Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/100

 more money and work less, if their needs, in other words, are purely material, no matter how free they might become, they can not, I am certain, ever become the parents of better offspring, They can only transmit to their children the desire, the passion, at best, for freedom and health and comfort. And I am not certain whether they have not handicapped them for the struggle, the battle they have to fight for themselves, in living as they did a purely materialistic life.

For though the children themselves achieve power, they remain, indeed, slaves. And a slave, born of a freed slave, will breed true to slavery. The levelling process, in this way, wreaks its vengeance upon the heads of those who uphold its infallibility—and it perpetuates its curse. Doubt it not. On the whole, the materialistic conception of history, as propounded by Carl Marx,—the conception that the fundamental factor in the development of any nation, is the economic factor, that is the way in which a nation produces and