ving capital. It is worth while to
consider which we mean or what we mean. Is it wicked to be rich? Is it
mean to be a capitalist? If the question is one of degree only, and it
is right to be rich up to a certain point and wrong to be richer, how
shall we find the point? Certainly, for practical purposes, we ought to
define the point nearer than between one and five millions of dollars.

There is an old ecclesiastical prejudice in favor of the poor and
against the rich. In days when men acted by ecclesiastical rules these
prejudices produced waste of capital, and helped mightily to replunge
Europe into barbarism. The prejudices are not yet dead, but they
survive in our society as ludicrous contradictions and inconsistencies.
One thing must be granted to the rich: they are good-natured. Perhaps
they do not recognize themselves, for a rich man is even harder to
define than a poor one. It is not uncommon to hear a clergyman utter
from the pulpit all the old prejudice in favor of the poor and against
the rich, while asking the rich to do something for the poor; and the
rich comply, without apparently having their feelings hurt at all by
the invidious comparison. We all agree that he is a good member of
society who works his way up from poverty to wealth, but as soon as he
has worked his way up we begin to regard him with suspicion, as a
dangerous member of society. A newspaper starts the silly fallacy that
"the rich are rich because the poor are industrious," and it is copied
from one end of the country to the other as if it were a brilliant
apothegm. "Capital" is denounced by writers and speakers who have never
taken the trouble to find out what capital is, and who use the word in
two or three different senses in as many pages. Labor organizations are
formed, not to employ combined effort for a common object, but to
indulge in declamation and denunciation, and especially to furnish an
easy living to some officers who do not want to work. People who have
rejected dogmatic religion, and retained only a residuum of religious
sentimentalism, find a special field in the discussion of the rights of
the poor and the duties of the rich. We have denunciations of banks,
corporations, and monopolies, which denunciations encourage only
helpless rage and animosity, because they are not controlled by any
definitions or limitations, or by any distinctions between what is
indispensably necessary and what is abuse, between what is establish