country is not too rich, but far too poor. All increase of wealth is a general and public blessing. It is this, into whosesoever hands the new wealth falls, since those who get the title to, and become the owners of new wealth cannot take a single step toward the utilization of it without sharing it with the rest of us.

I do not say that it makes no difference how the titles to the wealth of a community are distributed, that a country with innumerable millionaires will show as high a level of general welfare as one equally wealthy whose wealth is more widely scattered. Other things being equal, it is, no doubt, best that a nation's resources should be owned by very many and not by very few. But I do maintain and declare that, after all, mankind's main economic interest is the piling up of wealth. If little wealth exists, most of us must be wretched; whereas, if wealth is immense, however it is owned, all but the idle will be benefited by it.

But the wealth chances referred to will not be turned to realities unless by pro

fessional promoters. Others are too busy or too apathetic to attend to them. Usually it takes the keen, the practiced eye, to ferret out the chance; and even if the chance is patent to all, facilities for realizing upon it-reputation for honesty, energy, sagacity, and attention to details, skill in using experts and in approaching and handling men, access to banking and railway authorities, and so on-belong only to such as have sedulously and laboriously acquired them. It is not by mere hap that business pioneering has fallen into promoters' hands. The craft is a necessary and benevolent product of

business evolution.

Moreover the good promoter is in it to stay. His function is not a temporary one, but permanent. The need of him will not diminish, but grow ever greater as industry widens out its domain on the one hand and multiplies its details and its complexity on the other.

Well, then, granting that promoting, on the whole, is a public benefit, and that honest promoters will and ought to remain, ful

filling their wholesome and advantageous office, is there any hope that promoting of the vicious and criminal sort will in the course of time diminish?

Approaching a reply to this question, I remark that no time is, at present, in sight when it will do to be off our guard. We, the dear people, must reform our liking to be humbugged. So long as the world is full of fools, cheating of all sorts will abound and the conscienceless promoter will have his loot.

While we cannot too vehemently reprehend all dishonest promoting and underwriting, and while laws and public opinion should be used to the utmost toward suppressing those dark practices, people must, after all, in the last analysis depend on themselves, their own insight, common sense and sagacity to prevent being plucked by cormorants of these classes. After the lessons of past years, adults who lose by being drawn into unseaworthy schemes should be ashamed to plead the baby act. Besides judicious legislation, besides the

needful education of the investing public, teaching us to be more wary in the face of hoaxes, less gullible, less anxious to get something for nothing I expect much from that slow but sure moral amelioration of men which I believe to be going on, assuaging not the quest of wealth, which, if the motive is good, is consonant with the highest virtue; but lessening the desire of wealth as an end, and rendering the cunning and the crafty less ready to take advantage. I do not speak of the millenium. In a day much nearer than that, it shall, to all but the very basest, seem better that a man act in all things with scrupulous justice, dealing to each his due, and helping to build high the pile of social and general wealth, than that he scheme to best his fellows at any cost, in order to live in a great house, ride in a private car, sail in a yacht, and rot when dead under an immense pile of marble.

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CHAPTER XIV

TAXATION AND LAND

ATIFUNDIA perdidere Italiam,

Pliny wrote. "Big farms ruined Italy." Will America perish in the same way? I have long been convinced that the break between land and people by the general prevalence of the Roman or feudal tenure has become a terrible evil, and that it operates much as Henry George describes, diminishing production, congesting wealth, and multiplying injustice, poverty and vice. An increasing number of able English and American writers share this view; and it is masterfully argued in the extraordinary Italian work, Achille Loria's "Analysis of Property under the Capitalist Regime," published at Turin in 1889.

To turn the golden stream of economic rent partly or mostly into the state's treasury, where it would relieve farmers and the general public of taxation in burdensome forms, seems to me extraordinarily desir