and then some lose their possessions, which others get hold of, and that makes more misery.  We can put our fingers on the two great evils of life as it now is:  the first is poverty; and the second is infirmity, which is the accompaniment of increasing years.  Poverty, which is only the unequal distribution of things desired, makes strife, and is the opportunity of lawyers; and infirmity is the excuse for doctors.  Think what the world would be without lawyers and doctors!

We are all born young, and most of us are born poor.  Youth is delightful, but we are always getting away from it.  How different it would be if we were always going towards it!  Poverty is unpleasant, and the great struggle of life is to get rid of it; but it is the common fortune that in proportion as wealth is attained the capacity of enjoying it departs.  It seems, therefore, that our life is wrong end first.  The remedy suggested is that men should be born rich and old.  Instead of the necessity of making a fortune, which is of less and less value as death approaches, we should have only the privilege of spending it, and it would have its natural end in the cradle, in which we should be rocked into eternal sleep.  Born old, one would, of course, inherit experience, so that wealth could be made to contribute to happiness, and each day, instead of lessening the natural powers and increasing infirmities, would bring new vigor and capacity of enjoyment.  It would be going from winter to autumn, from autumn to summer, from summer to spring.  The joy of a life without care as to ways and means, and every morning refitted with the pulsations of increasing youth, it is almost impossible to imagine.  Of course this scheme has difficulties on the face of it.  The allotting of the measure of wealth would not be difficult to the socialists, because they would insist that every person should be born with an equal amount of property.  What this should be would depend upon the length of life; and how should this be arrived at?  The insurance companies might agree, but no one else would admit that he belongs in the average.  Naturally the Biblical limit of threescore and ten suggests itself; but human nature is very queer.  With the plain fact before them that the average life of man is less than thirty-four years, few would be willing, if the choice were offered, to compromise on seventy.  Everybody has a hope of going beyond that, so that if seventy were proposed as the year at birth, there would no doubt be as much dissatisfaction as there is at the present loose arrangement.  Science would step in, and demonstrate that there is no reason why, with proper care of the system, it should not run a hundred years.  It is improbable, then, that the majority could be induced to vote for the limit of seventy years, or to exchange the exciting uncertainty of adding a little to the period which must be accompanied by the weight of the grasshopper, for the certainty of only seventy years in this much-abused world.