itans. When such schemes
flourish, by which men's gains are suddenly swollen to enormous
proportions, somebody must be paying for it, and life is always the
final payment. It all comes out of the life of the people who are
producing the world's wealth. The plethora of the few is the depletion
of the millions. In every great aggregation of workers, the faces of
the underfed are a little paler and the pulses of the children beat a
little less joyously, and the feet are hastened on that journey to
the tomb--all because of those who come to steal and to kill and to
destroy.

Such is the contrast between beneficent business and maleficent
business. The good business employs men, feeds them, clothes them,
shelters them, generously distributes among them the goods that
nourish life; the bad business contrives to levy tribute on the
resources out of which they are fed and clad and nourished, and thus
enriches itself by impoverishing the life of the multitude.

And I suppose that we should all find, whether we are engaged in what
is called business or not, that the work which we are doing, the way
in which we are spending our time and gaining our income, is tending
either to the enlargement and increase of the life of those with whom
we have to do or to the impoverishment and destruction of their life;
and that this is the final test by which we must be judged--are we
producers of life or destroyers of life? Is there more of life in the
world--more of physical and spiritual life--because of what we are and
what we do, or is the physical and spiritual vitality of men lessened
by what we are and what we do? Are we helping men to be stronger and
sounder in body and mind and soul for the work of life, or are we
making them feebler in muscle and will and moral stamina?

When Jesus Christ came into the world the civilization prevailing--if
such it could be called--was under the dominion of those who came
to steal and to kill and to destroy. Rome was the world, and the
civilization of Rome, with all its splendor, was at bottom a predatory
civilization. It overran all its neighbors that it might subjugate and
despoil them; its whole social system was based on a slavery in which
the enslaved were merely chattels; the life of its ruling class was
fed by the literal devouring of the lives of subject classes. Of
course, this civilization was decadent. That terrible decline and fall
which Gibbon has pictured was in full progress. It was i