be said sweetly or gravely, never patronizingly or sharply, with resentfulness or petulance.  Be sure you choose your occasion tactfully, and above all things do not nag; it is better to have it out once and for all than to be forever hinting and complaining and reproving.  Praise when you can, temper advice with compliments, make it apparent that your spirit is friendly and your mood good-tempered.  Talk and think as little as possible of others’ faults; he who is above doing a low act is above talking about another’s failings.  The only right gossip is that which dwells upon the pleasant side of our neighbors’ doings.  Avoid all impatience, contempt, and anger; they poison no one so much as him who feels them.  Cultivate kindliness and sympathy; love opens blind eyes, helps us to understand our neighbor, and to help him in the best way.  Are the rich justified in living in luxury?  Of all the problems that loyalty to our fellows involves, none is acuter, to the conscientious man, than that concerning the degree of luxury he may allow himself.  It is strictly things in the world is limited; the more I have, the less others have.  How can a good man be content to spend unnecessary sums upon himself and his own family, when within arm’s reach men and women and children are being stunted mentally and morally, are living in dirt and squalor, are succumbing to disease, are actually dying, for lack of the comfort and opportunity that his superfluous wealth could give?  “Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around us of a hundred thousand [sic], or a thousand, or even of ten miles’ circumference, and look at the lives of those men and women who are inside our circle, we shall find half- starved children, old people, pregnant women, sick and weak persons, all working beyond their strength, with neither food nor rest enough to support them, and so dying before their time."[Footnote:  Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? chap. xxvi.] It is only a lack of imagination and sympathy, or an actual ignorance of conditions, that can permit so many really kind-hearted people to spend so much money upon clothes, amusements, elaborate dinners, and a lot of other superfluities, in a world so full of desperate need.  It would be well if every citizen could be compelled to do a little charity-visiting, or something of the sort, that he might see with his own eyes the cramping and demoralizing conditions under which, for sheer lack of money, so many worthy poor, under the present crude social organization, must live.  It is the segregation of the well to do in their separate quarters that fosters their shameless callousness, and leads, in the rich, “to that flagrant exhibition of great wealth which almost frightens those who know the destitution of the poor.”

There is, however, a growing uneasiness among those who have, an increasing sense of responsibility toward those who have not; there are hopeful signs of a return to the sane ideal of the Greeks, who deemed it vulgar and barbaric to spend money lavishly on self.  The compunctions of the rich are indicated, on the one hand, by generous donations made to all sorts of causes, and on the other hand, by the arguments which are now thought necessary to justify the selfish use of money.  These arguments we may cursorily discuss.