ust affect the views of
those who would attack what are called the inordinate fortunes. I hold no
brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In many cases I believe his
wealth is as personal, assimilated and legitimate as is the average
moderate fortune. In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is
in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent
unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes,
I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general
programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the
common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would
reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent
enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which
are founded and supported by great wealth. In our time The Rockefeller
Institute will have stamped out that slow plague of the south, the hook
worm. To the obvious retort that the government ought to do this sort of
thing, the reply is equally obvious, that historically governments have
not done this sort of thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown
the way. Our prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich
in particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the socialist
indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires a statute of
limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more trouble than the
possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts, interest, and grudges cannot be
indefinitely accumulated and extended. It is the entire disregard of this
simple and generally admitted principle that has marred the socialist
propaganda from the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred
between classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary
legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may be
clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman see clearly
what his actual grievance and expectancy of redress are in his own day and
time.

With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very rich will
have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire's evident utility as the milch
cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even of the anti-capitalistic
stamp, to waver at the point where the cow threatens to dry up from
over-milking. If the case, then, for utterly despoiling the harmful rich,
is by no means clear, the prospect for the harmless rich may