It is a great people that can
withstand great prosperity
We are in no vain chase of an equality which would eliminate all
individual initiative, and check all progress, by ignoring differences of
capacity and strength, and rating muscles equal to brains. But we are in
pursuit of equal laws, and a fairer chance of leading happy lives than
humanity in general ever had yet.
CAUSES OF DISCONTENT
Now, content does not depend so much upon a man's actual as his relative
condition. Often it is not so much what I need, as what others have that
disturbs me. I should be content to walk from Boston to New York, and be
a fortnight on the way, if everybody else was obliged to walk who made
that journey. It becomes a hardship when my neighbor is whisked over the
route in six hours and I have to walk. It would still be a hardship if
he attained the ability to go in an hour, when I was only able to
accomplish the distance in six hours.
It ought to be said, as to the United States, that a very considerable
part of the discontent is imported, it is not native, nor based on any
actual state of things existing here. Agitation has become a business.
A great many men and some women, to whom work of any sort is distasteful,
live by it.
Compared with the freedom of action in such a government as ours, any
form of communism is an iniquitous and meddlesome despotism.
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