the verge of starvation and the risk of life, must have some reason in
human nature. Even an illusion--and men are as ready to die for an
illusion as for a reality--cannot exist without a cause.

Now, content does not depend so much upon a man's actual as his relative
condition. Often it is not so much what I need, as what others have that
disturbs me. I should be content to walk from Boston to New York, and be
a fortnight on the way, if everybody else was obliged to walk who made
that journey. It becomes a hardship when my neighbor is whisked over the
route in six hours and I have to walk. It would still be a hardship if he
attained the ability to go in an hour, when I was only able to accomplish
the distance in six hours. While there has been a tremendous uplift all
along the line of material conditions, and the laboring man who is sober
and industrious has comforts and privileges in his daily life which the
rich man who was sober and industrious did not enjoy a hundred years ago,
the relative position of the rich man and the poor man has not greatly
changed. It is true, especially in the United States, that the poor have
become rich and the rich poor, but inequality of condition is about as
marked as it was before the invention of labor-saving machinery, and
though workingmen are better off in many ways, the accumulation of vast
fortunes, acquired often in brutal disregard of humanity, marks the
contrast of conditions perhaps more emphatically than it ever appeared
before. That this inequality should continue in an era of universal
education, universal suffrage, universal locomotion, universal
emancipation from nearly all tradition, is a surprise, and a perfectly
comprehensible cause of discontent. It is axiomatic that all men are
created equal. But, somehow, the problem does not work out in the desired
actual equality of conditions. Perhaps it can be forced to the right
conclusion by violence.