Accordingly, we have sought, so far as we could, to make investments in such a way as will tend to multiply, to cheapen, and to diffuse as universally as possible the comforts of life.  We claim no credit for preferring these lines of investment.  We make no sacrifices.  These are the lines of largest and surest return.  In this particular, namely, in cheapness, ease of acquirement, and universality of means of subsistence, our country easily surpasses that of any other in the world, though we are behind other countries, perhaps, in most of the others.

It may be asked:  How is it consistent with the universal diffusion of these blessings that vast sums of money should be in single hands?  The reply is, as I see it, that, while men of wealth control great sums of money, they do not and cannot use them for themselves.  They have, indeed, the legal title to large properties, and they do control the investment of them, but that is as far as their own relation to them extends or can extend.  The money is universally diffused, in the sense that it is kept invested, and it passes into the pay-envelope week by week.

Up to the present time no scheme has yet presented itself which seems to afford a better method of handling capital than that of individual ownership.  We might put our money into the Treasury of the Nation and of the various states, but we do not find any promise in the National or state legislatures, viewed from the experiences of the past, that the funds would be expended for the general weal more effectively than under the present methods, nor do we find in any of the schemes of socialism a promise that wealth would be more wisely administered for the general good.  It is the duty of men of means to maintain the title to their property and to administer their funds until some man, or body of men, shall rise up capable of administering for the general good the capital of the country better than they can.

The next four elements of progress mentioned in the enumeration above, namely, progress in government and law, in language and literature, in science and philosophy, in art and refinement, we for ourselves have thought to be best promoted by means of the higher education, and accordingly we have had the great satisfaction of putting such sums as we could into various forms of education in our own and in foreign lands—­and education not merely along the lines of disseminating more generally the known, but quite as much, and perhaps even more, in promoting original investigation.  An individual institution of learning can have only a narrow sphere.  It can reach only a limited number of people.  But every new fact discovered, every widening of the boundaries of human knowledge by research, becomes universally known to all institutions of learning, and becomes a benefaction at once to the whole race.