ce what he is or what he does so only that he performs
his accumulating office.

The one essential fact is that he assembles within his grasp the savings
of Society, prevents their dissipation in personal indulgence, applies
them to beneficial use, and enables the laborer to produce under the
direction of the Captain of Industry by means of the devices of the
inventor applied to the formulas of the scientist what is needful for
the welfare of mankind--and to live while he is doing it. It is the
accumulating man impelled by his instinct, or if you please his lust,
for wealth and power who makes it possible for poor men to live in any
great number. If he happens also to be a Captain of Industry, which
usually he is not, it is merely one middleman cut out. His essential
function is that of the money-grabber. It is by his exercise of that
function that most of us exist.

The third count in the indictment of Socialism is that by obliterating
the Capitalist, accumulating by interest, profit, rent, and the
exploitation of Nature for private gain, it would make life impossible
to half the population of the world and not worth living to the fittest
who should manage to survive.

I trust I make myself understood for there is more and worse to come.

This discussion is necessarily didactic and assertive for it is
impossible to prove or disprove any of these postulates. It is for that
reason, and the lack of time that I cite no instances. They would
be merely illustrative and not probative, for the human intellect is
unequal to any adequate inductive study of the subject, and human life
is too short to classify, master and digest the data even if they could
be assembled. All that can be done is to state conclusions reached
upon such observation and experience as is to each of us available
and commend them to the judgment of others upon their observation and
experience. Whatever can be proved at all can be reduced to a syllogism
but agreement upon premises is in this case impossible.

But some things we do know and among them is the awful fact that man is
powerless before Nature which deals with man precisely as it deals with
other forms of life. Man can dodge Nature as the scale insect cannot,
but higher forms of life can, and man the most effectively of all. But
in the end she will get every one of us. Those will live happiest and
longest who best know how to work with Nature and not against her. And
individualism and not col