hands since they got it and is now in the hands of people who have invested the proceeds of their labour in it, and is in fact an ordinary investment, very difficult to distinguish from an investment in Government securities or those of industrial Companies. Even in the case of the great slices of English territory, granted by King Charles the Second to the mistresses who amused his leisure, it has to be remembered that these fascinating ladies rendered a service in their time of a kind which, according to views current in those days, entitled them to any reward that the caprices of the monarch chose to shower upon them.
In all times, and still at the present, the ignorance and vice of the community, or of those members of it who happen to control claims to its wealth, have showered and continue to shower wealth upon totally unworthy objects. This is a disease which can only be cured by the education of the community to make more judicious use of its power to decide, by the choice which it exercises in consumption, as to whom it shall enrich. We cannot now go back and say that because society in the Middle Ages or at the time of the Restoration gave wealth to the wrong
