ach of us go ahead to do so, and we have every reason
to rejoice in each other's prosperity. There ought to be no laws to
guarantee property against the folly of its possessors. In the absence
of such laws, capital inherited by a spendthrift will be squandered and
re-accumulated in the hands of men who are fit and competent to hold
it. So it should be, and under such a state of things there is no
reason to desire to limit the property which any man may acquire.

IV.

_ON THE REASONS WHY MAN IS NOT ALTOGETHER A BRUTE._

The Arabs have a story of a man who desired to test which of his three
sons loved him most. He sent them out to see which of the three would
bring him the most valuable present. The three sons met in a distant
city, and compared the gifts they had found. The first had a carpet on
which he could transport himself and others whithersoever he would. The
second had a medicine which would cure any disease. The third had a
glass in which he could see what was going on at any place he might
name. The third used his glass to see what was going on at home: he saw
his father ill in bed. The first transported all three to their home on
his carpet. The second administered the medicine and saved the father's
life. The perplexity of the father when he had to decide which son's
gift had been of the most value to him illustrates very fairly the
difficulty of saying whether land, labor, or capital is most essential
to production. No production is possible without the co-operation of
all three.

We know that men once lived on the spontaneous fruits of the earth,
just as other animals do. In that stage of existence a man was just
like the brutes. His existence was at the sport of Nature. He got what
he could by way of food, and ate what he could get, but he depended on
finding what Nature gave. He could wrest nothing from Nature; he could
make her produce nothing; and he had only his limbs with which to
appropriate what she offered. His existence was almost entirely
controlled by accident; he possessed no capital; he lived out of his
product, and production had only the two elements of land and labor of
appropriation. At the present time man is an intelligent animal. He
knows something of the laws of Nature; he can avail himself of what is
favorable, and avert what is unfavorable, in nature, to a certain
extent; he has narrowed the sphere of accident, and in some respects
reduced it to computations which lessen