Who can picture the profound alteration in the attitude of people toward life and their fellow-beings, if they were but emancipated from the fear of want which now besets all of humankind? Even the rich and the well-to-do are not exempt from this fear; for an economic security based on an unsound economic system is like those walks which are thrown along the thin crust of earth among the geysers of Yellowstone Park, where those who walk them are in danger that a misstep may plunge them through the thin crust to perish in the scalding heat beneath. While an economic system based upon the legalized robbery of one class by another remains in force, the abyss of involuntary poverty will always yawn for those who may lose their command of wealth through their own incapacity for management, or through circumstances beyond their control. It seems likely that an instinctive sense of this is at least partly responsible for the constant effort of people already well off to increase their fortunes. It is certainly responsible for a great deal of effort to get wealth by dishonest means--that is to say, by those forms of dishonesty which are without legal sanction. The fear of want produces avarice, chicanery, fraud, servility, envy, suspicion, distrust. It leads to unlegalized theft, to murder, to prostitution. It produces a class of people who, in a society which denies free opportunity and puts a premium on graft, live by their wits, and in so doing often display an energy and ability which would be useful to a society that offered it no opportunity save that for honest and useful employment. Moreover, this fear of want keeps the great majority of people constantly occupied with the means of existence, when they should properly be devoting a large share of their time to the fulfilment of its purpose, which is that enjoyment gained from developing one’s spiritual capacities and pursuing spiritual interests. Those thus preoccupied can not employ with either imagination or profit what leisure they have. Rather, they will merely use their leisure to overcome their weariness of themselves. Their pleasures will be mere pastimes, of the kind that subvert thought and dull imagination. Thus little scope is left for the higher activities of the spirit, and the quality of life is impoverished.