Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to man and injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature that the fittest shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not the fittest, for through the centuries they do not survive. The extremely wealthy are dying out, for they do not have children enough to maintain their numbers. It is our duty so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. They are twin evils; extreme wealth indicates extreme poverty, as mountains indicate valleys. Wealth, corruption, and despotism, are grouped together in history, as liberty has been grouped with equality, simplicity, hardihood, the mountain and the wilderness. Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to reform, its method of opposition being corruption, and these characteristics are intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth everywhere gives power to monopolize the face of the earth, and thus establish a hereditary nobility; for the landlords of millions of acres are the most substantial and formidable lords that society knows, and nowhere in the world have there been greater opportunities to establish such an aristocracy, which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one thousand dollars per capita, represents not the increased wealth of the masses but the enormous accumulations of a few. Our gain of about two thousand millions annually, does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the republic? If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it is corpulence instead of strength.