a table where some hungry children are being fed, and
reach his arm over their heads and take their bread from them.

6. But you are not the least indignant, if, when a man has stoutness of
thought and swiftness of capacity, and, instead of being long-armed only,
has the much greater gift of being long-headed--you think it perfectly
just that he should use his intellect to take the bread out of the mouths
of all the other men in the town who are in the same trade with him; or
use his breadth and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the commerce
of the country into one great cobweb, of which he is himself the central
spider, making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and
commanding every avenue with the facets of his eyes. You see no injustice
in this.

7. But there is injustice; and, let us trust, one of which honorable men
will at no very distant period disdain to be guilty. In some degree,
however, it is indeed not unjust; in some degree it is necessary and
intended. It is assuredly just that idleness should be surpassed by
energy; that the widest influence should be possessed by those who are
best able to wield it; and that a wise man at the end of his career,
should be better off than a fool. But for that reason, is the fool to be
wretched, utterly crashed down, and left in all the suffering which his
conduct and capacity naturally inflict? Not so.

8. What do you suppose fools were made for? That you might tread upon
them, and starve them, and get the better of them in every possible way?
By no means. They were made that wise people might take care of them. That
is the true and plain fact concerning the relations of every strong and
wise man to the world about him. He has his strength given him, not that
he may crush the weak, but that he may support and guide them. In his own
household he is to be the guide and the support of his children; out of
his household he is still to be the father, that is, the guide and
support, of the weak and the poor; not merely of the meritoriously weak
and the innocently poor, but of the guilty and punishably poor; of the men
who ought to have known better--of the poor who ought to be ashamed of
themselves.

9. It is nothing to give pension and cottage to the widow who has lost her
son; it is nothing to give food and medicine to the workman who has broken
his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in sickness. But it is something to
use your time and strength in war