been rising—­but rising slowly and with many a backward slip, because he has tried to thwart the Divine plan with the system of inheritance.  Fortunately, the great mass of mankind has had nothing to leave to heirs, has had no hope of inheritances.  Thus, new leaders have ever been developed in place of those destroyed by inherited prosperity.  But, unfortunately, the law of inheritance has been able to do its devil’s work upon the best element in every human society, upon those who had the most efficient and exemplary parents, and so had the best opportunity to develop into men and women of the highest efficiency.  No wonder progress is slow, when the leaders of each generation have to be developed from the bottom all over again, and when the ideal of useful work is obscured by the false ideal of living without work.  Waiting for dead men’s shoes!  Dead men’s shoes instead of shoes of one’s own.”

“Dead men’s shoes,” muttered Hiram.

“The curse of unearned wealth,” went on his friend.  “Your life, Hiram, leaves to your children the injunction to work, to labor cheerfully and equally, honestly and helpfully, with their brothers and sisters; but your wealth—­If you leave it to them, will it not give that injunction the lie, will it not invite them to violate that injunction?”

“I have been watching my children, my boy, especially,” said Hiram.  “I don’t know about all this that you’ve been saying.  It’s a big subject; but I do know about this boy of mine.  I wish I’d ‘a’ taken your advice, Mark, and put him in your school.  But his mother was set on the East—­on Harvard.”  Tears were in his eyes at this.  He remembered how she, knowing nothing of college, but feeling it was her duty to have her children educated properly, a duty she must not put upon others, had sent for the catalogues of all the famous colleges in the country.  He could see her poring over the catalogues, balancing one offering of educational advantage against another, finally deciding for Harvard, the greatest of them all.  He could hear her saying:  “It’ll cost a great deal, Hiram.  As near as I can reckon it out it’ll cost about a thousand dollars a year—­twelve hundred if we want to be v-e-r-y liberal, so the catalogue says.  But Harvard’s the biggest, and has the most teachers and scholars, and takes in all the branches.  And we ought to give our Arthur the best.”  And now—­By what bitter experience had he learned that the college is not in the catalogue, is a thing apart, unrelated and immeasurably different!  His eyes were hot with anger as he thought how the boy’s mother, honest, conscientious Ellen, had been betrayed.

“Look here, Mark,” he blazed out, “if I leave money to your college I want to see that it can’t ever be like them eastern institutions of learning.”  He made a gesture of disgust.  “Learning!”

“If you leave us anything, Hiram, leave it so that any young man who gets its advantages must work for them.”