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exceptional physical and mental qualities being ruined by the inheritance of great wealth and by a life of pleasure and excitement. Brought up from childhood on a great estate which he soon learnt would be his own; surrounded by servants and flatterers, by horses and dogs, and seeing that hunting, racing, and shooting were the chief interests and occupations of those around him; with an intense vitality and superb physique,-who can wonder at his after career? At school he was allowed £400 a year, and it is said spent £800-alone enough to demoralize any youth of his disposition; and as a natural sequence he was expelled, first from Westminster and then from Harrow. He was then placed with a private tutor for a year. He entered at both Universities but matriculated at neither; and when nineteen became a cornet in the 7th Hussars, which he joined in France with the army of occupation after Waterloo. He quitted the army when of age, and settled at Halston.

Such having been his early life it would seem almost impossible that he could have profited much by his very fragmentary education; yet his biographer assures us that he had a fair amount of classical knowledge, and throughout life would quote Greek and Latin authors with surprising readiness, and, moreover, would quote them correctly, and always knew when he made a mistake, repeating the passage again and again till he had it correct. Several examples are given when, in his later years, he quoted passages from Sophocles and Homer to illustrate his own domestic and personal misfortunes. But besides these literary tastes he was a man remarkable for many lovable characteristics and especially for a real sympathy for the feelings of others. After being arrested at Calais on bills he had accepted in favour of a person with whom he had had some dealings, as soon as he was released from prison by his solicitor paying the debt, he called upon his former creditor, not to upbraid him, but to walk with him arm-in-arm through the town, in order that the affair might not injure the creditor's character, he being a professional man. As his biographer says, few finer instances of generosity and good feeling are on record. It was this

aspect of his character that led to his being so universally loved, that three thousand persons attended his funeral, with every mark of respect.

Here was a man whose qualities both of mind and body might have rendered him a good citizen, a happy man, and a cause of happiness to all around him, but whose nature was perverted by bad education and a wholly vicious environment. And such examples come before us continuously, exciting little attention and no serious thought. A few years back we had the champion plunger, who got rid of near a million in a very short time; and within the last few years we have had in the bankruptcy court a young nobleman of historic lineage and great estates; also a youth just come into a fortune of £12,000, who, while an undergraduate at Oxford, gave £5000 for four race-horses, which he had never seen, on the word of the seller about whom he knew nothing, spent over a thousand in training them, and in another year or two had got rid of the last of his thousands besides incurring a considerable amount of debt. But nobody seems to think that the great number of such cases always occurring, and which are probably increasing with the increasing numbers of great fortunes, really indicates a thoroughly rotten social system.

How often we hear the remark upon such cases, "He is nobody's enemy but his own." But this is totally untrue, and every such spendthrift is really a worse enemy of society than the professional burglar, because he lives in the midst of an ever-widening circle of parasites and dependents, whose idleness, vice, and profligacy are the direct creation of his misspent wealth. He is not only vicious himself, but he is a cause of vice in others. Perhaps worse even than the vice is the fact that among his host of dependents are many quite honest people, who live by the salaries they receive from him or the dealings they have with him, and the self-interest of these leads them to look leniently upon the whole system which gives them a livelihood. Innumerable vested interests thus grow up around all such great estates, and the more wastefully the owner spends his income the better it seems to be for all the tradesmen and mechanics in the district. But

the fundamental evil is the kind of sanctity we attach to property, however accumulated and however spent. Hence no real reform is ever suggested; and those who go to the root of the matter and see that the evil is in the very fact of inheritance itself, are scouted as socialists or something worse. The inability of ordinary political and social writers to follow out a principle is well shown in this matter. It is only a few years since Mr. Benjamin Kidd attracted much attention to the principle of "equality of opportunity" as the true basis of social reform, and many of the more advanced political writers at once accepted it as a sound principle and one that should be a guide for our future progress. Herbert Spencer, too, in his volume on "Justice," lays down the same principle, stating, as "the law of social justice" that "each individual ought to receive the benefits and evils of his own nature and consequent conduct; neither being prevented from having whatever good his actions normally bring him, nor allowed to shoulder off on to other persons whatever ill is brought to him by his actions." This, too, has, so far as I am aware, never been criticized or objected to as unsound, and, in fact, the arguments by which it is supported are unanswerable. Yet no one among our politicians or ethical writers has openly adopted these principles as a guide for conduct in legislation, or has even seen to what they inevitably lead. Stranger still, neither Mr. Kidd nor Herbert Spencer followed out their own principle to its logical conclusion, which is, the absolute condemnation of unequal inheritance. Herbert Spencer even declares himself in favour of inheritance as a necessary corollary of the right of property rightfully acquired; and he devotes a chapter to "The Rights of Gift and Bequest." But he apparently did not see, and did not discuss the effect of this in neutralizing his "law of social justice," which it does absolutely. I have myself fully shown this in a chapter on "True Individualism: the Essential Preliminary of a Real Social Advance" in my "Studies Scientific and Social."

It is in consequence of not going to the root of the matter, and not following an admitted principle to its logical

conclusion, that the idea prevails that it is only the misuse of wealth that produces evil results. But a little consideration will show us that it is the inheritance of wealth that is wrong in itself, and that it necessarily produces evil. For if it is right, it implies that inequality of opportunity is right, and that "the law of social justice" as laid down by Herbert Spencer is not a just law. It implies that it is right for one set of individuals, thousands or millions in number, to be able to pass their whole lives without contributing anything to the well-being of the community of which they form a part, but on the contrary keeping hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of their fellow men and women wholly engaged in ministering to their wants, their luxuries, and their amusements. Taken as a whole, the people who thus live are no better in their nature-physical, moral, or intellectual-than other thousands who, having received no such inheritance of accumulated wealth, spend their whole lives in labour, often under exhausting, unhealthy, and life-shortening conditions, to produce the luxuries and enjoyments of others, but of which they themselves rarely or more often never partake. Even leaving out of consideration the absolute vices due to wealth on the one hand and to poverty on the other, and supposing both classes to pass fairly moral lives, who can doubt that both are injured morally, and that both are actually, though often unconsciously, the causes of ever-widening spheres of demoralization around them? If there is one set of people who are tempted by their necessities to prey upon the rich, there is a perhaps more extensive class who are in the same way driven to prey upon the poor. And it is the very system that produces and encourages these terrible inequalities that has also led to the almost incredible result, that the ever-increasing power of man over the forces of nature, especially during the last hundred years, while rendering easily possible the production of all the necessaries, comforts, enjoyments, and wholesome luxuries of life for every individual, have yet, as John Stuart Mill declared, "not diminished the toil of any worker," but even, as there is ample evidence to prove, has greatly increased the total mass

of human misery and want in every civilized country in the world.

And yet our rulers and our teachers—the legislature, the press, and the pulpit alike-shut their eyes to all this terrible demoralization in our midst, while devoting all their energies to increasing our already superfluous and injurious wealthaccumulations, and in compelling other peoples, against their will, to submit to our ignorant and often disastrous rule. As the great Russian teacher has well said, "They will do anything rather than get off the people's backs." And we, who adopt the principles of those great thinkers whom all delight to honour-Ruskin and Spencer-and urge the adoption of equality of opportunity"—of equal education, equal nurture, an equal start in life-for all (implying the abolition of all inequality of inheritance) as the one Great Reform which will alone render all other reforms-all general social advance -possible, are either quietly ignored as idle dreamers, or openly declared to be "enemies of society."

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These few remarks and ideas have been suggested to me by the life and death of Jack Mytton, and I trust that some of my readers may follow them up for the good of humanity.

VOL I.

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