We are useful too as conserving certain valuable ideas. When I mention the idea of the right of private property, I expect to be laughed at by a large class of enthusiasts. Yet all of civilization has been built up on the distinction between _meum_ and _tuum_. Without this idea there is not the slightest inducement to persistent individual effort nor possibility of progress for the individual or for the race. The fruitful diversities, the germinative inequalities between men all depend on this right. And today the right to one's own is doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the guile of those in positions of financial trust. The strikers who offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill, and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay unearned dividends, are both undermining the right of property. Against such counsels of force and fraud, the representatives of the common sense and funded wisdom of mankind are the middling rich. It is an unromantic service--doubtless breaking other people's windows or scaling their bank accounts is much more thrilling--it is a public service obviously tinged with self-interest, but none the less a public service of high and timely importance. The business of keeping the sanity of the world intact as against the wilder expressions of social discontent, and the uglier expressions of personal envy and greed, may seem to lack zest and originality today. History may well take a different view of the matter. It would not be surprising to find a posthumous aureole of idealism conferred upon those who amid the trumpeting of money market messiahs, and the braying of self-appointed remodellers of the race, simply stood quietly on their own inherited rights and principles. Such are some not wholly minor uses for the middling rich. Should they be abolished, many of the pleasanter facts and appearances of the world would disappear with them. The other day I whisked in one of their motor cars through miles of green Philadelphia suburbs dappled with pink magnolia trees and white fruit blossoms--everywhere charming houses, velvety lawns, tidy gardens. The establishing of a little paradise like that is of course a selfish enterprise--a mere meeting of the push and foresight of real estate operators with the thrift and sentiment of householders, yet it is an advantage inevitably shared, a benefit to the entire community, an example in reasonable working, living, and playing.