ld take the pains to learn of the cases he treats for half his
fee, for a nominal sum, or for nothing; would candidly reckon his normal
fee against the long years of college, medical school and hospital, and
against the service itself; would then deduct the actual expenses of the
day, as represented by apparatus, motor, or horse service--I can only say
that if such an investigator could in any way conceive that physician as a
spoliator, because he earned twice as much as a master brick-layer or five
times as much as a ditch digger--if, I say, before the actual fact, our
Socialist investigator in any way grudges that day's earnings, his mental
and emotional confusion is beyond ordinary remedy. And such a physician's
earnings are merely typical of those of an entire class of devoted
professional men.

We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in the
country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most laborious means,
and accumulated and transmitted by self-sacrificing thrift. A rich person
in nine cases out of ten is merely a capable, careful, saving person,
often, too, a person who conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of
personal honor and a high standard of social obligation. We are too much
dazzled by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by
steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who plays
equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the sensational
clergyman who has made full coinage of his charlatanism. All these types
exist, and all are highly exceptional. Most rich persons are
self-respecting, have given ample value received for their wealth, and
have less reason to apologize for it than most poor folks have to
apologize for their poverty.

Furthermore: for the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human
virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently
remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a
bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to
make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities makes for charm
and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities produces an enormous
amount of human waste among the wage earners and the aristocrats
impartially. The great body of self-controlled, that is of reasonably
socialized people, must be sought between these two extremes. In short the
building up of ideals of discipline and of habits o