"That's my idea exactly," answered Hastings. "As I look at it the curse of most of the people living on Fifth Avenue is that they're perfectly safe. You could take away nine-tenths of what they've got and they'd still have about a hundred times more money than they needed to be comfortable. They're like a whole lot of fat animals in an inclosure--they're fed three or four times a day, but the wire fence that protects them from harm deprives them of any real liberty. Or they're like goldfish swimming round and round in a big bowl. They can look through sort of dimly; but they can't get out! If they really knew, they'd trade their security for their freedom any time. "Perfect safety isn't an unmixed blessing by any means. Look at the photographs of the wild Indians--the ones that carried their lives in their hands every minute--and there's something stern and noble about their faces. Put an Indian on a reservation and he takes to drinking whisky. It was the same way with the chaps that lived in the Middle Ages and had to wear shirts of chainmail. It kept 'em guessing. That's merely one phase of it. "The real thing to put the bite into life is having a Cause. People forget how to make sacrifices--or become afraid to. After all, even dying isn't such a tremendous trick. Plenty of people have done it just for an idea--wanted to pray in their own way. But this modern way of living takes all the sap out of folks. They get an entirely false impression of the relative values of things. It takes a failure or a death in the family to wake them up to the comparative triviality of the worth of money as compared, for instance, to human affection--any of the real things of life. "I don't object to inequality of mere wealth in itself, because I wouldn't dignify money to that extent. Of course I do object to a situation where the rich man can buy life and health for his sick child and the poor man can't. Too many sick babies! That'll be attended to, all right, in time. I wouldn't take away one man's money for the sake of giving it to others--not a bit of it. But what I would do would be to put it out of a man's power to poison himself with money. "Suicide is made a crime under the law. How about moral and intellectual suicide? It ought to be prevented for the sake of the state. No citizen should be allowed to stultify himself with luxury any more than he should be permitted to cut off his right hand. Excuse me for being didactic--but you said you'd like to get my point of view and I've tried to give it to you in a disjointed sort of way. I'd sooner my son would have to work for his living than not, and I'd rather he'd spend his life contending with the forces of nature and developing the country than in quarreling over the division of profits that other men had earned."