on, that a man may well
hesitate before he decides it for himself; he may well fear that he sets
too high a valuation on his own endeavours after good; he may well
condescend upon a humbler duty, where others than himself shall judge
the service and proportion the wage.

And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born. They
can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters on
parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For I suppose
that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war and
invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design than
to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach
of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and defended with
so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two or three
millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and position. It
is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all these
generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some well-being, for
themselves and their descendants; that if they supported law and order,
it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in
the present, they must have had some designs upon the future. Now a
great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man's wisdom and mankind's
forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has been
suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a
consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to
activity and honour, that with all this power of service he should not
prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should return in
benefits upon the race. If he had twenty, or thirty, or a hundred
thousand at his banker's, or if all Yorkshire or all California were his
to manage or to sell, he would still be morally penniless, and have the
world to begin like Whittington, until he had found some way of serving
mankind. His wage is physically in his own hand; but, in honour, that
wage must still be earned. He is only steward on parole of what is
called his fortune. He must honourably perform his stewardship. He must
estimate his own services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for
that will be one among his functions. And while he will then be free to
spend that salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the
rest of his fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind;
it is not his, because he has n