The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-11-18

lVH asked me what to qo. 4ou are twenty
 one years old. You are of an old family. You have come into an inheritance of $160,000.O00.
 You do not even have to look after your property; trust companies and trained and bonded agents attend to it for you. Every month you receive your usufruct, and it is so large you are unable to spend it.
 l will tell you whatytO do. What give you is advicet which is one of the few things you will find handed you in large quantities which you do not have to pay for. My ad- vice will have the merit of being plain, sim pie and understandable.
 My idea, however, is secondhand. In the Book of Luke you may read the account of certain rich young man who asked the Car penter of Nazareth what he should do in order to live the right life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments He replied that he had kept them from his youth up. Then the Master said to him:
 "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and come, follow me-" And when the young man heard this he was very sorrowful; for he was very rich.
 (This is one of those passages which Thoreau doubtless had in mind when he said |: Get but the plain words of Jesus once ut tered in a church, and not one stone of it would be left upon anOther.)
 Read this in the light of those modern ideas you have learned from your study of the great sociological thinkers of the past fifty years.
 Then substitute "the people" for "the poor," and go and do what Jesus told the young man to do.
 Draw up an account of all your possessions and write to the authorities, stating that you wish to give the entire amount to the public.
 To keep them from squandering it, it might be well to stipulate that the money be used only for the purpose of building new school houses and hiring more and better teachers for the children. In this way you could in a measure correct the evil of your privileged condition in enabling future children to enter upon life fairly equipped.
 I do not suggest that you give to churches, universities, and the like, not because these institutions have not their place but that the public schools outweigh thm in impor- tance hundred to one; and that these schools are now absurdly skimped and inefficient.
 Then go to work. Find any job that any one is ready to offer. Make up your mind to start fair with every other child born on your birthday, to take no ,unearned money.
 Get that money-load off your soul. You have no business with it. It came to you through mediaeval laws, most of 1t from the sheer force of the privilege of capital It is unjust to yourself to remain on a throne of power to which you were never elected and which you never gained by any worth of yours.
 The money came from The People. Give it back to them. They may fool it away, but that is their business and the responsibility is theirs.
 Come, be a MAN! You can only live so long, and far better is it to take your place in the ranks of life and work shoulder to shoulder with the rest of us, gaining what need of success you can, or being more nobly failure, than to, go through your days with that millstone around your neck.
 And, besides, your example in unloading yourself of this undeserved burden and put ting it where it belongs would do more moral, spiritual, and economic good than if you were to build 10000 cathedrals and SOW libraries over the land as thick as the sands of the sea.
 This advice, of course, you will not follow That would be to listen to a still, small voice against the roar of the Zeitgeist tempest. But put it way where you can find it; some day when your lifes candle burns low it may interest you to read these words by it's tad- ing light.