 plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are
fellows of one race - members of one human family. The only coin current is the
image of God, and that is good for all we have.
    I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so repugnant
to modern ideas as the neglect with which you treated your dependent classes.
Even if you had no pity, no feeling of brotherhood, how was it that you did not
see that you were robbing the incapable class of their plain right in leaving
them unprovided for?«
    »I don't quite follow you there,« I said. »I admit the claim of this class
to our pity, but how could they who produced nothing claim a share of the
product as a right?«
    »How happened it,« was Dr. Leete's reply, »that your workers were able to
produce more than so many savages would have done? Was it not wholly on account
of their heritage of the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the
machinery of society, thousands of years in contriving, found by you ready-made
to your hand? How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and this
machinery, which represent nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the
value of your product? You inherited it, did you not? And were not these others,
these unfortunate and crippled brothers whom you cast out, joint inheritors,
co-heirs with you? What did you do with their share? Did you not rob them when
you put them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did
you not add insult to robbery when you called the crusts charity?
    Ah, Mr. West,« Dr. Leete continued, as I did not respond, »what I do not
understand is, setting aside all considerations either of justice or brotherly
feeling toward the crippled and defective, how the workers of your day could
have had any heart for their work, knowing that their children, or
grand-children, if unfortunate, would be deprived of the comforts and even
necessities of life. It is a mystery how men with children could favor a system
under which they were rewarded beyond those less endowed with bodily strength or
mental power. For, by the same discrimination by which the father profited, the
son, for whom he would give his life, being perchance weaker than others, might
be reduced to crusts and beggary. How men dared leave children behind them, I
have never been able to understand.«
 
NOTE. - Although in
