and who have a summer of but one or two months, as in the extreme north,—­how could they amass property, how could they enlarge their conditions of peace and of comfort?  There are many parts of the earth where men live on the borders of deserts, or in mountain fastnesses, or in arctic rigors, where anything but poverty is impossible, and where it requires the whole thought, genius, industry, and foresight of men, the year round, just to feed themselves and to live.  Bad government, where men are insecure in their property, has always been a very fertile source of poverty.  The great valley of Esdraelon in Northern Palestine is one of the most fertile in the world, and yet famine perpetually stalks on the heels of the population; for if you sow and the harvest waves, forth come hordes of Bedouins to reap your harvest for you, and leave you, after all your labor, to poverty and starvation.  When a man has lost his harvest in that way two or three times, and is deprived of the reward of his labors, he never emerges from poverty, but sinks into indolence; and that, by and by, breeds apathetic misery.  So where the government over-taxes its subjects, as is the case in the Orient with perhaps nearly all of the populations there to-day, it cuts the sinews and destroys all the motives of industry; and without industry there can be neither virtue, morality, nor religion in any long period.  Wars breaking out, from whatever cause, tend to absorb property, or to destroy property, or to prevent the development of property.  Yet, strange as it may seem, the men who suffer from war are those whose passions generally lead it on.  The king may apply the spark, but the combustion is with the common people.  They furnish the army, they themselves become destroyers; and the ravages of war, in the history of the human family, have destroyed more property than it is possible to enter into the thoughts of men to conceive.

But besides these external reasons of poverty, there are certain great primary and fundamental reasons.  Ignorance breeds poverty.  What is property?  It is the product of intelligence, of skill, of thought applied to material substances.  All property is raw material that has been shaped to uses by intelligent skill.  Where intelligence is low, the power of producing property is low.  It is the husbandman who thinks, foresees, plans, and calls on all natural laws to serve him, whose farm brings forth forty, fifty, and a hundred fold.  The ignorant peasant grubs and groans, and reaps but one handful where he has sown two.  It is knowledge that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring anywhere.  Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are guided and governed by superior intelligence.  Slave labor produced gigantic plantations and estates.  The slave was always poor, but his master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the knowledge, and