od fortune, or by the skilful use of economic opportunities. They
come to be regarded, not as the ends for which alone it is worth while
to produce wealth at all, but as the instruments of its {36}
acquisition by a world that declines to be soiled by contact with what
is thought to be the dull and sordid business of labor. They are not
happy, for the reward of all but the very mean is not merely money, but
the esteem of their fellow-men, and they know they are not esteemed, as
soldiers, for example, are esteemed, though it is because they give
their lives to making civilization that there is a civilization which
it is worth while for soldiers to defend. They are not esteemed,
because the admiration of society is directed towards those who get,
not towards those who give; and though workmen give much they get
little. And the _rentiers_ whom they support are not happy; for in
discarding the idea of function, which sets a limit to the acquisition
of riches, they have also discarded the principle which alone give
riches their meaning. Hence unless they can persuade themselves that
to be rich is in itself meritorious, they may bask in social
admiration, but they are unable to esteem themselves. For they have
abolished the principle which makes activity significant, and therefore
estimable. They are, indeed, more truly pitiable than some of those
who envy them. For like the spirits in the Inferno, they are punished
by the attainment of their desires.

A society ruled by these notions is necessarily the victim of an
irrational inequality. To escape such inequality it is necessary to
recognize that there is some principle which ought to limit the gains
of particular classes and particular individuals, because gains drawn
from certain sources or exceeding certain amounts are illegitimate.
But such a limitation implies a {37} standard of discrimination, which
is inconsistent with the assumption that each man has a right to what
he can get, irrespective of any service rendered for it. Thus
privilege, which was to have been exorcised by the gospel of 1789,
returns in a new guise, the creature no longer of unequal legal rights
thwarting the natural exercise of equal powers of hand and brain, but
of unequal powers springing from the exercise of equal rights in a
world where property and inherited wealth and the apparatus of class
institutions have made opportunities unequal. Inequality, again, leads
to the mis-direction of