You must have suspected before this that, so far as the rapid accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society was in that stationary condition so much dreaded by your economists as the end of all material progress. An assumption among your thinkers that any permanent diminishment of the production of wealth is the forerunner of disaster to society, is one of those mistakes easily accounted for by the surroundings of your present stage of development. Your experience teaches you that where the wealth producing energies are in the highest stage of action, your civilization shows all its other forces equally advancing; and where on the other hand, capital and wealth are restricted, there is a state of general stagnation. These opposite conditions, however, you will find to be, more than anything else, the result of difference in degrees of intelligence, knowledge, and consequently ambition. Your aims, even the higher ones, are so indissolubly connected with wealth as the means by which most of them are promoted, that your incentives to acquire riches have become a part of your intellectual constitution. Where the penalty of a straightened financial condition is the forfeiture of everything which makes life desirable, even a denial of the opportunities of association with the better class, and a surrender of offspring to the degradation and contempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth would be keen. Equally as an incentive also are the innumerable avenues of gain, which are everywhere open for the investment of capital, and the remarkable profits which accrue to keep up the spirit of money-making adventure. You will certainly agree with me that this crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels in the attempt to get money is not the best possible form or type of society: more especially since you are not all fairly and evenly equipped in this struggle, the mass of your people reap no benefit from it, and its result is only to double up the incomes of the few.