The proposition that men are under moral obligation to give away the greater portion of their superfluous goods or income is, indeed, a "hard saying." Not improbably it will strike the majority of persons who read these pages as extreme and fantastic. No Catholic, however, who knows the traditional teaching of the Church on the right use of wealth, and who considers patiently and seriously the magnitude and the meaning of human distress, will be able to refute the proposition by reasoned arguments. Indeed, no man can logically deny it who admits that men are intrinsically sacred, and essentially equal by nature and in their claims to a reasonable livelihood from the common heritage of the earth. The wants that a man supplies out of his superfluous goods are not necessary for rational existence. For the most part they bring him merely irrational enjoyment, greater social prestige, or increased domination over his fellows. Judged by any reasonable standard, these are surely less important than those needs of the neighbour which are connected with humane living. If any considerable part of the community rejects these propositions the explanation will be found not in a reasoned theory, but in the conventional assumption that a man may do what he likes with his own. This assumption is adopted without examination, without criticism, without any serious advertence to the great moral facts that ownership is stewardship, and that the Creator intended the earth for the reasonable support of all the children of men. _A False Conception of Welfare and Superfluous Goods_