directors than they will from the best governmental management which can be devised; and so long as the railroads are owned by private investors, those investors will doubtless insist upon their directors having more and more to do. I am aware that there is a socialistic trend all over the world. There is more and more disposition to prescribe medicine for other people to take, but no amount of legislation will change the fundamental laws of the universe. The fact is,--notwithstanding our Declaration of Independence,--men are not created equal. It is a fine thing for all of us that they are not. There is a diversity of gifts; money-making is one of them, but a man may have the talent for making money and be totally unable to build a bridge or paint a portrait or lead an orchestra or an army, and if fortunes are acquired under the laws which we ourselves have made, why should we be envious? Unless a rich man hoards money like a miser, it is--if not alarmed--continuously at work for all of us, through the banks or otherwise, in spite of anything he can do, and the cheaper it can be had, the greater the economy to society as a whole. It is impossible to reduce everybody to a dead level, and how monotonous it would be if we could! We don't satisfy everybody even in our form of government, which we are prone to think is the best in the world. For example, at the last election six and a half million people did not get what they voted for. Part of them got what they really wanted, but on the face of the returns, six and a half million were disappointed, and yet the country goes happily on, apparently to greater prosperity than ever. But how much happier and how much more prosperous we might be if there were not so much untrained meddling--if there were not so many brakes upon the wheels of our progress! A brake, we all admit, is a good thing in its place, but it has no _propulsive_ power, and the efforts of the time to combine in one man or in any one body of men the four functions of prosecuting attorney, judge, jury and executioner, must sooner or later give way. First, because it is un-American, and where such a condition exists, as Alexander Hamilton pointed out to the people of New York, "There is no liberty." Second, because it will not work practically.