me from composing a great opera that
would make me rich and famous?

What oppressive laws forbade me to work my passage up the Yukon as
deckhand on a steamboat and discover the gold along Bonanza creek?

What is there in our industrial system that conceals from me the secret
of making diamonds from charcoal?

Why was it not I who, entering a lawyer's office as a suitable person to
sweep it out, left it as an appointed Justice of the Supreme Court?

The number of actual and possible sources of profit and methods of
distinction is infinite. Not all the trusts in the world combined in one
trust of trusts could appreciably reduce it--could condemn to permanent
failure one man with the talent and the will to succeed. They can
abolish that doubtful benefactor of the "small dealer," who lives
by charging too much, and that very thickly disguised blessing the
"drummer," whom they have to add to the price of everything they sell;
but for every opportunity they close they open a new one and leave
untouched a thousand actual and a million possible ones. As to their
dishonest practices, these are conspicuous and striking, because
"lumped," but no worse than the silent, steady aggregate of cheating;
by which their constituent firms and individuals, formerly consumed the
consumer without his special wonder.

CHARITY

THE promoter of organized charity protests against "the wasteful and
mischievous method of undirected relief." He means, naturally,
relief that is not directed by somebody else than the person
giving it--undirected by him and his kind--professional
almoners--philanthropists who deem it more blessed to allot than
to bestow. Indubitably much is wasted and some mischief done by
indiscriminate giving--and individual givers are addicted to that faulty
practice. But there is something to be said for "undirected relief"
quite the same. It blesses not only him who receives (when he is worthy;
and when he is not upon his own head be it), but him who gives. To
those uncalculating persons who, despite the protests of the organized
charitable, concede a certain moral value to the spontaneous impulses of
the heart and read in the word "relief" a double meaning, the office
of the mere distributor is imperfectly sacred. He is even without
scriptural authority, and lives in the perpetual challenge of a moral
_quo warranto_. Nevertheless he is not without his uses. He is a
tapper of tills that do not open automatically. He