Just as the world has got a new conscience in regard to the wrong of slavery, so is it getting a new conscience in regard to this “great iniquity,” as Tolstoy calls it, of private monopoly in land. This growing ethical conviction will ultimately destroy the illusion that the earth and its resources may, without moral wrong, be monopolized by a fortunate or favored few and the great masses be dispossessed.[730] The new conscience will decree that all of nature’s gifts in land and all increments in its value created by society shall belong to society and shall be the common heritage of the successive generations of men. [Sidenote: (_b_) Limitation of inheritance] Another of the conventions of our industrial system in which the moral sense of mankind is beginning to recognize an element of inequity is the right of unlimited inheritance. So long as land remains the common property of the community, or so long as there exists substantial equality in wealth among the members or families of a social group, the injustice of this is not apparent. But after great extremes of poverty and wealth have appeared, as in present-day civilization, then the essential injustice of the institution is disclosed; for there is thus created an idle class living on the labor of others. When a single child through the accident of birth becomes the heir of millions, while hundreds of other children come into the world absolutely portionless and at the same time shut out from the use of any bit of the earth even as standing room, then the system becomes a crass denial of human solidarity and brotherhood. And there is in this law of unlimited bequest a double wrong. The child of over-great wealth is wronged as well as the child of poverty. One is born to a life of luxurious leisure, and the other to a life of unremitting toil. Now, as Professor Dewey observes, there is moral value in work and there is moral value in leisure, but “it is beginning to be seen that their values cannot be divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other enjoy the freedom.”[731] Therefore the ethical demand for the modification of our laws of inheritance in such a way that they shall recognize the social as well as the individual element in wealth must be heeded as much out of regard for the children of the overrich as out of regard for the children of the very poor. [Sidenote: (_c_) Socialism: the democratization of industry]