ass of men possessing fortunes far exceeding anything that can really
administer to their enjoyment is a question which has greatly divided
both political economists and moralists. The former were long accustomed
to maintain somewhat exclusively that laws and institutions should be
established with the object of furthering the greatest possible
accumulation of wealth, and that a system of unrestricted competition,
coupled with equal laws, giving each man the most complete security in
the possession and disposal of his property, was the best means of
attaining this end. They urged with great truth that, although under
such a system the inequalities of fortune will be enormous, most of the
wealth of the very rich will inevitably be distributed in the form of
wages, purchases, and industrial enterprises through the community at
large, and that, other things being equal, the richest country will on
the whole be the happiest. They clearly saw the complete delusion of the
common assertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the
more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the
enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities,
in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are also the
centres in which we find the most prosperous middle class, and the
highest and most progressive rates of wages and standards of comfort
among the poor. Great corruption in many forms no doubt exists in them,
but it can scarcely be maintained with confidence that the standard of
integrity is on the whole lower in these than in other countries, and
they at least escape what in many poor countries is one of the most
fruitful causes of corruption in all branches of administration--the
inadequate pay of the servants of the Crown. The path of liberty in the
eyes of economists of this school is the path of wisdom, and they were
profoundly distrustful of all legislative attempts to restrict or
interfere with the course of industrial progress.

In our own generation a somewhat different tendency has manifestly
strengthened. It has been said that past political economists paid too
much attention to the accumulation and too little to the distribution of
wealth. Men have become more sensible to the high level of happiness and
moral well-being that has been attained in some of the smaller and
somewhat stagnant countries of Europe, where wealth is more generally
attained by thrift and steady