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Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-bred, well-fed, well-educated boy so hopelessly handicapped in life by those advantages? Is our ceaseless attempt to provide for our children the best advantages all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense enough to know better than that.

We know that poverty coarsens, weakens, stunts, degrades; that under its evil influence “the dregs of society” are steadily and inevitably produced. We know that where one person of phenomenal capacity can rise in spite of it, thousands of ordinary capacity are ruined because of it.

Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Yes. Were there no others? There were and are many poor boys splitting rails, and yet the crop of Abraham Lincolns remains limited to one.

Our error is a very simple one. We confuse a coincidence with a cause. Most people are poor. Therefore most great people have risen from poverty. How many more great people we might have had under better conditions we shall never know.

As for the effect of wealth, great wealth in private hands is not an advantage; it, too, is a morbid condition, and under its evil influence the scum of society is steadily and increasingly produced. It is perhaps as hard for a great nature to overcome the difficulties of our illegitimate wealth as those of our illegitimate poverty. Still some do it. We have but to study the biographical dictionary to find that the proportion of great men to rich and poor is about the same as the proportion of those two classes, that is all.