in England and here at home, that a legal system which sanctions such a
civilization is iniquitous. Here, the discontented say, you insist on a
certain form of competition being carried to its limit. That is, you
demand intellectual and peaceful competition for which I am unfit both by
education, training, and mental ability. I am therefore excluded from
those walks in life which make a man a freeman. I become a slave to
capital. I must work, or fight, or starve according to another man's
convenience, caprice, or, in fine, according to his will. I could be no
worse off under any despot. To such a system I will not submit. But I can
at least fight. Put me on a competitive equality or I will blow your
civilization to atoms. To such an argument there is no logical answer
possible except the answer which all extreme socialists have always
advanced. The fortunate man should be taxed for all he earns above the
average wage, and the State should confiscate his accumulations at death.
Then, with a system of government education, obligatory on all, children
would start equal from birth.

Here we come against the hereditary instinct, the creator and the
preserver of the family: the instinct which has made law and order
possible, so far as our ancestors or we have known order, as far back as
the Ice Age. If the coming world must strive with this question, or
abandon the "democratic ideal," the future promises to be stormy.

But even assuming that this problem of individual competition be overcome,
we are as far as ever from creating a system of moral law which shall
avail us, for we at once come in conflict with the principle of abstract
justice which demands that free men shall be permitted to colonize or move
where they will. But supposing England and America to amalgamate; they now
hold or assume to control all or nearly all the vacant regions of the
earth which are suited to the white man's habitation. And the white man