The doctrinaire further says that if the tribesman who made a farm had been satisfied to fence in his farm, only, _the common_ would have remained after all had been supplied. In this country, we have millions of acres of “commons” now waiting any one “member of the tribe” who wants to go and take his share. The truth of it is, the doctrinaire doesn’t want to go out into the wild land and _make a farm_. He wants to stay where he is, and _take one that some other fellow has made_. Especially doth he crave a slice of the Astor estate, which doctrinaires have talked of so much that they can almost identify their shares therein. One of the doctrinaires quotes the following from “Progress and Poverty”: “If a fair distribution of land were made among the whole population, giving to each his equal share, and laws enacted which would impose a barrier to the tendency to concentration, by forbidding the holding by anyone of more than a fixed amount, what would become of the increased population?” I do not consider it any part of my task to assail the position taken in “Progress and Poverty,” but I think it a satisfactory answer to the foregoing question to say that in the very nature of things posterity must be the heirs-at-law of the conditions of those who went before. To say that we can so frame a social fabric as flexibly and automatically to give an equal share of everything to every child born into the world hereafter, regardless of whether that child’s parents were thrifty, industrious, virtuous people, or, on the other hand, were thriftless, indolent, vicious people, seems to me to be one of the wildest dreams that ever entered the human mind. No matter how equal material conditions might be made today by legislation, the inherent inequality in the capacities of men, physically, mentally, spiritually, would evolve differences tomorrow. There is no such thing as equality among men, and no law will ever give it to them. What the father gains the children lose; and the grandchildren may regain. While one man runs the race of life and wins it; another man, equally tall and strong will run the race and lose it. Just why, it is, in some cases, difficult to tell.