And, as we learn, we must act. We must ourselves eradicate the worst of our faults. We must ourselves condemn to death the idle rich. We must see to it that as our young men and women grow to maturity they learn to condemn and to scorn the sort of ostentatious display, the miserable vices, the degenerate luxuries, and the positive moral crimes that to-day are so rampant among us. We must, if we are to save ourselves and the world that we inherited, go back to the traditions of our fathers. We must reestablish in the social world of America the Spartan principles that marked that world in the days of Lincoln. The age of arrogance is ended. That is a hard lesson. The idle rich of America, with the bitter voice of poverty and the deep tones of science alike ringing in their ears challenges of their existence as a class, may well tremble at the tones of that other voice which, though seeming silent, yet speaks aloud. The nation’s greatest builder, Lincoln, built as unto liberty. That temple from which he drove the idle driver of slaves, for these long years dedicated to the uses of Mammon, yet looms large in the visions of the disinherited. Above all else that we may do on the positive side there remains the privilege of putting our study to practical work in the amelioration of the conditions that exist and the prevention of the recurrence of the phenomena that gave us these conditions. As a class we are, to-day, obstructionists. It is our class conservatism, you may say, that impels us to look with suspicion upon the rising of the people against, for instance, such a political debauch as has ruled Rhode Island for so long. We, on the contrary, should stand in the front ranks of such a battle as that. First of all, we, the people of this country, should detect political corruption, we should recognize the symptoms of the palsying touch of gold--and we should stand out before the world as the sworn champions of justice, equality, and honour. For I do not believe that the march of progress in this land is to be turned backward. I cannot believe that the nation as a nation is to sink into the depths as England sank in the middle of the eighteenth century. I take it for granted that the wiping out of the idle rich is to be one of the first steps in a programme of national advancement, greater, more splendid, and far more universal than any other period of advancement and progress in the history of the nation. The idle rich are an obstacle in the way; therefore they must be eliminated or destroyed. Whether we, all the rich, as a class, are to share with them in that destruction depends upon whether or not we too set ourselves up as an obstacle in the path of the nation’s development.