury to society than 
there is in the fact that the Treasurer of the United States 
is the custodian of tens or hundreds of millions of public 
money. Even when dishonestly acquired, the moral sense 
48—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 11. 
