In all these ways the very rich can find ample opportunities for useful benevolence. It is the prerogative of great wealth that it can often cure what others can only palliate, and can establish permanent sources of good which will continue long after the donors have passed away. In dealing with individual cases of distress, rich men who have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the special circumstances will do well to rely largely on the recommendation of others. If they choose trustworthy, competent and sensible advisers with as much judgment as they commonly show in the management of their private affairs, they are not likely to go astray. There never was a period when a larger amount of intelligent and disinterested labour was employed in careful and detailed examination of the circumstances and needs of the poor. The parish clergyman, the district visitor, the agents of the Charity Organization Society which annually selects its special cases of well-ascertained need, will abundantly furnish them with the knowledge they require. The advantage or disadvantage of the presence in a country of a large class of men possessing fortunes far exceeding anything that can really administer to their enjoyment is a question which has greatly divided both political economists and moralists. The former were long accustomed to maintain somewhat exclusively that laws and institutions should be established with the object of furthering the greatest possible accumulation of wealth, and that a system of unrestricted competition, coupled with equal laws, giving each man the most complete security in the possession and disposal of his property, was the best means of attaining this end. They urged with great truth that, although under such a system the inequalities of fortune will be enormous, most of the wealth of the very rich will inevitably be distributed in the form of wages, purchases, and industrial enterprises through the community at large, and that, other things being equal, the richest country will on the whole be the happiest. They clearly saw the complete delusion of the common assertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities, in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are also the centres in which we find the most prosperous middle class, and the highest and most progressive rates of wages and standards of comfort among the poor. Great corruption in many forms no doubt exists in them, but it can scarcely be maintained with confidence that the standard of integrity is on the whole lower in these than in other countries, and they at least escape what in many poor countries is one of the most fruitful causes of corruption in all branches of administration--the inadequate pay of the servants of the Crown. The path of liberty in the