Behind his demand for a program to carry out _min shêng_ there was the fundamental belief that a government which does not assure and promote the material welfare of the masses of its citizens does not deserve to exist. To him the problem of livelihood, the concrete aspect of _min shêng_, was one which had to be faced by every government, and was a means of judging the righteousness of a government. He could not tolerate a state which did not assure the people a fair subsistence. There was no political or ethical value higher than life itself. A government which did not see that its subjects were fed, sheltered, clothed, transported, and lettered to the degree which the economic level of its time permitted, was a government deserving of destruction. Sun Yat-sen was not a doctrinaire on the subject of classes; he would tolerate inequality, so long as it could be shown not to militate against the welfare of the people. He was completely intolerant of any government, Eastern or Western, which permitted its subjects to starve or to be degraded into a nightmare existence of semi-starvation. Whatever the means, this end of popular livelihood, of a reasonable minimum on the scale of living for each and every citizen, had to prevail above all others.(314) Within the limits of this supreme criterion, Sun Yat-sen left the government to its own choice in the matter of the sphere of state action. If the system of private initiative could develop more efficiently than could the government in certain fields, then leave those fields to private effort. If and when private initiative failed to meet rigid requirements to be established by the government it was not merely the privilege, it was the obligation of the government to intervene. Sun Yat-sen seems to have believed that government action would in the long run be desirable anyhow, but to have been enough of a political realist at the same time to be willing to allow the government a considerable length of time in expanding its activities. In a developing country like China it seemed to him probable that the ends of _ming shêng_ could best be served in many fields by private enterprise. “All matters that can be and are better carried out by private enterprise should be left to private hands which should be encouraged and fully protected by liberal laws....”(315)