in him. "God help me!"

"Have you ever looked about you in this town and thought of the meaning
of its steady decay, moral and physical? God prospered the hard-working
men who founded it; but, instead of appreciating His blessings, they
regarded the wealth He gave them as their own; and they left it to their
children. And see how their sin is being visited upon the third and
fourth generations! Industry has been slowly paralyzing. The young
people, whose wealth gave them the best opportunities, are leading idle
lives, are full of vanity of class and caste, are steeped in the sins
that ever follow in the wake of idleness--the sins of selfishness and
indulgence. Instead of being workers, leading in the march upward,
instead of taking the position for which their superior opportunities
should have fitted them, they set an example of idleness and indolence.
They despise their ancestry of toil which should be their pride. They
pride themselves upon the parasitism which is their shame. And they set
before the young an example of contempt for work, of looking on it as a
curse and a disgrace."

"I have been thinking of these things lately," said Hiram.

"It is the curse of the world, this inherited wealth," cried Hargrave.
"Because of it humanity moves in circles instead of forward. The ground
gained by the toiling generations, is lost by the inheriting generations.
And this accursed inheritance tempts men ever to long for and hope for
that which they have not earned. God gave man a trial of the plan of
living in idleness upon that which he had not earned, and man fell. Then
God established the other plan, and through it man has been rising--but
rising slowly and with many a backward slip, because he has tried to
thwart the Divine plan with the system of inheritance. Fortunately, the
great mass of mankind has had nothing to leave to heirs, has had no hope
of inheritances. Thus, new leaders have ever been developed in place of
those destroyed by inherited prosperity. But, unfortunately, the law of
inheritance has been able to do its devil's work upon the best element in
every human society, upon those who had the most efficient and exemplary
parents, and so had the best opportunity to develop into men and women of
the highest efficiency. No wonder progress is slow, when the leaders of
each generation have to be developed from the bottom all over again, and
when the ideal of useful work is obscured by the false ideal of living