discourage
excess of riches and we should endeavor to relieve all of distressing
poverty. We should hedge about accumulation with such conditions as to
make it very difficult to gain great wealth, and at the same time we
should so ease the conditions of accumulation that only gross
indolence or great misfortune could cause dependent poverty.

The so called middle class are those who neither have great riches nor
yet are they in fear of want. The great mass of our people belonged to
this class until very recent times. Now we find the excessively rich
have multiplied and a vast number of our industrious, honest and
virtuous population are struggling for life's necessities. The middle
class is less numerous while both those in opulence and those in
poverty have been increasing.

We should level up and level down to the medium which is best for the
development of the highest manhood and best also for the strength and
perpetuity of our republican institutions.

The rich should be limited in their accretions while the poor are
lifted out of their poverty; but how can this be accomplished without
interfering with individual liberty and our personal rights? The
problem is not easily solved. While usury remains, which is an ever
active centralizing force adding wealth to wealth, no remedy can be
found. Do away with usury, and the evil is overcome.

(_a_) When it is recognized that vital energy alone produces all
wealth, no great fortune can be gathered in the life time of one man.
The earnings of any life, however long, or the earnings of a
succession of industrious, energetic ancestors, could not amass a
fortune to interfere with the rights and activities of others.

One may inherit a large fortune from wealthy kindred; he may discover
a fortune; he may draw a grand prize in a lottery; he may as a Turk
seize the properties of others and then bribe the courts to confirm
his claims; or a people may be "held up" by law and one, selfish and
conscienceless as a ghoul, may jump at the opportunity and appropriate
their earnings and their property and yet the robber keep out of the
penitentiary; but no one, however great his skill or brilliant his
genius, can earn one million dollars, nor the tenth of it, in his
natural life. To gain one million dollars one must earn twenty
thousand dollars each year for fifty years and save it all. He must
spend nothing for pleasure nor benevolence. He must spend nothing for
food nor for clothe