Yet, for all our abstract belief in equality, we have not become equal in opportunity, and in some ways are actually becoming less so.  Land, for example, which was once to be had for the taking, is steadily rising in price, and is now, in most parts of the country, getting beyond the reach of the poor.  Foreign observers agree that there is no other existing nation so plutocratic as our own; and wealth here is probably though the matter is in doubt becoming more and more concentrated. [Footnote:  For a recent and cautious discussion of this point see F. W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, chap. 54, sec. 3.  There is really no accurate information available to settle the question whether wealth is becoming more or less concentrated.  Certainly the number of the rich has rapidly increased, and very many of the poor have risen into the class of the well to do.  Wages and the scale of living of the poor have risen, but not in proportion to the total increase in wealth.  The rich seem to be not only getting richer, but getting a larger share of the national wealth.] It is estimated that one per cent of the inhabitants of our country now own more property than the remaining ninety-nine per cent.

The natural resources of the country have been to a considerable extent such natural monopolies as railways, telegraph and telephone service, gas and electric lighting, are controlled by, and largely in the interests of, a small owning class.  The Astors have become enormously rich because one of their progenitors bought for an inconsiderable sum farm land on Manhattan Island which is now worth so many dollars a square foot.  Others have made gigantic fortunes out of the country’s forests, its coal deposits, its copper, its waterpower, its oil.  A certain upper stratum of society is freed from the necessity of work, can exercise vast power over the lives of the poor, and use its great accumulations for personal luxury or at its caprice, in defiance of the general welfare.  Such congestion of wealth involves poverty on the part of masses of the less fortunate.  With no capital, the poor man cannot compete in the industrial game; he has no money to invest, no reserve to fall back upon; he must accept employers’ terms or starve.  He cannot pause to educate himself, to get the skill and knowledge that might enable him to work up the ladder.  His power in politics is overshadowed by that of the great corporations with their funds and their control of legal skill.  He cannot afford expert medical care, or proper hygienic conditions of life; he is lucky if he can get a measure of justice in the courts.  To call such a situation one of equality is irony.  It is certain that, far as we are yet from final solution of the problems of production, we are still farther from a solution of the problems of the distribution of wealth.  “A new and fair division of the goods and rights of this world should be,” De Tocqueville long ago declared, “the main object of all who conduct human affairs.”  What methods of equalizing opportunity are possible?