It is instructive in this regard to compare with the newspapers that serve the middling rich, those that address the poor, and those that are owned in the interest of well understood capitalistic interests.  The extremes of yellow journalism and of avowedly capitalistic journalism, meet in a preference for salacious or merely shocking news, and in a predilection for blatant, sophistical, or merely nugatory and time-serving editorial expressions.  Between the two really allied types of newspapers are a few which exercise a decent censorship over questionable news, and habitually indulge in the luxury of sincere editorial opinion.  There are some exceptions to the rule.  In our own day we have seen a proletarian paper become a magnificent editorial organ, while somewhat illogically maintaining a random and sensational policy in its news columns.  But generally the distinction is unmistakable.  Imagine the plight of New York journalism if four papers, which I need not mention, ceased publication.  It would mean a distinct and immediate cheapening of the mentality of the city.  Then observe on any train who are reading these papers.  It is plain enough what class among us makes decent journalism possible.

Much is to be said for the abolition of poverty, and something for the reduction of inordinate wealth.  Poverty is being much reduced, and will be farther, the process being limited simply by the degree to which the poor will educate and discipline themselves.  We shall never wholly do away with bad luck, bad inheritance, wild blood, laziness, and incapacity:  so some poverty we shall always have, but much less than now, and less dire.  The fact that the large class of middling rich has been evolved from a world where all began poor, is a promise of a future society where poverty shall be the exception.  But such increase of the wealth of the world, and of the number of the virtually rich, will never be attained by the puerile method of expropriating the present holders of wealth.  That would produce more poor people beyond doubt—­but its effect in enriching the present poor would be inappreciable.  You cannot change a man’s character and capacity simply by giving him the wealth of another.  In wholesale expropriations and bequests the experiment has been many times tried, and always with the same results.  The wealth that could not be assimilated and administered has always left the receiver or grasper in all essentials poorer than he was before.  Wealth is an attribute of personality.  It is not interchangeable like the parts of a standardized machine.  The futility of dispossessing the middling rich would be as marked as its immorality.