“For where is the justice that noblemen, goldsmiths, and usurers and those classes who either do nothing at all or in what they do are of no great service to the commonwealth, should live a genteel and splendid life in idleness or unproductive labour; whilst in the meantime the servant, the waggoner, the mechanic, and the peasant toiling almost longer and harder than the horse, in labour so necessary that no commonwealth could endure a year without it, lead a life so wretched that the condition of the horse seems more to be envied?... Thus after careful reflection, it seems to me, as I hope for mercy, that our modern republics are nothing but a conspiracy of the rich pursuing their own selfish interests under the name of a republic. They devise and invent all ways and means whereby they may, in the first place, secure to themselves the possession of what they have amassed by evil means; and in the second place, secure to their own use and profit the work and labour of the poor at the lowest possible price.” Would he find words to express himself were he alive to-day? But of them all no one has emphasised so clearly or insisted so strongly on the vanity and danger of worldly goods as Christ did. The rich man consults Him, and tells Him that all the chief commandments he has observed from his youth. But Christ sees what is amiss, and the man goes away grieving, “For he had great possessions.” Then follows the great generalisation: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” As to whether or not the “needle’s eye” was the name of a narrow gate of the city through which heavily laden camels could not pass, does not signify. The meaning is clear beyond question. In the Kingdom of God upon earth, that is an ideally constituted human society, there is no place for a man encumbered with riches; his presence would assuredly disturb the even balance of the whole. Rousseau saw that it was a condition of good government that no citizen should be rich enough to buy another, and no citizen poor enough to be compelled to sell himself.[32] If all the social organisation of humanity, the arrangement of which rests apparently to a great extent in our control, were so constituted as to allow each man a full competence, far from its producing a deadening equality as some pretend, it would free the human race to make the most of its varied natural capacities and talents which are now mostly lost, and a competition of achievement and service founded on altruism would take the place of a competition for gain and profit based on egoism. The ideal may be unattainable for the present because we have drifted so far from it, but that is no reason for discarding it altogether and turning our faces in the exactly opposite direction.