Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SOME RIGHTS AND WRONGS. " Citizens, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and these he has composed of gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor ; others of stiver, to be auxiliaries ; others again, who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen, he has made of brass and iron ; and the species will often be preserved in the children. But as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, and a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims to the rulers as a first principle that if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then Nature orders a transposition of ranks."—Plato. No belief is herein expressed in either the justice, or the benefits, or the possibility of an absolutely equal distribution of wealth. The social problems are, as treated in this volume, how to give men equal opportunities, or at least some approach to equal opportunities ; how to prevent wealth-tyranny, just as we would try to prevent all other forms of tyranny ; how to break up the luxurious idleness and the predatory viciousness of certain rich men ; and how to lessen the ignorance, and vice, and destitution of the lower levels, and to remove at least a portion of the enforced idleness of men who want work and cannot find the opportunity of working. In a word, both ends of the social scale must be attacked and injustice destroyed wherever we can find it. Society, in self-protection, must give the rich idler a chance to work, and give the man who has been carrying his blankets in search of labor a fair opportunity of doing likewise. If society neglects this plain duty, nature compels us—you and me and all others who are so fortunate as to possess fair opportunitie... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.