In this connection let me warn you not to expect any considerable portion of the necessary work to be done by the very rich. They have so long believed, and their experience has justified the conviction that money will buy anything, that many of them seem to think their wealth will enable them to buy liberty of a mob. A mob is always venal but it can never be bribed by what it has the power to take. Did the wealthy of France escape? They were the first to die. Have the rich of Russia been spared? They have been the first to suffer. Possibly the rich may be able to buy their choice of being mutilated before or after death. The history of all revolutions of the kind that seems impending justifies the prediction that the more money a man has the greater certainty of his torture and ultimate death. Quite recently a very rich man was asked to contribute to a campaign of education against bolshevism. He wrote a patronizing letter acknowledging the importance of the work, but expressed the opinion that it should be financed, not by the rich, but by men worth thirty or forty thousand dollars. “Accursed be the gold that gilds the narrow forehead of the fool.” LEGISLATION OFFERS NO REMEDY It is recorded that the children of Israel once upon a time got into serious difficulty through worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain getting the Moral Law. If American civilization is idolatrous—and it seems not to be free from that sin—the object of its worship is statute law, to the neglect of underlying principles which make most laws unnecessary. In the last ten years over sixty-five thousand statutes have been enacted by Congress and the state legislatures and approved by executives. Meanwhile the evil we are now considering, in common with most others recognized a decade ago, has in the main increased. Neither the laws of nature, nor the laws of economics, nor the laws of society, can be reversed by statute. We have proceeded upon the theory that a republic can accomplish anything by popular edict, but the tides come in whether prohibited by sovereign king or by sovereign people. A DIAGNOSIS