servant girl taking the place of the child of a
countess. Scientists tell us that Nature is wonderfully democratic,
and that, at the moment of birth, there is no physical difference
between the babies of the richest and the babies of the poorest. It is
only afterward that man-made inequalities of conditions and
opportunities make such a wide difference between them.

Look at our two babies a moment: no man can tell what infinite
possibilities lie behind those mystery-laden eyes. It may be that we
are looking upon a future Newton and another Savonarola, or upon a
greater than Edison and a greater than Lincoln. No man knows what
infinitude of good or ill is germinating back of those little puckered
brows, nor which of the cries may develop into a voice that will set
the hearts of men aflame and stir them to glorious deeds. Or it may be
that both are of the common clay, that neither will be more than an
average man, representing the common level in physical and mental
equipment.

But I ask you, friend Jonathan, is it less than justice to demand
equal opportunities for both? Is it fair that one child shall be
carefully nurtured amid healthful surroundings, and given a chance to
develop all that is in him, and that the other shall be cradled in
poverty, neglected, poorly nurtured in a poor hovel where pestilence
lingers, and denied an opportunity to develop physically, mentally and
morally? Is it right to watch and tend one of the human seedlings and
to neglect the other? If, by chance of Nature's inscrutable working,
the babe of the tenement came into the world endowed with the greater
possibilities of the two, if the tenement mother upon her mean bed
bore into the world in her agony a spark of divine fire of genius, the
soul of an artist like Leonardo da Vinci, or of a poet like Keats, is
it less than a calamity that it should die--choked by conditions which
only ignorance and greed have produced?

Give all the children of men equal opportunities, leaving only the
inequalities of Nature to manifest themselves, and there will be no
need to fear a dull level of humanity. There will be hewers of wood
and drawers of water content to do the work they can; there will be
scientists and inventors, forever enlarging man's kingdom in the
universe; there will be makers of songs and dreamers of dreams, to
inspire the world. Socialism wants to unbind the souls of men, setting
them free for the highest and best that is in them.

Do