Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/219

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OVERCROWDING OF THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS.
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to gain their livelihood in a way which without being hygienically preferable, lays far greater burdens upon their shoulders than those borne by the day-laborer. The price paid for prosperity in their career is constant humiliations, suppression of then true character and denial of their own individuality, a yoke more galling to a nature of true nobility than material want. Owing to the fact that these persona are capable of suffering more intensely, they bear with even more impatience than the wages-receiving class, the burdens imposed upon them by the internal economy of society and property holding. Those among them whose efforts have not met with success, are looked down upon by the man of wealth, who calls them failures, and affects to despise them. But these "failures" are the intrepid vanguard of the army that is besieging the proud fortress of society and that sooner or later will raze it to the ground.




II

Let us analyze more closely the separate elements of the picture we have just been drawing. We have seen the rich man revelling in superabundance without labor, the factory-hand, day-laborer, condemned to physical decay and the intellectual laborer trampled to death in the deadly competition. Let us turn our light upon the minority, the wealth possessing class. What are the sources of the riches of the men who compose this minority? They have either made them for themselves, or increased what they received by inheritance, or else limit their efforts to retaining; what they have inherited. I will discuss this matter of inheritance at length farther on, only remarking here that man is the only living being who carries the natural care for his offspring—one of the manifestations of the instinct for the preservation of the