No; riches are not wrong. There is no greater mistake in the world than to denounce capital as something evil in itself. Whiskey is inherently a curse. Smallpox is an unalloyed scourge. These things are intrinsically bad. But capital is merely a neutral instrument that can be used for good or for ill. Capital is like an automobile. It can be employed to facilitate robberies and murders or it can take crippled children for an airing.

Failure to recognize this fact is the trouble with Russia. The Bolshevists made criminal fools of themselves. They started to abolish riches as something reptilian. What happened? They smashed the factories that produced the necessities of life. They wrecked the railroads that transported these necessities. In wiping out capital and capitalists, the Bolshevists wiped out their whole world. They sawed off the branch that supported them.

Capital Makes And Maintains Civilization

One difference between an animal and a man is that a man uses tools. One difference between savagery, barbarism, and civilization is that civilization uses the tool we call capital. It is this tool that has made our mills, water power developments, farm machinery, automobiles, telephone systems, railroads, buildings, and other essentials. Capital is the world's greatest invention, because it has made possible the application of all other inventions.

Economists have learned from statistics that there is a tendency for population to increase faster than the means of sustenance. Were it not for the power of capital, there would be no hope of supporting the 105,000,000 people now in the United States - and still less hope of supporting the added millions of the future.

Without Capital The United States Would Starve

With the vast multitude now in this country, what could we do with the little old spinning wheel, grist mill, and cobbler's bench! Without the marvelous mechanism that has been constructed by capital, it would be physically impossible to provide the bare food, shelter, and clothing for these growing myriads. They would starve. It is just as easy to starve in the United States as in Russia or China. The reason our people are going to the motion pictures and riding in automobiles instead of succumbing to famine and pestilence, is because the United States has had the good sense to use capital instead of destroying it as in Russia, or ignoring it as in China.

Take a single illustration. The arid regions of the West have been transformed into fruitful farms by irrigation. Whether financed by the government or private organizations, irrigation and the other great works of civilization would be impossible without accumulated and mobilized wealth. Of course, capital includes more than mere money, materials, and labor of construction. Behind these gigantic projects are the perfected machinery, the studied methods, and the trained managers, evolved through generations.

Sometimes we forget how completely the achievements of capital have revolutionized the world. I do not know of any description that brings this home to us more vividly than Kipling's fine poem on Modern Machinery. Indeed this might almost have been entitled "What We Owe to Capital." To the red orator and his soap-box denunciations of riches, the following wonderful verses give the practical answer:

We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,

We were melted in the furnace and the pit, We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,

We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit. Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,

And a thousandth of an inch to give us play: And now if you will set us to our task,

We will serve you four and twenty hours a day!

We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive, We can print and plough and weave and heat and light, We can run and jump and swim and fly and dive, We can see and hear and count and read and write!

Would you call a friend from half across the world?

If you'll let us have his name and town and state, You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled.

Across the arch of heaven while you wait. Has he answered? Does he need you at his side?

You can start this very evening if you choose, And take the Western Ocean in the stride.

Of seventy thousand horses and some screws!

The boat-express is waiting your command! You will find the Mauretania at the quay, Till her captain turns the lever 'neath his hand, And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea.

Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head.

And lay their new-cut forests at your feet? Do you want to turn a river in its bed,

Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat? Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down.

From the never-failing cisterns of the snows, To work the mills and tramways in your town.

And irrigate your orchards as it flows?

It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!

Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake.

As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,

And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake.

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,

We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive,

If you make a slip in handling us you die! We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings.

Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods! - Our touch can alter all created things,

We are everything on earth, - except The Gods!