... “Your letter has deeply stirred me. Not that anything you say surprises me, or is new to me; but behind the words, I know, are the sad, dreadful facts for which they stand; and, being a creature endowed with some imagination, I can in some measure realize what that simple statement means, when you say that six millions of your people are on the brink of pauperism. “Good God! what endless heartaches, what physical misery, what degradation of mind and soul is implied in those few words! I am glad you do not envy me my wealth. I am beginning to think that I am not so much to be envied as I thought at first I might be. I have been amazed, in these last few weeks, to learn from numberless sources of the chagrin, disappointment, and perplexity of many rich men and women who have thought to benefit the world by the ‘charity’ which you so despise. They have put up great institutions, only to find that in many cases it was the least helpful thing that they could do; that a large part of the money was spent on taxes, insurance, agents, servants, go-betweens; that, after all, when they had gathered their orphans or cripples or old women together, they had brought about an utterly cheerless, artificial state of things, and have proved that for the average human being with natural human instincts the poorest home is often more preferable than the most palatial asylum. “So, set your heart at rest. I am not going to spend my money in that way. Whatever may be the political and social changes which will take place in the next twenty years,—and doubtless they will be many and great,—of one thing I am sure, no new condition of things can be made permanent or harmonious except by means of two things. The first of these is moral character. The second is intellectual insight into cause and effect and relation. In any condition of things we must have righteousness, and we must have trained minds. You will doubtless agree with me that selfishness and ignorance are the two monster dragons that are threatening now, as they always have done, to devour us, only we should differ as to the way in which they are to be slain. You have a definite theory as to how this is to be done, which I do not yet thoroughly understand. I see your goal, but I do not understand how you propose to reach it without doing away with individuality and crushing out some of the deepest human instincts. True, many of our instincts are brutish. There is still the tiger and the ape within us, which, as John Fiske says, is our inheritance of ‘original sin’ from our brute ancestors. I agree with you that such instincts must be eliminated, but how? By dynamite, fear, revolution, legislation?