But why should not a part of that
fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in
yours? When Sir Thomas More wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the
monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small thefts in
England; and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he
denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put
men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother
England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have
realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same
abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught
and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often
failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its
riots. That state seems as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man
for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you.
"But we do not regret the experience of competition and monopoly. They
taught us some things in the operation of the industries. The labor-saving
inventions which the Accumulation perverted to money-making we have
restored to the use intended by their inventors and the Creator of their
inventors.
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