responsible for their lesser capacity; and it is idle to speculate on some imaginary phase of human development in which the more gifted and more useful will refuse to be more richly rewarded than the less useful.
But it does not follow that the community has no right to control the distribution of wealth. At one time such a proposal would have been branded “robbery.” To-day even Conservatives do not threaten to remove the death-duties and graduated income-tax by which we confiscate some of the wealth of the more fortunate. The only question is, to what extent we may or ought to prevent the excessive accumulation of wealth, or to disperse it after accumulation.
There occur at once two methods of enrichment which invite careful attention. One is the power to transmit wealth to one’s descendants in perpetuity, or until they choose to dissipate it. Most of us will admit that in a social order at all resembling our own—and I do not care to speculate about Utopian or imaginable orders—the power to win advantages for one’s children as well as for oneself is a sound incentive to work. But the wish to relieve one’s descendants of the need to work, to make them for ever a burden on the community, is a perverse ideal. It is one of those unsound primitive traditions which we detect in the actual stream of our ideas and sentiments, and instances are not unknown in our time of such holders of hereditary wealth revolting against the tradition.
