The most obvious of the reasons why the right to income from capital forms in the eyes of the exceptional wealth-producer a principal element in the desirability of the wealth produced by him has {317} its root in the facts of family affection. In spite of the selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man’s desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who are otherwise selfish shows how deeply it is engrained in the human character. It may, indeed, be regarded as a kind of selfishness itself; and the vigorous and practical men who have exceptional faculties for wealth-production are precisely those in whom it is strongest and most persistent. Men like these would never for a moment tolerate an arrangement which permitted the head of the family to keep his wife and children in luxury so long as he lived, but would condemn all of them, the moment he happened to die, to be turned by the butler and footmen into the street as beggars. It has been said that this family feeling on the part of the great wealth-producer may be regarded as a species of selfishness; and there is nothing very recondite in the process by which it comes to be so. Such a man, no matter how selfish, values his family because it happens to be his own. His own importance is enhanced by the success and brilliancy of its members; and the possession of a fashionable wife, and a popular and well-bred son, reflects almost as much credit on him as the possession of a gentleman for his grandfather. For this reason, if for no others, he will do for them everything that exceptional wealth will enable him to do. Wealth, {318} however, depends for its effects on those who enjoy it, not merely on its present enjoyment, but on the prospect of its continued possession; and unless the man who is making a fortune by his ability may bequeath to one of his children, at all events, a position similar to his own, and something exceptional in the way of wealth to all, the money which he spends on them during his own lifetime will be wasted. The whole social importance which wealth might have given them would be gone. The tastes and the peculiar cultivation which wealth is capable of securing for those who are from their earliest years surrounded with it, they would under such circumstances neglect to acquire at all; or, if they did acquire them, they would be living in a fool’s paradise, for when their father died, and their wealth consequently vanished, they would be infinitely worse off than those who had never possessed it. They would resemble nothing so much as plants that had been grown in a conservatory, merely that, when on the point of flowering, they might be bedded out in the frost.