sitions:

(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do,
because the Asiatic earns little, the American much--a condition due
to the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples his
productive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools and
knowledge, machinery and education. The Oriental does not.

(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; the fact that
your labor earns two, three, or ten times what you would get for it if
you had been born in Asia; this is due in the main, not to your
personal merit, but to your racial inheritance, to the fact that you
were born among a people who have developed an industrial order, have
provided education and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner
that your services to society are worth several times as much as would
be the case if you were in the Orient, where education has never
reached the common people.

Pity--may God pity!--the man who fancies he owes nothing to the
school, who pays his tax for education grudgingly as if it were a
charity--as if he had only himself to thank for the property on which
the government levies a pitiable mill or so for the advancement and
diffusion of knowledge among mankind. Pity him if he has not
considered; pity him the more if, having considered, he is small
enough of soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what
education has brought us from all its past, but for what it has
wrought through the invention of better tools and the better
management (through increased knowledge) of all the powers with which
men labor, our close-fisted, short-sighted {185} taxpayer would
himself be living in a shelter of brush, shooting game with a bow and
arrow, cultivating corn with a crooked stick! Most of what he has he
owes to his racial heritage; it is only because other men prosper that
he prospers. And yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing
for the Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he
would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress.

"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of possible
redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: Whatever
prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what previous generations have
done for increasing man's efficiency by means of knowledge and tools;
your first duty to your fellows is to help forward the same agencies
for human uplift in the future. And while this is the first duty of
the individu