In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon labor all the emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in adding to the fruits of his toil. In our society there is no possibility, and no one has hopes of gaining money by chance. We hold it to be a demoralizing evil that wealth should be obtained without industry. The quality of mind which you honor under the name of shrewdness, and which seldom hesitates to profit by the losses and even the miseries of others, would find life a burden on account of the odium attached, in any community on our planet. The privilege to build up an individual fortune, by taking from the substance of the whole people in any unlimited degree which an unscrupulous ingenuity can devise, is one of the peculiarities of your civilization. To this general license, with its very small limitation, is to be ascribed most of your social miseries. The lessons presented to your youth at the very first glance at the affairs of life are calculated to impress them with the belief that success is not so much for the strong and considerate, as it is for the wary and cunning; and that the business of creating wealth is of the slightest importance, when compared with the many successful arts and schemes for capturing it after its production. The example is witnessed everywhere among you of money-making without loss of honor or respect, by the method of drawing from others, by taking advantage of their necessities, excessive and unfair portions of their substance for some sort of service rendered. The consequence is that life with you is constantly renewed, on the one hand, by persons with more or less inherited capital, who are educated to believe that existence is a game, whose winning instances are the best guides to follow; and on the other by the great mass of hereditary toilers who submit themselves as victims under sheer force of necessity and usage. This state of your civilization brings into play many of your lower feelings, as indispensable instruments of success. When selfishness is the chief promoter of thrift, practical charity is only aroused by unusual provocation. The miseries of existence are unseen and unfelt by others than the sufferers themselves among you, just as your senses become oblivious to the presence of disturbing influences which you find it unprofitable to suppress. The necessity for each one looking out for himself in your fierce battles of life makes him unmindful of others. Yet benevolence dwells within all your hearts as a divine attribute, which cannot be wholly destroyed, no matter how neglected its cultivation. Like the retarded germination of seed in a too deeply surmounting soil, it comes to the light among you here and there, under