My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

A LECTURE-TOUR IN AMERICA 291the best nurture, the best training of all its faculties,and the fullest opportunity for utilizing those facultiesfor its own happiness and for the common benefit.Not only equality before the law, but equality ofopportunity, is the great fundamental principle ofsocial justice. This is the teaching of HerbertSpencer, but he did not carry it out to its logicalconsequence—the inequity, and therefore the socialimmorality of wealth-inheritance. To secure equalityof opportunity there must be no inequality of initialwealth. To allow one child to be born a millionaireand another a pauper is a crime against humanity,and, for those who believe in a deity, a crime againstGod.^It is the misfortune of the Americans that theyhad such a vast continent to occupy. Had it ended atthe line of the Mississippi, agricultural developmentmight have gone on more slowly and naturally, fromeast to west, as increase of population required. Soagain, if they had had another century for developmentbefore railways were invented, expansion would necessarilyhave gone on more slowly, the need for goodroads would have shown that the rectangular systemof dividing up new lands was a mistake, and some ofthat charm of rural scenery which we possess wouldprobably have arisen.But with the conditions that actually existed wecan hardly wonder at the result. A nation formedby emigrants from several of the most energetic andintellectual nations of the old world, for the mostpart driven from their homes by religious persecutionor political oppression, including from the very first allranks and conditions of life—farmers and mechanics,traders and manufacturers, students and teachers,1 I have discussed this subject in my " Studies," vol. ii. chap, xxviii.