ws by what it feeds on and becomes
insatiable.

It is an unsound appetite, for the increase of wealth already beyond all
human wants, adds nothing to a man's comforts or happiness--it adds only
to his cares, which it increases, to his selfishness, which it
intensifies, and to his power of indulging arrogance and ostentation. It
impairs his sympathy with his fellowman, and inflames his egotism.

The superfluous mass of wealth serves only to supply an overruling power
destructive to the social rights of others, and a haughty ostentation
that humiliates fellow-citizens. It is, therefore, a hostile and
dangerous element in a republic, although a few may hold great wealth
and resist its insidious influence.

Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to man and
injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature that the fittest
shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not the fittest, for through
the centuries they do not survive. The extremely wealthy are dying out,
for they do not have children enough to maintain their numbers. It is
our duty so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of
possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. They are
twin evils; extreme wealth indicates extreme poverty, as mountains
indicate valleys. Wealth, corruption, and despotism, are grouped
together in history, as liberty has been grouped with equality,
simplicity, hardihood, the mountain and the wilderness.

Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to reform, its method
of opposition being corruption, and these characteristics are
intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth everywhere gives power to
monopolize the face of the earth, and thus establish a hereditary
nobility; for the landlords of millions of acres are the most
substantial and formidable lords that society knows, and nowhere in the
world have there been greater opportunities to establish such an
aristocracy, which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of
Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one thousand dollars
per capita, represents not the increased wealth of the masses but the
enormous accumulations of a few. Our gain of about two thousand millions
annually, does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the
republic? If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it is
corpulence instead of strength.

Our social system has the elements of decay already as conspicuous as in
the tuberculous pa