You have perhaps not fully considered how it has come to pass that your wealth is so generally without the best feelings and impulses of humanity. The desire to accumulate which pervades all classes can accomplish nothing in the ranks of labor, except for those who possess it in an inordinate degree. The anxiety for gain must be so intense as to overwhelm the wish for gratifications within reach, and to produce a fortitude of restraint which denies every dispensable want and pleasure. Is is only the few who have this power of abstinence that can escape a life of drudgery. The ranks of capital and wealth are largely recruited from this body of abstainers. Under the depressing effects of your monopolistic condition, ordinary prudence and moderate abstemiousness are not, as a rule, capable of laying the foundation of wealth. You have, consequently, by a natural process of selection, the ranks of your moneyed classes filled up, for the most part, by the most aggressively mercenary and acquisitive of your race; while the better part of humanity, where the self-sacrificing and generous impulses most prevail, must pay the penalty of its virtues in unrelieved dependence. Your successful moneyed class, coming in time to that place of power which its wealth procures for it, shapes and directs your legislation; which, as you might expect, instead of being devoted, as it should be, chiefly to the support of measures to equalize and ameliorate the conditions of all classes, works the machinery for government for its own selfish ends, making easy and comfortable paths for those schemes which multiply its wealth. While the wish to accumulate is acknowledged to be the fountain head of all material progress, its accomplishment, under our system, is mostly the reward of those qualities of the mind which are not safe lessons for common acceptance. Your examples of material success are not good studies, if charity and the true public spirit are to be considered as worthy of being enlarged by precept. CHAPTER XI. Our more advanced civilization and truer democracy exhibit themselves nowhere more strikingly, than in the way in which we have determined the equal division of land interests. With our city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, and its income during the same period of time as yours of thirty-one million days’ labor, there is assessed by our authorities about the sum as ground rent equivalent to eight million average days’ pay of our workmen. For this amount in hand, our government furnishes to its tenants, without further cost, perfected streets in constant repair, abundance of water for household and other purposes, lights both in houses and streets, heat by our system (to you undiscovered), perfect drainage without cost or repair of conduits, insurance against individual loss by fire or flood, free burial of the dead, and a system of education bestowing upon every individual the higher branches of study.