great fortunes of the modern world have been built up by proceedings
either not socially beneficial, or in some cases positively harmful.
Consider some of the commoner methods of growing rich. There is first
the selling of rubbish for money, exemplified by the great patent
medicine fortunes and the fortunes achieved by the debasement of
journalism, the sale of prize-competition magazines and the like; next
there is forestalling, the making of "corners" in such commodities as
corn, nitrates, borax and the like; then there is the capture of what
Americans call "franchises," securing at low terms by expedients that
usually will not bear examination, the right to run some profitable
public service for private profit which would be better done in public
hands--the various private enterprises for urban traffic, for example;
then there are the various more or less complex financial operations,
watering stock, "reconstructing," "shaking out" the ordinary
shareholder, which transfer the savings of the common struggling
person to the financial magnate. All the activities in this list are
more or less anti-social, yet it is by practising them that the great
successes of recent years have been achieved. Fortunes of a second
rank have no doubt been made by building up manufactures and
industries of various types by persons who have known how to buy
labour cheap, organize it well and sell its produce dear, but even in
these cases the social advantage of the new product is often largely
discounted by the labour conditions. It is impossible, indeed,
directly one faces current facts, to keep up the argument of the
public good achieved by men under the incentive of gain and the
necessity of that incentive to progress and economic development.

Now not only is it true that the subordination of our affairs to this
spirit of gain placed our world in the hands of a peculiar,
acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of person, and that the mass of
people hate serving the spirit of gain and are forced to do so through
the obsession of the whole community by this idea of Private
Ownership, but it is also true that even now the real driving force
that gets the world along is not that spirit at all, but the spirit of
service. Even to-day it would be impossible for the world to get along
if the mass of its population was really specialized for gain. A world
of Rockefellers, Morgans and Rothschilds would perish miserably after
a vigorous campaign of mutu