with equally industrious and provident fathers and uncles, and it is
often bad for the man who gets the income as a reward for no effort of
his own, because it gives him a false start in life and sometimes tends
to make him a futile waster, who can only justify his existence and his
command over other people's work, by pointing to the efforts of his
deceased sire or uncle. Further, unless he is very lucky, he is likely
to grow up with the notion that, just because he has been left or given
a certain income, he is somehow a superior person, and that it is part
of the scheme of the universe that others should work for his benefit,
and that any attempt on the part of other people to get a larger share,
at his expense, of the good things of the earth is an attempt at
robbery. He is, by being born to a competence, out of touch with the law
of nature, which says that all living things must work for their living,
or die, and his whole point of view is likely to be warped and narrowed
by his unfortunate good fortune.

These evils that spring from hereditary property are obvious. But it may
be questioned whether they outweigh the advantages that arise from it.
The desire to possess is a strong stimulus to activity in production,
because possession is the mark of success in it, and all healthy-minded
men like to feel that they have succeeded; and almost equally strong is
the desire to hand on to children or heirs the possessions that the
worker's energy has got for him. In fact it may almost be said that in
most men's minds the motive of possession implies that of being able to
hand on; they would not feel that they owned property which they were
bound to surrender to the State at their deaths. If and when society is
ever so organized that it can produce what it needs without spurring the
citizen to work with the inducement supplied by possession, and the
power to hand on property, then it may be possible to abolish the
inequities that hereditary property carries with it. As things are at