So far from being in danger of suppression, we middling rich people are likely to last longer than the capitalists who exploit us in practice, and the workmen who exploit us on principle.  Theoretically, and perhaps practically, the very rich are in danger of expropriation.  Theoretically the course of invention may limit or almost abolish all but the higher grades of labor.  The need of the more skilful sort of service in the professions, in manufacture, in agency of all sorts, is sure to persist.  The socialists expect to get such service for much less than it at present brings, that is to make us poor and yet keep us working.  Such a scheme must break down, not through the refusal of the middling rich to keep at work;—­for I think there is loyalty enough to the work itself to keep most necessary activities going after a fashion, even under the most untoward conditions;—­but because to make us poor is to destroy the conditions under which we can efficiently render a somewhat exceptional service.  Our wealth is not an extraneous thing that can be readily added or taken away.  It is our possibility of self-education and of professional improvement, it is the medium in which we can work, it is our hope of children.  To take away our wealth is to maim us.  There is nothing humiliating in such an avowal.  It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one’s life and work.  As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to face the threat of a proletarian revolution as we harmless rich.  It is the class that produces generals, explorers, inventors, statesmen.  A social revolution with its stern attendant regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively undisciplined class of working people.  The disciplined class of the middling rich is better prepared to meet such an eventuality.  Accordingly it is no mere selfishness or complacency that leads the middling rich to oppose the pretensions of proletarianism on one side and of capitalism on the other.  It is rather the assertion of sound middle class morality against two opposite yet somewhat allied forms of social immorality—­the strength that exaggerates its claims, and the weakness that claims all the privileges of strength.

We are useful too as conserving certain valuable ideas.  When I mention the idea of the right of private property, I expect to be laughed at by a large class of enthusiasts.  Yet all of civilization has been built up on the distinction between meum and tuum.  Without this idea there is not the slightest inducement to persistent individual effort nor possibility of progress for the individual or for the race.  The fruitful diversities, the germinative inequalities between men all depend on this right.  And today the right to one’s own is doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the guile of those in positions of financial trust.  The strikers who offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill, and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay