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 established
in the order of nature and what is legislative error. Think, for
instance, of a journal which makes it its special business to denounce
monopolies, yet favors a protective tariff, and has not a word to say
against trades-unions or patents! Think of public teachers who say that
the farmer is ruined by the cost of transportation, when they mean that
he cannot make any profits because his farm is too far from the market,
and who denounce the railroad because it does not correct for the
farmer, at the expense of its stockholders, the disadvantage which lies
in the physical situation of the farm! Think of that construction of