: of accumulating wealth. The automatic fulfillment of
the American national Promise is to be abandoned, if at all, precisely
because the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has
resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.
In making the concluding statement of the last paragraph I am venturing,
of course, upon very debatable ground. Neither can I attempt in this
immediate connection to offer any justification for the statement which
might or should be sufficient to satisfy a stubborn skeptic. I must be
content for the present with the bare assertion that the prevailing
abuses and sins, which have made reform necessary, are all of them
associated with the prodigious concentration of wealth, and of the power
exercised by wealth, in the hands of a few men. I am far from believing
that this concentration of economic power is wholly an undesirable
thing, and I am also far from believing that the men in whose hands this
power is concentrated deserve, on the whole, any exceptional moral
reprobation for the manner in which it has been used.
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