We smoked silently for some moments.  Hastings’ ideas interested me, but I felt that he could give me something more personal—­of more value to myself.  The fellow was really a philosopher in his quiet way.

“After all, you haven’t told me what you meant by saying you wouldn’t change places with me,” I said abruptly.  “What did you mean by that?  I want to know.”

“I wish you would forget I ever said it, sir,” he murmured.

“No,” I retorted, “I can’t forget it.  You needn’t spare me.  This talk is not ex cathedra—­it’s just between ourselves.  When you’ve told me why, then I will forget it.  This is man to man.”

“Well,” he answered slowly, “it would take me a long time to put it in just the right way.  There was nothing personal in what I said this morning.  I was thinking about conditions in general—­the whole thing.  It can’t go on!”

“What can’t go on?”

“The terrible burden of money,” he said.

“Terrible burden of money!” I repeated.  What did he mean?

“The weight of it—­that’s bowing people down and choking them up.  It’s like a ball and chain.  I meant I wouldn’t change places with any man in the millionaire class—­I couldn’t stand the complexities and responsibilities.  I believe the time is coming when no citizen will be permitted to receive an income from his inherited or accumulated possessions greater than is good for him.  You may say that’s the wildest sort of socialism.  Perhaps it is.  But it’s socialism looked at from a different angle from the platform orators—­the angle of the individual.

“I don’t believe a man’s money should be taken away from him and distributed round for the sake of other people—­but for the protection of the man himself.  There’s got to be a pecuniary safety valve.  Every dollar over a certain amount, just like every extra pound of steam in a boiler, is a thing of danger.  We want health in the individual and in the state—­not disease.

“Let the amount of a man’s income be five, ten, fifteen or twenty thousand dollars—­the exact figure doesn’t matter; but there is a limit at which wealth becomes a drag and a detriment instead of a benefit!  I’d base the legality of a confiscatory income tax on the constitutionality of any health regulation or police ordinance.  People shouldn’t be permitted to injure themselves—­or have poison lying round.  Certainly it’s a lesson that history teaches on every page.

“Besides everybody needs something to work for—­to keep him fit—­at least that’s the way it looks to me.  Nations—­let alone mere individuals—­have simply gone to seed, died of dry rot because they no longer had any stimulus.  A fellow has got to have some idea in the back of his head as to what he’s after—­and the harder it is for him to get it, the better, as a rule, it is for him.  Good luck is the worst enemy a heap of people have.  Misfortune spurs a man on, tries him out and develops him—­makes him more human.”