Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/85

 but which can be detected in most of the current socialistic discussions, viz., that all the capital which is here now would be here under any laws or institutions about property, as if it were due to some independent cause; and that some have got ahead of others and seized upon the most of it, so that those who came later have not been able to get any. If this notion about the source of capital is not true, then wealth at one pole cannot cause poverty at the other. If it is true, then we can make any regulations we like about the distribution of wealth, without fear lest the measures which we adopt may prevent any wealth from being produced.

In Rome, under the empire, wealth at one pole was a symptom of misery at the other, because Rome was not an industrial state. Its income came from plunder. The wealth had a source independent of the production of the society of Rome. That part of the booty which some got, others could not have. No such thing is true of an industrial society. The wealth of the commercial cities of Italy and southern Germany, in the Middle Ages, was largely in the hands of merchant-princes. If one were told that some of these merchants were very rich, he would have no ground of inference that others in those cities must have been poor. The rich were those who developed the opportunities of commerce which were, in the first instance, open to all. What they gained came out of nothing which anybody else ever had or would have had. The fact that there are wealthy men in England, France, and the United States to-day is no evidence that there must be poor men here. The riches of the rich are perfectly consistent with the high condition of wealth of all, down to the last. In fact, the aggregations of wealth, both while being made and after realization, develop and sustain the prosperity