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 as a newspaper proprietor, but the story of his failure as a plumber was probably a slander prompted by envy. There is, however, no need to be libellous in order to find scores of men who have risen from the bottom to the top of the ladder of wealth, beginning life with nothing behind them but their wits and their good luck and ending it great owners of capital.

Nevertheless there the handicap is. The well-to-do, under the private ownership of capital, can live, if they have enough of it, on the toll that it takes from production without doing any work at all, and if they want to work have everything made easy for them in the shape of specially reserved posts, and the connections and influence that are so great a help in making a start. It must be a very great temptation to those who are rich enough to be able to idle through life, to do so; and the fact that very few succumb to it shows that some sort of activity is a natural want of a healthy and normal human being. There has been a noticeable change in this respect even within the memory of the middle-aged. The graceful idleness which used to be thought so gentlemanly is now much less popular than it was, and young men of the class that used to