obbery, or industry. _He has left it;
he is done with it; he is dead in fact and ought to be dead in law!_
The law has no jurisdiction over him now, and he has no possible
interest in what is done, nor any power to rectify his mistakes. To
perpetuate his fictitious personality, and make the opinions which he
has left in writing an authority like the acts of a living man, is a
tremendous stretch of the imagination, much like the old superstitions
which made a law by the preface "thus saith the Lord."

I know the claim will be made that the wealth which the millionnaires
could not carry away was truly theirs, and therefore that while they
lived they had a right to dispose of it. But I deny it. In the highest
sense of justice, _it was not theirs_, and even if it was, it was
justly forfeited by their treason to humanity; for I hold that neither
genius nor the business capacity that produces wealth ever releases a
man from his obligations to society. In time of war to defend the city
or State, we take every man's property, so far as needed, and require
him, in addition, to offer his life in battle to protect the
community; and surely in the grand battle which every republic has to
meet against its foes,--on the one hand oligarchy and despotism, and
on the other social disorder and convulsions between capital and
impoverished labor,--in this battle, I say, every man may be required
to defend the republic with his money, his honor, and his life, if
need be, and he should think himself very lightly released if society
demands only to become his legatee, after he has provided for his
family. He thus relinquishes what is nothing to him but everything to
society.

Wealth is the product of the nation--of all its work of brain and
muscle. No one man by himself ever accumulated wealth. But in the
entangled social co-operation, struggle, and battle, wealth is
scattered strangely and gathered in heaps like the money at a gaming
table. One man seizes a gold mine, another seizes for a trifle a piece
of parchment giving the title to land where a million are going to
settle, and both become millionnaire princes at the expense of the
commonwealth. There would be very few rich men if the real production
of each was all that he could hold. To seize by a legal fiction a mine
that yields a million annually is simply a robbery of the
commonwealth. The robbery of the commonwealth and the toiler is our
chronic condition. The urban population, st