In my lecture I have drawn a strong distinction, though Mr. Greg has not observed it, between hereditary wealth and that which, however great, and even, compared with the wages of subordinate producers, excessive, is earned by industry. Wealth earned by industry is, for obvious reasons, generally much more wisely and beneficially spent than hereditary wealth. The self-made millionaire must at all events, have an active mind. The late Mr. Brassey was probably one man in a hundred even among self-made millionaires; among hereditary millionaires he would have been one in a thousand. Surely we always bestow especial praise on one who resists the evil influences of hereditary wealth, and surely our praise is deserved. The good which private wealth has done in the way of patronizing literature and art is, I am convinced, greatly overrated. The beneficent patronage of Lorenzo di Medici is, like that of Louis XIV., a chronological and moral fallacy. What Lorenzo did was, in effect, to make literature and art servile and in some cases to taint them with the propensities of a magnificent debauchee. It was not Lorenzo, nor any number of Lorenzos, that made Florence, with her intellect and beauty, but the public spirit, the love of the community, the intensity of civic life, in which the interest of Florentine history lies. The decree of the Commune for the building of the Cathedral directs the architect to make a design "of such noble and extreme magnificence that the industry and skill of men shall be able to invent nothing grander or more beautiful," since it had been decided in Council that no plan should be accepted "unless the conception was such as to render the work worthy of an ambition which had become very great, inasmuch as it resulted from the continued desires of a great number of citizens united in one sole will." I believe, too, that the munificence of a community is generally wiser and better directed than that of private benefactors. Nothing can be more admirable than the munificence of rich men in the United States. But the drawback in the way of personal fancies and crochets is so great that I sometimes doubt whether future generations will have reason to thank the present, especially as the reverence of the Americans for property is so intense that they would let a dead founder breed any pestilence rather than touch the letter of his will. Politically, no one can have lived in the New World without knowing that a society in which wealth is distributed rests on an incomparably safer foundation than one in which it is concentrated in the hands of a few. British plutocracy has its cannoneer; but if the cannoneer happens to take fancies into his head the "whiff of grapeshot" goes the wrong way.