ear in order to support social institutions."
Certainly, liberty, and universal suffrage, and democracy are not
pledges of care and protection, but they carry with them the exaction
of individual responsibility. The State gives equal rights and equal
chances just because it does not mean to give anything else. It sets
each man on his feet, and gives him leave to run, just because it does
not mean to carry him. Having obtained his chances, he must take upon
himself the responsibility for his own success or failure. It is a pure
misfortune to the community, and one which will redound to its injury,
if any man has been endowed with political power who is a heavier
burden then than he was before; but it cannot be said that there is
any new _duty_ created for the good citizens toward the bad by the fact
that the bad citizens are a harm to the State.

III.

_THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICH; NAY, EVEN, THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO
BE RICHER THAN ONE'S NEIGHBOR_

I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the
opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million
dollars' worth of property. Alongside of it is another slip, on which
another writer expresses the opinion that the limit should be five
millions. I do not know what the comparative wealth of the two writers
is, but it is interesting to notice that there is a wide margin between
their ideas of how rich they would allow their fellow-citizens to
become, and of the point at which they ("the State," of course) would
step in to rob a man of his earnings. These two writers only represent
a great deal of crude thinking and declaiming which is in fashion. I
never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon
his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the
practice of accumulation. A good father believes that he does wisely to
encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and
judicious expenditure on the part of his son. The object is to teach
the boy to accumulate capital. If, however, the boy should read many of
the diatribes against "the rich" which are afloat in our literature; if
he should read or hear some of the current discussion about "capital";
and if, with the ingenuousness of youth, he should take these
productions at their literal sense, instead of discounting them, as his
father does, he would be forced to believe that he was on the path of
infamy when he was earning and sa