mere luck.

Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day
for everybody. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their
bellies. As for the security of property, it should be tolerably well
secured in a country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though
the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that add to
the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest
the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the
smallest in its division? In point of fact, far-seeing men count the
increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of the chief
dangers with which the institutions of the United States are threatened
in the not distant future. The right of individual property is no doubt
the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a
little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional
consideration because it bears all the burdens of the State. It bears
those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with its
person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should
not forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then.
Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can,
and rate as highly, the value of wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the
security of refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and
beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an
ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which
has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue
which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criticise any
form of government. All have their virtues, all their defects, and all
have illustrated one period or another in the history of the race, with
signal services to humanity and culture. There is not one that could
stand a cynical cross-examination by an experienced criminal lawyer,
except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the
world has never seen, except in that white-haired king of Browning's who

"Lived long ago
In the morning of the world,
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now."

The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have
at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very
sa