amount of property he had. Jubilant American democracy wiped out the old methods by which certain families or groups had transmitted as a kind of heirloom the holding of important offices from father to son; it proclaimed and insisted upon the principle of rotation in office. In our own time political equality has been extended to include all

women.

Educational equality was achieved by the American people at large only after a hard struggle with caste aristocratic and capitalistic forces. The public school system became an imperative function of American life compelling the training of every child. Backward sections of the South were exceptions. We still have remnants of the old exclusive system in certain of our institutions of higher learning, to which only those in favored circumstances are admitted. But the ideal expressed by the Working-men's party almost a century ago may yet come to fruition-an ideal protesting that it was "an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the means of education in college while another is restricted to common schools, ," and demanding "a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be." Since that time, however, the high school, the equivalent in many respects of the old-time college, has become an essential part of our public school system, which now provides for more than 26,000,ooo pupils, requires more than 822,ooo teachers, and calls for an annual expenditure of $2,400,000,000.

The combat for industrial equality was waged for a century and a quar

ter. Favored by public opinion, working-men by 1836 had secured the right to organize and strike. Nevertheless, in various aspects, industrial overlords maintained an autocratic position for sixty or seventy years longer. With few exceptions they refused to accord human rights to man rights to labor-unions and shielded themselves behind every artifice furnished by old laws and precedents for the purpose of declining to recognize moral responsibility. They resisted agitation for laws providing for shorter work hours, factory sanitation, compensation to injured workers, and payments to families of those killed through industrial hazards.

But the mighty power of coalesced wealth proved futile against the surge of public opinion backing the fighting spirit of labor-unions. A succession of State laws was followed by the Federal (Clayton) Anti-Trust Act of 1914 definitely abandoning the antiquated master-and-servant interpretation of labor and specifically defining that labor is not a commodity. The culmination had been reached where capitalists, individual or corporate, could no longer arrogantly refuse to meet labor-union representatives. The discussion of grievances thenceforth was on a plane of equal rights. Since about 1915 the old attitude of opposition to these standards on the part of the controllers of industry has been widely transformed into voluntary acceptance.

of

Racial equality alone was accomplished by methods which involved the use of armed force. If laws passed by some Southern colonies forbidding the slave traffic had

not been voided by King George III, the negro slave question would never have become acute. The tragic four years of the Civil War unshackled the negro and gave him legal and political rights as a man and citizen. The action of some Southern States in impairing these rights by legislative stratagem does not alter the fact that in general the negro race legally and politically is the equal of the white race. Social equality is another matter, which no law can effect. The American Indian has a pride in his race; may not the American negro develop a similar feeling? It is not so many centuries since the mass of white men were slaves or serfs.

With a hundred and fifty years of powerful momentum behind it, there does not seem to be the least reason for believing that America's traditional movement for equality of rights can or will cease. Consistent thus far in its successive steps, a consistency in sequel is more than implied; it is somewhat clearly indicated.

So long as we have huge disproportion in powers derived solely by accident of birth, the continuous effort of the American people to remove artificial distinctions and discriminations remains unfinished. The abolition of hereditary economic power was, in fact, included in the early American program for equality of rights; in 1829 and 1830 resolutions were passed in some American cities calling for the abolition of the power to transmit wealth, which then still consisted mainly of landed estates. But in the campaign for equality of rights other demands

came to be given priority; the time was not ripe for uprooting this kind of hereditary privilege; and the operation of the laws against entail and primogeniture was disintegrating the great feudalistic estates.

The principle then declared, that it was against social justice to allow accident of birth to endow certain persons with a superiority conferred by wealth, remains even truer as applied to the great economic power of to-day. Ownership giving mastery or control over industrial plants, railroads, public utilities, banks, mines, and other sources of material wealth passes from father to son. By the arbitrary, perhaps fantastic, rule of birth, a few children are thus placed upon a supereminent elevation of economic authority, while the mass of other children are compelled by the same process to start life burdened with pressing economic inequality.

That such a condition is in glaring contrast with all other conditions of American life does not admit of argument. No man can transmit political power to his children. Highly developed spiritual and intellectual qualities are confined wholly to the persons acquiring them. Fineness of character and excellence of reputation do not descend to offspring as a heritage. Neither does talent nor even athletic prowess. If children seek to emulate their parents in these, they must go through the same hard work in attaining them. But in the case of wealth, the sordid pursuit of which rates as among the lowest of human ambitions, successive generations are permitted to take inheritance. Often amassed by the most reprehensible

methods, wealth becomes a sacred process of hereditary descent, indued, as time goes on, with the full color of respectability.

Enormous wealth arrogates to itself an irresponsibility allowed to no other part of society. The ordinary business man risks failure, the professional man loss, the employed worker discharge, and the farmer ruin by not knowing required duties and personally attending to them. Too often the inheritor of control over industrial or other corporate concerns is ill informed if not ignorant of actual conditions in the plants from which his great revenues are derived. Management is intrusted to salaried executives who frequently are subordinated to the orders of distant banking financiers. Inherited proprietorship or control may come to be of an absentee character, allowing possessors of great wealth to live far from the properties that yield such riches. By inheritance the title to large holdings of stocks and bonds gives these individuals hereditary authority over large numbers of employees and insures the hereditary right to enjoy and enlarge wealth which they have done nothing to create.

The practice of the wealthy in making large donations for public benefactions did not have a voluntary origin. So strong was the American people's feeling against personal or family aggrandizement that it became customary that the rich should relinquish part or all of their wealth. Of the many evidences of this fact an editorial comment of the "North American Review" in October, 1848, may be cited: "in a manner, the very wealthy

are constrained to make large bequests for public objects in their wills; and if one occasionally fails to comply with the general expectation in this respect, his memory incurs such obloquy that sometimes his heirs have been shamed into an attempt to atone for his neglect.”

There has, however, never been any popular approval of a social order allowing the few to posit themselves as benefactors and to extol themselves as philanthropists; it is not a creation of the American people but a legacy of the past when monarchs condescendingly bestowed largess.

American revulsion against anything savoring of patronage is traditional. ditional. Attempts, before the establishment of the public school system, to foist charity schools upon Americans were met by a boycott declared by self-respecting parents. It is just a century since, in a concerted movement, American artists indignantly repudiated the longstanding old-world custom of dependence upon patrons, and proclaimed that culture and talents outranked any superficial pretensions of rank or wealth. The head of any of our corporations will tell you that extreme care has to be exercised in talking about employees' welfare work so as not to arouse the resentment felt by working people against a spirit of patronage.

Among the objectionable characteristics of great wealth not the least is the inherent opportunity of buying commendation or renown by sheer lavish disbursement. Few donations have been made anonymously. In certain cases the motive of the donor may not be altogether

or even partly one of self-glorification, but the effect is precisely that. In their laudable desire for a good name, either during or after their own time, other members of society must earn it by worthy personal exertion. They have to produce evidence that their work or deeds entitle them to recognition. But the moneyed magnate or his heir simply gives an order, signs a check, and forthwith there is erected a library, university building, institute, or foundation imposing his name upon the community and sanctifying his memory with a halo. The same lucre often enables him to exercise a control over education which is repugnant to American senti

ment.

The American people have set an example for the world in their high standard of living. The purpose of the American is not mercenary but merely that of providing reasonable security for the family. Unquestionably in constructing a new social basis a place would be found for the right to make adequate provision for survivors. But this would be very different from the existing order, whereby vast fortunes with far

reaching fortified economic power are passed from sire to son, and are often virtually entailed for several generations by the ingenious devices of trust provisions in wills.

In what effectual way will such a change be made? The answer will be supplied by practical men and women. My concern is with outlining the principle and not with prescribing the method. The superior rights of the generality of the people over particular individuals is already recognized by law in multifarious ways. Specially relevant is the estate tax, which is a limited application of the right of the people, through their government, to divest rich holders of part of their inheritance. Without the protection of the state great fortunes could not exist. In all the other movements of the American people for equality of rights, the enunciation of principles came first, and their transformation into accomplished facts inevitably followed. So it will be with the American people's next great achievement, the establishment of economic equality, to which the step here indicated promises to be an introduction.

O

LD Mr. and Mrs. Wayne lived until they were both eightyfive, and then died within a fortnight of each other.

For fifty-five of those eighty-five years ever since her birth, in facttheir only child, Honoria, had lived with them; and, during the last fifteen or so of the fifty-five, it was only natural that Honoria's thoughts should turn occasionally to the inevitable future, when she would be alone.

Honoria never went so far as to admit to herself that she disliked her parents (which was, however, very justly the case, for beneath airs of gentleness and solicitude for her, they were a thoroughly selfish pair, and had sucked her life dry). But she did take pleasure in planning her own future on lines as different as possible from her past and her present.

There was going to be impulse in that future, in place of routine; travel, for instance, and keeping open house for friends, and no reading aloud, and no fuss about flannels or servants or drafts. That sort of thing. For if duty was strong in Honoria, so also was the will to live some time or other.

And as the years passed and passed, there grew to be one special time in every day when thoughts of the future came to her invariably.

That time was half-past nine in the evening, the last half-hour before going to bed, when she was tired in body and frayed in nerves, and the hot milk came in.

Hot milk! There had been a time when Honoria had rebelled against this pick-me-up of the aged. But she had been gradually worsted. For what was the use of declining a glass of hot milk one night, if it came into the room with her parents' glasses just the same the next night and the next, and so on forever, in the hope of getting itself drunk?

And then her parents, her antiphonal parents, on the subject of hot milk.

"I told Cook always to send it in, darling, just on the chance of your drinking it sometimes."

"An excellent nightcap, Honoria. You will find it, as we do, a most excellent nightcap.'

"And so nourishing, dear. You are looking a little tired. And what would father and I do if you were to break down?"

"To please your mother, Honoria. You know how she worries."

It was simpler, it was the line of least resistance, to drink the stuff, and to eat the two biscuits that went with it. Honoria ate and drank. Only, as she did it, she could not help envisaging always the time when