Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/194

182 possibly remove without opening a door to immeasurable evil and wrong. Wealth itself is an inequality which renders possible the most lurid contrast in conditions of human happiness. To see the brown-stone front with a gilded carriage at the door, while a hovel with starving inmates is not many blocks away, suggests a train of thought as pathetic as anything the world has to show. But you can not abolish wealth without punishing economy and thrift, and taking away the incentive to rise in the world. You can only abolish it by abolishing civilization, to which wealth and poverty are incidents; and poverty you can not abolish, either while civilization lasts or after it is destroyed. Nothing was ever truer—as a declaration for the present, a description for the past, and a prophecy for the future—than the statement, "The poor you have always with you."

But schemes have been suggested for limiting wealth in one way and another, either by extinguishing the owner's power to bequeath it at all, or by reducing to a small allowance what may go to his children, or what he may bequeath; or by taxing each additional ten thousand dollars acquired above the first ten thousand at such a frightfully increasing ratio as to make the incentive to obtain money no longer attractive. This is a backhand way of trying to abolish poverty, or make it more tolerable by making everybody poor compulsorily. You can not do a more effective thing toward paralyzing energy and industry, and offering a bounty to laziness and unthrift, than to make the thrifty men of the world draw all the sloth and incompetence along. This is taxing them not only to support poverty, but to multiply it and make it prevail.

I have been comparing here the evils that seem to have relation to wealth with those which seem to some to grow out of the "unearned increment," But if it is a fact that a hovel of starving inmates can be seen not far from the palace of a man of wealth, is it not even a more closely related fact that the rise of the palace, and the man who lives in it, has directly helped thousands of honest toilers, and continues to help such, whether the man who is wealthy wishes to help them or not? But we do not notice, on account of this hovel, the thousands of well-to-do workers all over the land who have drawn tribute for years from this wealthy man's multiplied wants and luxuries, and who live plainly and comfortably from the fact that he and others like him live luxuriously. A society where wealth exists has evils, because evil is inevitable; but to cripple or destroy wealth would bring a deluge of disasters which no man, if he could foresee them fully, would be able to avert. I have been supposing what I do not believe, that the "unearned increment" involves some element of wrong. In continuing the supposition, I