perfectly clear, but even if we did
not have war conditions to teach us as a patriotic responsibility the
necessity of earning and saving a surplus, the obligation would still
be there. We owe a similar debt to our state and to our city or
district. And nearer still comes the duty to one's family and to one's
own future, the duty of providing for the rainy day, for old age. And
it will be observed that money-making in this sense is directed to the
acquisition of _net_ income, it relates to that portion of one's
earnings which is saved from current expenditure and becomes capital.
Then we must also consider the duty to society. As we look out upon the
surrounding evidences of civilization--buildings and railroads and
highly cultivated fields, the machinery of production and distribution,
the shops full of useful commodities--and then cast our thought
backward to a time not very many years ago when all this country was a
natural wilderness, we may begin to realize the magnitude of the
wealth, the capital, that has come into being since then, every
particle of which is due to the earnings and savings of somebody, to
the surplus not consumed by the workers of the past, their unexpended
and unwasted net balances year by year. Universities, churches,
libraries, parks, are included in the wealth thus handed down to us.
Our lives to-day may be richer and broader through this inheritance
created by the industry and abstinence of our forefathers. Their
business careers, now closed, we regard as the more successful in that
they earned and saved a surplus, that they had a _net_ income to show
as the result of their work.

But these savings of the past were accumulated, after all, by
comparatively few of the workers; not by the many, who lived from hand
to mouth, happy-go-lucky, spending and enjoying in time of abundance,
suffering in time of poverty and stress, making no provision even for
their own future, still less recognizing any duty to their country or
to posterity to produce economically and regulate their expenditure
wisely so as to carry forward a surplus. As far as this majority is
concerned we might yet be living among rocks and trees, without
shelter, lacking sure supplies of food, with fig leaves to cover our
nakedness. And to-day the same conditions obtain. How many persons are
to be found among one's acquaintance who feel and act upon any
responsibility for doing their "bit" in the creation of capital? Very
few. Ra