while the useful and productive millions may barely exist. On the other hand, with a changed set of legal and moral values, we may have men of social influence and power striving constantly to increase the incomes and relieve the sufferings of the poor and helpless. Our legislatures may be busy with laws shortening the hours of all labor, laws prohibiting child labor, laws restricting the labor of women, laws for the protection of miners, laws relating to the conditions of pay for labor and to compensation for accidents--which promptly reflect themselves in the values of the goods produced in the industries affected, and in the increased values--through increased "demand"--of the goods consumed by these classes. The ideal of "no pay without function" may attain--as I think it is to-day attaining--a value of increasing power. And it may lead men to strive for the abolition of monopoly incomes, and the correction of the gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth. If it do not succeed--and it does not by any means succeed--it is because opposing values check it. At any given moment, there is an equilibrium, usually unstable, between the forces tending to correct, and to perpetuate, these inequalities. And it need not be an evil force that is the real obstacle to the realization of greater justice in distribution. The legal value of private property--one of those social "absolute values" which do not readily lend themselves to the "marginal process"--checks at an early stage many of our well-meant, but badly planned, efforts at justice. Glad as most of us would be to deprive plutocratic pirates of what they have not earned, we still do not care to upset the fundamentals of our social system in the process. But the conflict between these values brings them both into clearer light. We see, and feel, the significance, the "presuppositions," the "funded meanings," of each. And while, for the present, there is a "mechanical haul and strain" between them, which, if no more light comes, may ultimately lead to the triumph of one and the complete defeat of the other, still, we may hope to get a result like that which often comes in the case of conflicts between values in the individual psychology--a fuller appreciation of the significance of both values, which will get us away from the "absoluteness" of each, and effect a marginal equilibrium between them, or, perhaps, get a new value which will comprehend them both. Of course, the thing is not so simple as this. It is not a conflict simply between two values, both of which the same man may "participate" in. Our plutocrats are also parts of the social will. They count! The economic value they control may bribe lawmakers, may corrupt judges, may seduce writers and preachers and teachers and others who have to do with the making of public sentiment and the shaping of social values. And, in subtler ways, through the social prestige which their mere wealth too often gives, through the ideals which