struggle, and not the absence of it, which makes both men and a nation great. I have, therefore, ceased to ask myself where are the old magnificent energies which once characterized this people. One looks in vain for the former warfare of intelligence, for the old time audacity of invention, for the fray of commercial contest, for the powerful massing of capital we read of as characteristic of Americans two hundred years ago. All this has gone with the old competitive system. With the abolishment of competition have died out, naturally, all the prizes and rewards in life which came from individual struggle. As accumulation of personal property, in lands or in moneys, and the possibility of personal advancement are forbidden by law, under this form of government, all incentives to personal activity have disappeared. The law of equality, with its logical decrees for the suppression of superiority, has brought about the other extreme, sterility. The crippling of individual activity has finally produced its legitimate result--it has fatally sapped the energies of the people. It is a curious and interesting feature in one’s study of this people, to find that it is not the establishment of the law of equality which has been the cause of decay in this people, but the enforcement of the opposite law--the law it was soon found necessary to establish against inequality. It naturally and logically followed that if men are to be made equal, such equality can only be maintained by the suppression of degrees of inequality. Mentally, for instance, the standard must be made low enough for all to attain it; each man, therefore, in time, no matter what his fitness, capacity or gift, was forced to subordinate his particular qualities to the general possibility of attainment. This level of a common mediocrity was more or less difficult to inforce and develop. Their own historians record many interesting accounts of the slow death of inequality. In one I read only yesterday, “So instinctive through long centuries of oppression and misuse of power was the impulse among men to aspire to superiority of attainment, to excel in mental development, or to exhibit richer creative power, that for years the state penitentiaries were filled with men whose crime was their unconquerable desire selfishly to surpass their less fortunate brothers. It is only within our own enlightened twenty-first century that this grave fault has been remedied. Now, happily, no one dreams of insuring his own personal happiness at the expense of others.” And so, my dear Hannevig, the old drama of history is enacted anew. Years ago men were unhappy because the many had to struggle against the favored few. Here, where all are equal, men are miserable because they are so; because all having equal claims to happiness, find life equally dull and aimless. The perpetual moan here is, O for a chance to _be_ something, to do something, to achieve something!