It is only the strongest or the finest natures that become stronger and finer through the advantages and the sense of responsibility that inherited wealth brings with it. In the main, the productive sources of society would be multiplied upwards as well as downwards, if wealth became personal in the fullest sense of the word, depending on each person’s contribution of efficient force, but the goad of acquisitiveness would be broken, through the limited possibility of increasing one’s wealth and the needlessness of thereby securing the existence of one’s children. A new system would do away with the necessity of applying to the state for increase of salary for the education of children as befits their class. For if all children were placed in an equal position by the community providing everything—from school materials to travelling scholarships—for the complete education of the bodily and mental powers of individuals, an education in which a true circulation of the classes would take place by consideration being given only to ability; if each thus had the same position when all entered upon their different careers; if each had the same chances of there attaining to the right use of his special powers, since he had had every means of training them; if society gave—as a right, not as a charity—to every worker full care during sickness and full support in old age, then the desire to favour one’s own children at the cost of the rest would disappear. The father whose activity had procured him a position of power, which during his lifetime made his children’s circumstances more favourable than those of a number of others, would certainly thus be able—and to the advantage of the whole community—to allow his children to enjoy that differentiation and refinement which, for instance, the richer culture of their home might give. But when the right of inheritance disappeared—or at least was greatly limited and heavily taxed—he could not exempt them from permanently securing by the exercise of their own powers the advantages of a higher or lower kind that they had learned to value at home. When the difference between legitimate and illegitimate children is abolished in every respect, the paternal home, as in classical and Scandinavian antiquity, may include more often than at present the children of more than one living mother; sometimes even a mother’s home may include children of more than one living father. In either case this would be a recognition of the children’s rights which would leave present day customs with respect to children born out of wedlock a long way behind. No relation shows better than marriage how morals and emotions may be centuries in advance of the laws within whose limits they have been developed.